What is experiential marketing? Amazon defines experiential marketing as “a way for brands to connect with consumers through experiences.” Those connections can be in-person, but they can also be a connection made online through social media, blogs, virtual events, etc. 

Experiential marketing creates that personal touch that draws people to your brand. If they relate to your message and vision, you’ll gain life-long customers or clients. But, you have to create that experience that draws them to you and keeps them hooked.

Even the best plan can go awry. Your experiential marketing plan is just one part of the picture. If you cannot measure its success, how will you know that you’ve achieved everything you hoped? Learn how to measure the success of your marketing campaign.

Explore What Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Are

A key performance indicator, KPI for short, is a measurement of an objective’s performance over an amount of time. KPIs can measure financial, operational, and strategic achievements and can include comparisons against your competitors to help gauge how well your business is doing.

Marketing KPIs cover different topics. They track the traffic for your social media channels and website. They can track brand awareness, click-through rates, blog activity, and conversion rates. Your brand will also want to track customer experience, efficiency, and retention metrics. Your experiential marketing KPIs should touch on each of these.

1. Brand Awareness

Start with brand awareness. This is the measurement of how many people have heard of your brand. You might be surprised to learn you’re not as well-known as you thought. They may know something about a product you have, but they know nothing about your brand. Measure brand awareness through the site’s website and social media analytics software. 

2. Brand Engagement

Brand engagement is how well and how often people interact with your brand. Do you post daily to social media and get no response? It’s time to address what is missing. Why aren’t people engaged? You can measure engagement through social media shares or interactions on social media posts.

3. Lead Generation

Leads are a touchpoint where you are getting information from consumers. This might be getting an email address for promotional emails or a mailing address for a mailed catalog or flyer. You can get leads through surveys, social media connections, and contest entries. This opens the door to being able to communicate with customers, but you need to be careful how you do this.

Have you been to a site where to get a discount, you have to provide your email. You do that and then another box comes up saying that you must share your phone number and agree to messages to get the discount code through SMS. You don’t want to share your number, so now the company has your email, and you have no discount code to show for it. You leave and go to a competitor, so that company lost the lead because they misled you.

4. Click-Through Rates/Sales

Click-through rates and sales are measures of how much money you’re making or touchpoints are being completed. Your brand may be selling items, which is where sales are important. Track those through your in-person or online sales.

You might not have a physical product and, instead, promote something. A click-through is when someone sees the link or ad and clicks on it to explore more. Both of these are important KPIs that you can track through website analytics.

5. Customer Satisfaction

Here’s something to think about. If a customer has a negative experience with your brand, only 3.8% will actually inform the company. Many customers will tell people they know about the lousy experience and find a new brand. You may never have a second chance to engage a client, so you need to do everything you can to ensure they’re engaged from the first touchpoint.

Compare that to the statistic that finds seven out of ten people tell at least six people about positive experiences with a brand. 

Customer satisfaction is so important. You need to do everything possible to make sure customers are happy, even if you couldn’t help them or they didn’t like your product or service. Turn their negative into a positive through excellent customer service.

What Are the Best Methods for Measuring KPIs?

What methods are best for measuring performance? These are the most common ways to measure our marketing campaign’s success.

Social Media Analytics:

Social media analytics keep track of how many followers share your posts or photos. How many visitors are you getting? It also tracks other touch points like clickthrough rates, views, and comments. 

Surveys:

You can get a lot of information through surveys. Surveys can be sent via text or email, through the mail, by phone, or in person. Don’t be surprised to find that consumers are unwilling to participate in a phone survey. You’re likely to have better luck offering a survey they can fill out on a trusted website. 

It’s important to consider the length of your survey. If you’re asking someone to invest 10 or 15 minutes filling out a survey, you should be prepared to make it worth the consumer’s time. If a person gets a survey that takes 20 minutes to complete, doing it for free isn’t very enticing. Offer a 20% discount on their next purchase, and you might get more responses.

Website Analytics:

Websites have analytics options that help you monitor traffic, click-through rates, sales, page views, and a lot more. You should also view bounce rates, which is the percentage of people who visit a website and never complete a touchpoint like signing up for a newsletter, purchasing an item, or going to another page on the site.

Tips to Keep in Mind

Experiential marketing is all about connecting with consumers in memorable ways. Each customer that has a positive experience becomes a great tool in drawing new clientele as satisfied customers share their experience with their friends, family members, and acquaintances. Each person that explores your brand based on a word-of-mouth experience is increased business. 

Make sure you have clear goals for your marketing campaign. Before you hold a pop-up, virtual event, in-person presentation, etc., you need to know what your goals are so that you can determine what KPIs help measure them. Don’t just focus on one KPI, use several methods to collect data that you can carefully analyze. 

As you track KPIs and determine how successfully you met your goals, make sure you’re making adjustments as needed. It’s highly unlikely that your plan will go perfectly straight out of the gates. Don’t just take the results from one week to determine how successful it was. Track your results over extended periods to get a full picture.

Keep your stakeholders and key employees in the loop. As you share results, you can brainstorm what’s working and what to change.

Working with an expert in experiential marketing is a great way to deliver results. Not every marketing department has the tools and insights needed to plan a successful campaign the first time. Factory 360 has a wealth of experience in all aspects of experiential marketing and works with you to determine the best KPIs for your goals. Reach out to our marketing team to learn more.