This six-step how-to guide is designed to be used side-by-side with the article “Your Checklist and Plan for Event and Experiential Marketing Measurement” and “Your Event Measurement Cheatsheet: Objectives, Metrics, Benchmarks, Tools, and Cost Estimates for Every Type of Experiential Marketing.” Together they provide all the details you need to design and complete your measurement program. The Checklist provides more task-oriented descriptions of what you need to accomplish. This Timeline tells you what you need to do and when.
As communications has become increasingly electronic and invaded by bots, Russians, oppo researchers, and who knows what, the chance to actually touch, feel, and experience a brand is evermore important. More and more decisions are based on familiarity and interactions with a brand, rather than on traditional advertising and marketing tactics.
But simply “reaching millions of eyeballs” (i.e., impressions) is no more relevant a goal than is “increasing market share in the buggy whip market.” Therefore, new alternative metrics—like relationship measures, engagement indices, and cost-per-touch—are increasingly demanded. To help you sort this out, we’ve provided you a timeline for the perfect experiential marketing measurement program.
It can be challenging to get time with leadership and their decisions can take a while, so allow four to six weeks to set your program up. If you don’t have existing research, add another four weeks to conduct your baseline research.
Week 1: Clarify and define
Be clear about what outcomes your experiential marketing program is designed to achieve.
As with any effort, you can’t start to measure success until you know what success means for you—and more importantly, what it means to the senior leadership who approve your budget. So create a draft of what you believe the objectives are, and then sit down with your management team and make them sign off on them.
Typically, for any given event or experience, the goals fall into one of the four categories below. These will drive the design of your measurement program.
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Awareness
Awareness may include awareness of a new brand, a new product or service line, understanding of a new positioning, or just awareness of the brilliance (a.k.a. thought leadership) of your CEO.
No matter what the subject or target is, awareness is in the minds of your audience. As such it must be measured either with a survey or by way of an acceptable proxy for a survey, such as social shares or other physical actions.
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Sales leads or revenue
If you’re a direct-to-consumer company you may have events just to generate sales, or sales leads. But the category of sales goals also includes new markets and new customers, as well as events designed to increase customer retention. (Which, let’s face it, is the fastest way to increase revenue and improve your bottom line.) For you non-profit event managers, this applies to you as well: just substitute “volunteers and contributions” for “sales leads or revenue.”
Whatever the revenue goal, you will need some sort of a CRM system to track the impact of your event on the revenue funnel.
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Enthusiasm or support
A lot of events today are designed to generate “engagement.” But, since no three people can agree on a definition of engagement, I prefer to call it “support” or “enthusiasm.” Such events include anything from a political rally, to an employee team-building event, to a town hall designed to reduce opposition to your expansion plans.
Support, like awareness, is in the minds of your audience, and so unless you have a secret trove of Vulcan mind meld devices, you will need to survey them. Alternatively, you may come up with an acceptable proxy such as sign-up forms and/or petitions.
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Trust or relationships
A lot of smaller events are designed specifically around improving relationships with existing customers, prospects, or influencers. Again, if you’re a non-profit the goal may be to improve trust among your donors or improve relationships with your local community.
Trust is easily measured by a standard trust survey. You can read all about how to do that in our special Measurement Advisor issue on trust.
Once you have agreement on the objectives and the general sort of metrics you will use (specific metrics are chosen in Week 3 below), make sure you translate them into SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Agreed upon, Realistic, and Timely), with targets and timelines. An example is “Increase percentage of attendees more likely to purchase by 5% over last year.” See the Checklist companion article for more specific examples.
Week 2: Agree upon a benchmark—context, context, context
Now that you know your objectives, you need to understand what your event results will be compared to. Anyone who has been following my rants for more than a minute will know that I am obsessed with the importance of benchmarks and baselines. Why are most measurement reports dismissed as meaningless? It’s not because the data isn’t good or there aren’t enough charts, it’s because they fail to put results into context. Who cares how you did if the competition did three times better? Who cares if your event scored a 10 on engagement if it cost ten times more to put your product into the hands of the 400 people who matter?
The key point to remember is that you always need to compare the data from your event to something else. Here are a few suggestions to benchmark against:
- Where you were before any event took place
- The same event in a prior year
- A competing event
- An event put on by the competition
- A different type of event
- Other forms of customer outreach
- Other forums of communications
For all of these potential benchmarks you’ll want to at least estimate the costs and compare the costs to the results, either on a cost-per-contact, cost-per-lead, or cost-per-minute-spent-with-prospect/customer basis.
Week 3: Determine parameters of your measurement (including the budget!)
Now that you know the objectives and have a benchmark you need to have an honest discussion of budget and what is possible (or not) within that budget. That means agreement on the budget for measurement, not just for the event itself. While automation has made measurement a lot less expensive these days, you still need to budget about 10% of your event budget to figure out if the other 90% is working.
A realistic budget requires clarity around who you’re really targeting, where they get their information, and what keeps them up at night. Without knowing these three things you could easily spend a lot time and effort on something that will totally miss the mark.
Also, you can’t measure success in terms of massive amounts of “impressions” or “reaching billions and billions” of people if your target audience is only the 5,000 people in the market for your product, or the 500 people qualified to apply for your jobs, or the 50 people with enough money to make a difference. So unless you have an unlimited budget, you will need to focus on the people that matter and the type of event that matters to them.
Week 4: Get buy-off on your metrics and/or KPIs
Once you’ve agreed upon your objectives and benchmarks you can establish the specific criteria of success that you will measure. See this chart to pick the right metrics for your program. When you pick KPIs for your event, consider only the metrics that best reflect the health of your business, or that best represent characteristics that most affect your business.
To a certain extent, your choice of criteria of success is dependent on the type of event you are evaluating. If the customer experience you are measuring takes place at a trade show or exhibit booth, you might choose as key criteria the percentage of new visitors or the cost per minute spent with a client in the booth. If the experience takes place at an event such as a concert, then you need to count how many people were exposed to your brand messages or benefits, and, as a result of being there, either understand your messages or will now consider or prefer your brand.
Week 5: Select a measurement instrument
There are four basic categories of tools needed to measure events. Each metric you chose previously in the process may require different measurement tools, so do not pick a tool until after you’ve completed steps 1-4 above.
We do not recommend relying solely on data gathered at the event itself. It is rarely useful or actionable. And if it is being reported by the event producer it is probably grossly inflated, as you can read in this example. What you want to know is what the attendees remembered and what they did a few weeks afterwards.
1. Surveys
The only way to measure increased awareness is to survey your target audience before the event and then repeat the survey afterwards to see if they changed their mind. If that isn’t an option (and I realize getting names ahead of an event may be impossible), the second-best way is to collect names at the event and interview attendees afterwards. Ask them what they can remember about the experience:
- Do they remember being in your booth?
- Did they even know you were a sponsor?
- Did they remember your brand, and the brand benefits or brand positioning you were trying to convey?
- Did they leave more likely to purchase or to recommend?
2. Web and social analytics
Use unique URLs and hashtags. Set up conversions in Omniture, Google Analytics (here’s my how-to video), or Webtrends to track the extent attendees engaged with your brand during or after the event.
3. CRM tools
CRM (Customer Relationships Management) systems, such as Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Zoho, SAS, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, etc., are powerful tools that track the customer (or donor in the case of non-profits) journey from first touch point to ultimate sales and revenue. Incorporating your experiential marketing events into your CRM system is critical to establishing real ROI for your efforts.
4. Media content analysis
When we talk about media analysis, we mean analyzing both traditional as well as social media. What you want to know is did you receive your fair share (or ideally more than your fair share) of the conversation around an event. Your share of hashtag use is another good metric to use.
Additionally, you’ll want to analyze the media to see if you got your key messages across, the extent to which your spokesmen or leaders were quoted relative to their peers or competitors, and to what extent any of your content was picked up or shared.
Event Plus 2 to 4 Weeks: Analyze your results, draw conclusions, and act
The purpose of all this research and evaluation isn’t to just demonstrate that “It was a really, really great show!” The purpose is to make better decisions for the next event. So as soon as you can, but no later than 2-3 weeks after your event, analyze the data. See what didn’t work first. Look at your cost-per-touch-point or cost-per-engagement or -lead to see whether all your effort and energy was worth it. Ultimately, events are expensive and thus vulnerable to budget cuts, but if you have solid data on what outcomes they achieved, you’ll dodge the cost-cutting bullet.
Forget wondering if attendees had a good time. Look instead at retention of key messages and actions. Identify what key messages were missed.
And finally, here’s a real-life lesson learned: We once analyzed a press event and discovered that the reporters who were not at the event picked up more of the clients key messages than the ones that were actually there. It turned out that the event had too many distractions: speakers went long and rambled on, and messages got lost amidst the shrimp and flashy hors d’oeuvres. The reporters who just referred to the press kit wrote stories that were much clearer on what the product benefits actually were. As always we learned more from failure than we did from success. ∞
