EML Activations

Brands want to establish a connection with their customers – experiential marketing can allow them to establish that connection.
Customers want to have fun and be entertained by brands – live brand activations can create immersive events that would accomplish both objectives.

So, whatever your target audience might need from you, experiential marketing campaigns can allow them to express themselves, connect with you, create brand recognition, brand recall and foster brand affinity.

However, there’s a part of the experiential marketing campaign that makes most brand managers pause: “How do I measure ROI (return on investment) for an experiential marketing campaign?” Most often, marketing departments ignore this pertinent but often overlooked question. One thing is for sure though: you can effectively measure the ROI of your experiential marketing campaign.

In this article, we’ve outlined three easy steps that will help you measure the success of your brand activations and put you many steps ahead of your competition.

1. Understand the Market, Your Target Audience and Current Trends
Understanding the market and carrying out a market analysis is typically the first step to take before planning a campaign. This is because evaluating the response and feedback of your target audience is very vital. Plus, it’s important to consider what appeals to your specific target audience to help you understand what might resonate with them. You shouldn’t forget trends too.

For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed marketing trends. People are now shifting to e-commerce rather than physical store visits. And that means that groceries stores are now pivoting to adding online delivery to their list of services. Therefore, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to see that the few stores who aren’t acting based on the experiential marketing trend will record a huge decline in sales.

2. Define Your Key Marketing Objectives
It is critical to consider what your team, management and other stakeholders would consider as a success for the brand before the start of the campaign. For brand A; the goal and objective could be brand awareness and brand B could be to make sales.

Both are equally as important, but it makes marketing sense to understand which is of higher priority to your brand at that very moment as it helps you to weigh success better and for the agency, it gives a better direction to help you successfully plan a campaign that would be most effective.

Some marketing objectives to consider include:

Brand Awareness:It could also mean that your brand wants to gain predominant mind-share and be the only source of recall in the minds of its customers and also get potential ones to shift their loyalty.

Sales Enablement: This is typically done to increase sales for the brand, and could take the form of activation or a sales promo (This is to get people to buy more for less).

Product or Service Launch: Introducing the general public to a new product or service launch.

Whatever your marketing objectives might be, it’s important that you set clear marketing goals to help you identify what’s important from what’s not.

3. Achieving Internal Buy-In
This is a major struggle for the agency especially as the brand typically has different people on the team with opposing success metrics. This, in turn, causes a change in the success metrics during a campaign and sometimes occurs after the budget has been assigned.

The disparity in success metrics can cause the brand to miss the goals or target state it intended to achieve at the beginning of the campaign. Follow these three tips and the odds of achieving a successful experiential marketing campaign are highly stacked in your favour. Additionally, fine-tuning the way you measure ROI helps your brand reach more customers while saving more money.

EML Activations – August, 2020