Experiential Marketing is huge right now. Perhaps you’re currently planning an event. Or perhaps you’ve already held one, but aren’t sure how to gauge its success. Here are some of the most important KPIs to keep in mind when assessing your next event.
KPIs to Measure Success at your Next Event
Brand Awareness
Pre-Event Online Engagement – Before your event even begins, you can start to get a picture of brand awareness. Closely track unique hits to your marketing event’s page or website. Keep track of how people are engaging with social media for your event.
One great way to do this is to encourage the use of a hashtag early on. This will make it easy to see exactly how people are talking about your event. You might consider running a social media contest to encourage people to share your event with their friends and followers.
Event Attendance – This is probably the most obvious KPI for any event. It’s vital that you know how many people actually attend your event. This number will be factored into many of the KPIs you’ll be looking at after the event as well.
Of course, there are a number of ways to track attendance. If your event requires registration, you probably already have the numbers. But if not, you may have to get a bit creative. You might collect social media handles or email addresses. Or you could set up a counter at the event’s entrance. However you choose to do it, do be sure to keep track of how many people are coming and going.
Demand at Booths or Events – Did you have a waitlist a mile long the whole time? Did you run out of promotional materials and giveaways? Were your booth workers busy all day? Keep track of the ebb and flow of traffic to your booth as well as how engaged visitors are.
Waitlist technology like NextME can be a huge help here. This simple app will check-in attendees, then let them wander as they await their turn. In the app, you’ll text them when it’s time to come back. And at the end of your event, you’ll have an accurate measurement of how busy your event was at any given time.
Brand Engagement and Interest
Leads – The most important thing to capture during any marketing event is a list of leads. Ideally, you want contact info and a few details about the interest of each person. In the middle of a busy event, this can be a challenge.
Fortunately, technology like NextME is a great way to get this info quickly and accurately, then keep it and all sorts of other event data in one place until you’re back in the office and ready to use it.
Follower Growth Rates – Check out your social media numbers before and after your event to see how they’ve grown. If your event is compelling enough, you’ll add followers not only from attendees, but also from their friends and followers.
One good way to boost this number is to get guests to engage with your social media during the event itself. There are a million ways to do this, from contests to photo ops. If you’re using NextME to handle your waitlist, be sure to include your social media links on your customized marketing page.
Clients and Sales
Conversions – This is the main goal, right? How many of those leads turned into sales? Depending on your industry and the length of your sales cycle, this number may not be immediately available. But be sure to review before you plan your next event to see how well you really did.
Increased Sales – In addition to conversions, experiential marketers also need to look at overall increased sales. By nature, this type of marketing can turn attendees into brand ambassadors. So you might see an uptick in sales from people who didn’t make it to the event but saw it on a friend’s social media.
Brand Loyalty
Referrals – If you do an event right, people will want to share their experience. Be sure you let them do so by encouraging referrals. You can offer an incentive of some sort or simply ask attendees who you should invite to your next big event. Either way, once you’ve created some level of brand loyalty, people are likely to give you plenty of referrals if you just ask.
Sharing – A marketer’s dream is for their event to go viral. And plenty of good events have. But even if you don’t see millions of shares and a trending hashtag, be sure to keep track of how people are talking about your event. Word of mouth is still a powerful tool for any marketing effort. And social media shares are the digital, measurable version of word of mouth.
Brand Ambassadors – Consider launching a brand ambassador program. This can be a higher level of your brand’s loyalty program or can be a completely separate effort like a street team. Either way, once you’ve got some loyal brand fans, it’s time to let them help you spread the word.
Select only ambassadors who already have a social media following and are likely to be able to share your message with a broad audience. Then, offer them perks. Keep them in the loop with a special newsletter or webpage detailing what’s coming up for your brand. Give bloggers prizes for contests on their site. Let ambassadors be the first to sample new products. Give them swag like t-shirts and stickers. And of course, give them samples or coupons to hand out to friends and family.
No matter how you measure it, experiential marketing is a great way to get people excited about your brand. And if done right, it can turn leads into ambassadors in a way few other marketing efforts ever could!