How to Measure the Success of Your Experiential Marketing Campaign

Experiential and event marketing is absolutely booming — 

91% of consumers are much more likely to purchase a brand’s products and services after participating in a brand activation or experience. - EventTrack 2021.

Experiential campaigns generate valuable insights for brands and leave lasting impressions on target audiences. The right key performance indicators (KPIs) and marketing metrics generate valuable insights for sales and marketing teams. 

"Our data collected at each and every event, no matter the avenue, is incredibly valuable to our clients. The data reports on not only impressions or sales but also insight on how the consumer relates to the product or service we are promoting. Knowledge is power and the power of insight is immeasurable." said Christine Baker, VP of Client Relations at The Experiential Network.

Measuring success for your experiential marketing campaign is simply a matter of focusing on the right marketing KPIs to reflect the goals of your campaign and messaging strategy. Analyzing your experiential KPI values will determine the return on investment (ROI) and provide a clear game plan for moving forward.

Experiential marketing KPIs ultimately create impactful, meaningful, and emotional experiences. While some of these sentiments are tougher to measure than others, as marketers, we improve performance by focusing on the marketing metrics we can track and analyze.

What Is Experiential Marketing? 

Known as impact marketing, engagement marketing, experiential marketing, event marketing, and influence marketing — all refer to marketing strategies focused on immersing customers in product experiences that engage and invigorate them in a rich, thematic, and meaningful way. 

Emotional connections and relationships are essential to building success in today’s competitive market environment. Experiential marketing invigorates brands to create brand activation moments and touchpoints that deliver the benefits of experiential marketing: 

• Personalized engagement  
• A powerful emotional connection to products
• Design of a positive touchpoint 
• Socially sharable 

Creating interactive moments for your customers is a powerful way to activate your brand and invigorate interest in your target audience. Measuring success using experiential marketing KPIs is essential for optimizing performance and building a sustainable and scalable enterprise. 

Marketing metrics help marketers define experiential marketing goals to increase brand awareness and engagement. Marketing KPIs play a vital role in helping brands measure their experiential ROI and understand how their investments translate into positive outcomes for generating new business. 

How to Measure the Success of Your Experiential Marketing Campaigns 

Measuring the success of experiential campaigns is always a matter of tracking measurables and quantifying success. In this case, we will be counting different values of customer activities, and these key performance indicators help inform a better picture of the success of an event or experiential marketing campaign. Your brand's experiential marketing goals should be focused around generating unforgettable moments to activate your customers. 

Phase 1 — Experiential Marketing KPIs to Measure Awareness and Interest 

Before your event or brand activation, you will want to be sure you are doing everything you can to get the word out across all your customer touchpoints and communication channels. People cannot attend an event if they are not aware of it and interested in attending.

• Hashtags — To track customer interest prior to the big day of your event, it can be very beneficial to measure how successfully you have been at getting people to use hashtags associated with the brand and the specific activity you have planned. Do not discount the amazing value of hashtags. There are benefits to studying how your competitors, customers, and general industry uses hashtags. 
• Shares — Another simple metric that could be useful to track prior to your event is how many times your event announcement, social media pages, or other resources such as event directions have been shared. When your prospective customers are sharing your marketing messages, it helps improve your communications and boost conversion rates for your experiential marketing campaigns. 
• Downloads — Oftentimes, experiential event marketers will purposefully require customers to download apps, tickets, promotional coupons, or unique customer identifiers so that it is easier to track who actually followed through and showed up. Ideally, marketers want to build more and more highly personalized customer profiles to know who to focus their attention on when communicating about upcoming brand activation events. 

Phase 2 — Experiential Marketing KPIs of the Buyer’s Journey

• Social media traffic — Your customers engage with your brand across your social media communication channels. Your experiential marketing efforts will improve if you pay attention to what traffic sources are generating the most traction with your customers. Social media offers a huge opportunity to earn a substantial experiential ROI because it's possible to drive high-value engagement at low costs. 
• Landing pages — Prior to completing a purchase or attending an event, your customers will learn about your opportunities by visiting landing pages after opening sales emails or visiting social media pages. It is very useful to track experiential marketing KPIs from your landing pages, such as landing page views, bounce rate, average time on page, or the page visitors to event attendees ratio. 
• Word of mouth — One of the most valuable experiential marketing KPIs is customer conversation about your event. Your event pages, business websites, social media accounts, and other customer communication channels such as discussion forums can be great resources for learning more about how your target audience feels about your special event opportunity before, during, and after it has been completed.  

Phase 3 — Experiential Marketing KPIs for Conversions 

Event check-ins — It's important to know the absolute number of people who show up at an event where you are activating.  This number relates to your ROI and what advertisement efforts went into promoting it.

You ideally want to know that people who attended enjoyed themselves, so it's important to design key marketing metrics and event marketing KPIs to try to capture that emotional connection.  

Here are some of the top experiential marketing KPIs for conversions from our past clients:

• Survey answers
• Samples distributed
• Map coverage for street teams (GPS-tracked logged miles)
• Register rings
• QR codes scanned/landing page visits
• App downloads
• Coupons redeemed
• Photo booth interactions
• Social media shares
• Event registrations
• Door tag or flyer distribution totals
• Contest entries
• Lead generations
• Promo item distribution
• Impressions for a mobile vehicle

For over two decades, The Experiential Network has helped brands navigate endless experiential marketing and event avenues. We can drive your brand forward with our strategic development, nationwide brand ambassador programs, speed to market, unique partner vendors, market-leading product sampling programs, and ability to think — and work — outside the box.

Book a consultation with The Experiential Network today.