So, you've invested your time, energy, and resources into creating an amazing brand activation. But now comes the crucial question: How do you measure the return on investment (ROI) of your efforts? Measuring ROI can be tricky for brand activations, especially for in-person experiences with few digital components. Brand activations also leave a lasting impression on guests and provide longer-term benefits to the brand, which can be more difficult to measure. By following the guidelines below, you can make informed decisions about the value of your event and ensure that your brand activation gets the credit it deserves.
Set Clear Objectives
Setting clear objectives will set you up for success and ensure you’re thinking about ROI during every step of the process. What are you hoping to achieve? Increased brand awareness, customer engagement, lead generation, or all of the above? By defining your goals upfront, you'll have a clear roadmap for measuring the success of your activation. Make sure your goals are measurable, and put processes in place to collect the necessary data to meet these goals. Finally, share these goals with everyone on your team so you’re all on the same page and can work together to achieve them.
Track Audience Engagement
Brand activations are all about connecting with your target audience. To measure ROI, it's crucial to create some kind of data to track audience engagement during the event. You can capture data on metrics such as the number of attendees, dwell time, social media interactions, and participant feedback. Leverage event technology, surveys, and social listening tools to gather valuable insights into your audience's experience. Placing counters at the entry and exit points can help track total attendees, and giveaways can help encourage guests to fill out feedback surveys. If you have a larger budget, you can even use facial recognition technology to track how long guests spend at the activation and what areas they spend the most time in. Finally, you can conduct pre- and post-event surveys to assess any changes in brand recognition and recall. Creating these datasets allows you to set benchmarks for success and analyse performance after the event.
Monitor PR & Social Media
PR and social media play a pivotal role in brand activations and help expand the event’s reach beyond the guests who attended in person. Keep a close eye on social media metrics to gauge the reach and impact of your activation. You can create a custom hashtag for the event, track post engagement, measure the growth of your online community, and collect social handles and emails during the event so you can continue the conversations afterwards. Finally, use social listening tools to measure customer sentiment and track PR mentions in important publications. Engaging with your audience in this way can create meaningful interactions and foster a sense of brand loyalty and advocacy.
Analyse Sales & Lead Generation:
The end goal of any brand activation is typically to increase sales. Tracking sales at a brand activation can be easy if the event includes a pop-up shop or physical store, but this often isn’t the case. Instead, you can include a short survey at the point of sale to track which sales came directly from the brand activation, or offer a coupon with a unique code to track when it is redeemed. If you aren’t able to do either of these, you can monitor pre- and post-activation sales patterns to get insights on how the event impacted sales. Generating leads is also an essential component of any event or brand activation. It is important to assign unique identifiers to track leads generated from specific activation touchpoints and accurately assess how many leads came specifically from the event. You can use CRM systems and lead scoring techniques to track their progression through the sales funnel and monitor conversion rates.
Calculate Return on Investment (ROI):
Now it's time to crunch the numbers! Compare the costs spent on your brand activation against the returns generated, such as increased sales, new customers, or strengthened brand loyalty. Make sure your ROI calculations align with the objectives you set previously and report on how well you were able to meet those objectives. This evaluation will help guide future decisions and determine whether similar activations will be beneficial for the brand. ROI measurement is not a one-time activity. You should learn from your results, identify areas of improvement and adjust your strategy accordingly. Keep experimenting with new ideas, technologies, and engagement tactics to continuously enhance your ROI. Now go forth, measure, and conquer!
Want to work directly with an accomplished experiential marketing agency? VEE Agency is an industry leader in creating engaging, effective campaigns. Browse our work or reach out to us at howdy@veeagency.com.au to discuss your next project.
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