Next week in “Marketing” is a feature on Field Marketing/Experiential Marketing.
The article will look at how experiential marketing has become a popular route to market for brands as they look to differentiate themselves from their competition. This feature will examine how experiential marketers are currently measuring return on investment on their strategies. How many brands have a discernible target on their experiential activity? What techniques can be used to measure the impact of such activity? Are these live events used more as brand building tools then sales opportunities?
This is a very interesting discussion – one that should be examined on an individual case by case basis. We were asked how we assess our client’s activities.
Our response:
Every client is unique in that each client has a specific reason for wanting to embark on an experiential/live brand experience event. Some want to do the activity to tie in with a PR campaign or use it as a medium to gain PR coverage, others want to do it to interact with as many potential customers as possible by getting customers to feel, touch, taste and experience the brand and product/or service. Whilst an agency can set out a whole raft of different ways in which to monitor the effectiveness of the campaign it will ultimately come down to the client to assess the value based on the monitoring of new sales (assessing if there has been a spike in sales over a specific time period), increase in enquiries, internet hits or media coverage. Some of the tactics we might use to help clients to assess there activity is:
1. Capturing Video Footage and conducting interviews with the target audience (Vox Pops)
2. Capturing peoples emails and phone numbers to be used in a follow up sales campaign
3. Counting the amount of people that actually interacted in the activity
4. Distribute leaflets and other information to interested parties
5. Gain media partners to link in with the campaign to drive added awareness
We will discuss this element in length with our clients to ensure that we are providing a clear path for assessing the cost benefits of the campaign. Give us a call if you have any questions and we would be happy to help out.