How to make your engagement marketing event produce enough ROI?

What would you like to do more? Spend an entire weekend watching a movie on the Texas Rangers who took down Bonnie and Clyde? Or, would you rather be a part of the team that caught the notorious duo? Netflix is all about experiential marketing these days. The platform wants its audiences to feel the thrill, taking a leaf from HBO’s Westworld experience from the last season. The change in the advertising topography shows that the audience wants more than the traditional billboards, print, and TVCs.

Over the years, several brands have tried to leverage engagement marketing to drive brand awareness and sales. In the last couple of years, it has become absolutely necessary to measure the success of event marketing. It poses a challenge for event marketing experts since it involves evoking emotional responses and driving engagement. Quantifying consumer’s perception of a brand or the impression an event has on the audience is not easy. However, one needs to focus on the metrics that can estimate the returns from a marketing event.

How do you measure the revenue of an experiential marketing event?

It is every marketing team’s responsibility to link the event with the revenue. In Los Angeles, experiential marketing is gaining popularity with the millennial crowd. Millennials have little time to engage in social activities and no time to look up from their digital screens. It is only natural that the traditional forms of marketing that require them to look away from their phones is failing with this target group rapidly. Brands need to take the added step of leveraging the emotion of the target audience to command their attention.

Now, quantifying emotions is not going to be easy, but that does not mean that the top Los Angeles experiential agency settles for non-quantification of the results. According to an engagement marketing expert, here are the three steps that can help you make the job easier –

  1. Establish clear objectives

How can you measure the success of an event, if you have no goal laid out? You can select a mishmash of general goals and specific goals. The broad goals can include getting a specific number of attendees for the event per day, whereas specific goals can consist of getting around 40% repeat audience every day.

While the ulterior goal of every marketing event is to promote the product and boost the sales, any experiential marketing event that pushes sales tend to not do well with the target audience. While planning the event, you should spend more time devising brand awareness methods.

You might want to create social media contests, introduce new branded hashtags and photo contests on Instagram. Nonetheless, it will only show you returns, when you have laid out the goals, and you have the results for comparison.

  1. Measure the progress

Sometimes, it is difficult to estimate the reach of a brand campaign or event when there is no specific goal. The moment you set goals for your event, you introduce valid KPI metrics. Your target numbers are there for tracking, and merely allocating them during the kickoff meeting will not do you much good unless you are monitoring them in real-time. These numbers will help you keep track of your progress and reach.

There are a few quantifiable metrics that everyone should follow during an event. These include the total number of attendees, the number of repeat attendees, total number of sign-ins, mentions on social media and many more. Collecting contact numbers and email addresses on the site of the event can help in translating the attendee presence into long-term online engagement.

  1. Quantify the attention of your consumer

That is something not a lot of experiential marketing companies in LA can do. The quantification of any experience is critical in the understanding of the brand’s impression on the target audience.

A very novel marketing concept – Attention Quotient, measures the attention of the consumer. This metric is the product of the research of a Harvard Business School professor and marketing expert. The expert covers three similar parameters that have the potential to measure the effect of an event throughout the marketing funnel. The model includes the amplification effects of activation on social media channels, local visuals, and traditional media channels.

Audiences in Los Angeles are smart. The years of lousy concert setups and terrible promotional event experiences have taught them that not every flashy event is worth spending the money. When promoting a new brand or product in LA, any brand is better off coupling their activation events with big-name-events and concerts that draw hundreds and thousands of attendees from all across the city. Smartly coupling your brand awareness campaign with an already popular event that targets your audience can help you save money and give you reliable metrics for evaluation.

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