How to Calculate Experiential Marketing ROI

Calculating return on investment used to be a head-scratching task for experiential marketing agencies. It wasn’t easy to calculate the success of a campaign. But today, technology has enabled these campaigns to be completely measurable.

FIRST THINGS FIRST – HOW TO PLAN AN EXPERIMENTAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN

To gain any return, you will need to effectively map out your campaign. Understanding what your goals are and what you are going to measure are two critical elements.

Campaign goals could include; Increasing sales, lead generation or increasing brand awareness. Tailor your goals based on your business objectives.

Once you have defined your goals, it will be easier to measure the ROI. A ‘hard’ ROI is measured in monetary value. Whereas, a ‘soft’ ROI includes more subjective measures like brand affinity and intent to purchase.

This is a proven method to use during the planning phase of an experiential marketing campaign:

  1. Set goals: What do you want to achieve from experiential marketing?
  2. Hypothesis: What effect do you think your campaign will have on your consumer and how will it help your brand?
  3. Plan: What will your campaign do and how will you measure it?
  4. Execute: Do it!
  5. Report: Pull out the dreaded Xcel sheet and see how well it was received.
  6. Analyse: See what worked and had the most success.
  7. Improve: Use the data to plan for your future campaigns.

HOW DOES AN EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING AGENCY MEASURE ROI?

Now that you have the general outline of how to set up your experiential campaign – You’ll need to know how to measure the ROI using specific metrics.

Here are a few examples of metrics. Note: These aren’t the only metrics you can use. The list is endless.

Social engagement

This is a metric to measure the success of an integrated campaign. It allows your brand to see the digital reach that your campaign had.

Reach figures

This metric is used to measure how many consumers your campaign was exposed to. There is social reach as mentioned above but PR and word-of-mouth reach will also need to be factored in.

Samples distributed

The number of samples distributed is an indicator of engaged consumers. This metric must be paired with another which measures the ‘hard’ ROI of the campaign. For example, 1000 samples were distributed which helped to increase sales in Johannesburg by 5%.

HOW TO MEASURE THE METRICS?

Now that you know about the potential metrics, you will need to know how to track them.

Online reach and engagement

Social

Tools like native analytics tools make collecting data simple where you can export straight to Excel. For example, Facebook Insights.

Web Traffic

Google Analytics is a great tool to track website data. Make sure that it is set up on your website before your campaign begins.

Interactive methods

Brand Ambassadors

You will need to ask your brand ambassadors to keep track of how many interactions they were involved in during the campaign. I.e. How many consumers they interacted with or how many samples they distributed.

Data Capture pre, during and post

This method can be rolled out by means of surveys, follow-up email questionnaires and direct responses about the event. This helps to quantify brand affinity and evangelism.

More than the metrics, your campaign doesn’t need to be complex to create excitement – it must intrigue the consumer in its interaction. Google did this experiential campaign to engage directly with the consumer.

Now is the time to pay attention to the experience your brand creates for the consumer. Whilst a lot of the measuring involves “Likes” and “shares”, it’s more than that. Consumers want to feel that they can relate to something in this cluttered world, to be a part of the shared experience. They like to feel. Brands need to focus on the emotions invoked. It’s not just about impressions, it’s about expressions.

Before you go, see our experiential marketing campaign using bloggers and influencers.