Relying on impressions alone is no longer sufficient in today’s marketplace to measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts.
Consumers want to engage with companies and experience live events that will shape their deliberate choices as a buyer.
The objective of this article is to identify the various aspects of a brand activation strategy that must be considered to convert consumer attention into a qualified customer pipeline and revenue.
Summary: How We Track Events From Awareness to Action
For most companies, events are simply a branding venue. Most of the time, they will leave money on the table from their events by not developing a well-structured approach to linking physical or digital experiences with a monetizable outcome.
Rather than just renting booth space and handing out materials, the most successful companies develop a system that follows the user journey from the point of first contact with the brand all the way through to a completed sale.
- It is essential to clearly define a specific customer behavior before creating the creative event.
- Before building either the booth or an app, build the process for capturing data and sending CRM messages.
- When evaluating the success of an event, measuring success via pipeline and sales data is key, rather than focusing only on foot traffic, impressions, or social media postings.
Creating a Brand Activation Strategy for Revenue Generation
The most significant error that marketers make is to begin with creativity. Instead of determining the format for an event (such as a pop-up shop) or what experience will be created before they understand how to measure an event's success, the successful approach is to work backward.
You must identify the business outcome you need to achieve as the first step in your business plan.
Defining the Desired Business Outcome
A desired business outcome is not a vague objective for generating more awareness. There are specific financial and operational objectives. For instance, you may be working to encourage product trials as part of a product launch, or to generate qualified prospects for your sales team.
You could also be encouraging repeat purchases from your existing customer base. You'll want to select one primary goal, as trying to achieve multiple goals with a single campaign will result in failure to meet each individual goal. The entire brand activation strategy planning process will be based around this singular goal.
Stating the Target Behavior
Once you've determined the business outcome, you will need to identify the specific behavior you want the target audience to perform. This behavior must be stated in an accurate, observable manner. For example, if your target behavior is to promote good feelings toward your brand, you cannot write that down as the target behavior.
Instead, it will need to read as completing a five-minute product demonstration; this describes what you expect your target audience to do. In addition, it could also read as redeeming a discount at checkout or booking a follow-up appointment with your sales rep. All of these actions bridge the gap between the event and your organization.
Formulating the Centerpoint Mechanic
Now that you know how to create the event experience, focus on designing the event. Start by determining the least complex and smallest experience that will lead to achieving the target behavior, and eliminate all other activities.
You will want to structure the event around one impactful action that highlights the value of your product. For a consumer goods brand, perhaps you'll create a tasting experience; for a software solution provider, it could be an interactive game that showcases your product.
Ensure the action is relevant within the context of the venue where your target audience will be engaged. The connection between planning and action for marketing by agencies, such as Jack Morton, will be a key component of the campaign.
Capturing and Organizing Your Data and CRM
The event itself, either physical, virtual, or a combination of both, is just half of the overall event campaign that includes the supporting data. If you cannot identify the individuals that participated in your event, then you cannot quantify the business impact of the brand activation strategy.
Bridging the Gap Between Offline and Online
Identifying your data during your event must be a well-thought-out component of your event strategy. It is unreasonable to expect individuals to fill out lengthy paper forms on a clipboard.
A more effective approach would be to use a seamless integration of the data collection process within the actual event experience. Utilize tools such as QR codes, unique promotional links, mobile applications, or event platforms (e.g., Splash and Bizzabo).
The data collection should seamlessly integrate into the event experience and provide a reason for an individual to provide you with their information (personalized results of the event experience, a photo, or other incentives).
Your Follow-Up Sequence
Once you capture the data, your next task is to take action on that data without any delay whatsoever. Your follow-up sequence must be planned out and ready to execute prior to your event.
The follow-up will consist of the next steps to be taken once the individual leaves the engagement booth or closes the application used to collect their data. You should clearly identify and define your CRM campaign tracking codes, write your email follow-up sequence, and write the business opportunity tracking rules.
If a qualified lead books a meeting with your team, your sales team must have clearly defined rules in place to respond. If there is any delay with your response (two or three days), you may lose all of the momentum created by an exceptional event experience.
Measuring Your Brand Activation Strategy with a Multi-Tier ROI Model
Most businesses measure the impact of their event by examining the amount of impressions created, foot traffic generated, and the number of social media conversations about the event. However, these metrics cannot show you whether or not there was an increase in sales due to your event.
Therefore, you need a multi-tiered measurement model to accurately determine how your brand activation strategy influenced the buyer's journey.
The First Tier: Measuring Reach and Exposure
The first tier of measurement consists of basic metrics relating to the number of people who attended your event, the number of impressions generated by the media, the number of times your company or product name was mentioned, and the overall value of free publicity earned by your event.
While these are great statistics to include in your final report, they will provide evidence of only one thing: that people were aware of your event. The first tier does not indicate whether anyone purchased your product after attending your event.
These metrics will allow you to get a good overview of your event as a whole but should not be the only metrics used to evaluate your event's effectiveness.
The Second Tier: Measuring Engagement Quality
The second tier of measurement evaluates the engagement level of event participants. It is important to know how engaged the attendee was with your brand during their time at your installation.
High second-tier metrics indicate that your creative concept worked, that your attendees enjoyed being at your event, and that you have successfully connected with your target audience through your event.
SureShot Professional Marketing has a great deal of insight into tracking this middle tier to verify that your creative concept holds the attention of your audience.
The Third Tier: Measuring Business Results
The final tier (the only tier that shows whether your event produced ROI) consists of assessing sales growth, offer redemption rates, increases in web traffic to your primary website following the event, reorders, etc.
This requires analyzing target account attendance, meeting booking rates, pipeline creation, and influenced revenue from business-to-business campaign activities (after the event is completed) within a time frame of 30, 60, and then 90 days after the conclusion of the event.
Evidence and Use Cases for B2C and B2B Campaigns
The structure of the model does apply to consumer brands and enterprise companies; however, they execute differently.
By examining individual case studies of reported campaigns, we have been able to identify how the methodology will adapt to different market segments.
High Volume Consumer Sample Distribution and Retail
Consumer campaigns are geared toward rapid trial and mass exposure of products. An example of this would be a campaign run by Liquid Death during a NASCAR event where they reportedly sampled over 11,000 cans and distributed thousands of premium items.
White Claw executed a campaign during the Coachella music festival with a reported reach of 80,000 runners. Samsung reported that their Flipvertising project created a sales increase of 34 per cent at the retail level.
The takeaway here is agility and volume. The consumer data is typically captured within minutes and often requires an action from the consumer, such as scanning a code to redeem a discount.
B2B Trade Shows and Account-Based Campaigns
B2B campaigns function on an entirely different level as compared to their consumer counterparts. The objective of B2B campaigns is not to accumulate thousands of random interactions but to foster a handful of highly qualified conversations (i.e., fewer in number and higher quality).
An example of this can be found with the campaign run by VSA Partners for BNY Mellon that engaged 23,000 employees internally and contributed to an 18-point increase in awareness.
To be successful, external B2B activity at a trade show should mirror the experience of the buyer's journey with measurable outcomes. Your business needs a list of target accounts and a method to book a demo sales appointment immediately and effectively.
Secondly, your business must also have an established set of procedures and standard operating procedures for the hosting of each of your live events to ensure the highest quality possible for the audience's experience and image of your brand.
The Risks and Costs of Live Event Planning
The unfortunate reality is that if your company does not properly plan for live events, you can destroy your brand in front of a live audience because of the mistakes you made while executing your brand activation strategy.
Budgeting Guidelines for Live Events
When budgeting for live events, it is important to think about all possibilities that could affect the success of your event, both internally and externally. As a general rule, you should allow for approximately 50% of the total budget to be allocated toward physical execution and production and the remaining 50% for creative development, promotion, and back-up plans.
Costs associated with live events can vary widely depending on the scope of the project; for example, a digital campaign may have a much lower overall cost than a large-scale multi-market tour.
The Biggest Threat to Your Live Campaign
The single largest potential risk associated with your live campaign is the amount of time your audience waits to participate. If the waiting period is too long, you will lose the attention and interest of your target audience.
Therefore, it is essential that you develop a plan that allows for the most efficient flow of people to allow for the highest level of capacity for your event. In addition, you should use live tracking controls to monitor and manage all aspects of your live project during the live campaign event from the moment it begins to its completion, and review all potential technical breakdowns with your event's mobile tracking application while performing this function.
If there are any signs of potential problems during your event due to weather (including severe weather warnings), temporarily lost permits, and product shortages, you should develop contingency plans to address these issues. Any obstacle that exists between the customer and the core mechanic will only reduce your ultimate return on investment.
Final Words: Take Action Instead of Finding Inspiration
The most important factor when evaluating how successful marketing campaigns are is not how attractive they are, nor how many awards they win, but how much they change consumer behavior. Moving away from traditional advertising and towards live participatory events creates a strong need to focus on data.
Every dollar spent on creating a physical product should be able to be tracked digitally. When you measure your results prior to planning your creative, you will continually create consumer engagement that leads to legitimate business growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you bridge offline to online engagement for a long B2B sales pipeline?
Collect intent immediately and not just a paper business card. Utilize your event apps or a designated platform to collect specific interests during your conversation and connect this information directly to your CRM system.
Make it automatic so that days or months later when a B2B sale occurs from participants that you met at an event, credit will be given back to the original conversation.
What is the number one reason that prevents conversion after a successful live event?
Asking participants to complete a long or irrelevant follow-up email sequence is the most common reason why converting is not successful. Even if attendees had a fantastic time at an event on the weekend, if they do not hear from a sales/marketing team until the following Thursday, all momentum will have disappeared.
Therefore, have your follow-up emails or calls drafted, approved, and ready to be sent out prior to the day of the event.
What are your concerns regarding privacy and data for collecting participant information?
Be sure to propose a fair exchange of value for collecting the information. For instance, you cannot expect someone to provide you with their primary email address in exchange for a cheap pen.
You must provide a more valuable item, such as a high-quality, personalized picture, a large discount code, or an exclusive research piece. Consistently communicate your terms and conditions and ask for only the minimum amount of information needed before proceeding with the next step.