Measuring for Event ROI

Brands are looking for better ways to justify spending and to see a return on investment. You must prove that your campaigns are worth their assigned budget, and that they produce results. Your clients need a number. Why did the campaign work? How do we know? Amazing creative and show-stopping experiences are nice, but the goal is always to improve brand awareness and generate sales. That’s why we do what we do.

Keep Old Metrics in the Past

Historically, ROI has been grounded in the number of people coming through and interacting with your experience, also known as impressions. To supplement, some agencies develop surveys to provide some depth to the return metrics.

The problem with using impressions or surveys as key performance indicators is, they do not provide a holistic look at the quality of the experience. The event you’re attending may have thousands of participants. They may have even had extensive interactions with your experiential marketing or on-demand retail space. What does this say about the success of the campaign? Nearly nothing. In this case, the metrics do not give an accurate sense of the return or quality of experience (if that is a priority metric for you).

Targeted surveys are a tempting, and dooming answer to the quality vs quantity questions. People dread being targeted by brand ambassadors when they go into an experience. Your KPI gathering shouldn’t feel like an assault on your attendees. Your customers are getting more savvy, more cautious, and more immune to your tired old tactics. Posing survey questions during an event is the worst kind of time suck. Gathering your data should happen naturally, invisibly, or not at all.

Measuring the Right Data, the Right Way

Your team must find a way to capture the right metrics, without alerting attendees. We’ve worked with a ton of clients to help perfect this method. For example, touch-screen displays with model-building technology or ordering platforms available at your experience is a great way to subtly nudge people towards self-identification and eventually into your sales funnel.

This strategy has two strengths. First, you’re gathering data at the event. Namely, we can see the items that attracted people, color preferences, desirable features, sizes, etc. And after the event, we have meaningful interaction on the website, social platforms, and mobile app.

The reason this kind of data capture works is because people aren’t asked to “give” anything. Instead, they receive something like a fun game experience, a shipment of samples, or a rendering of their dream kitchen. The possibilities are endless. Simultaneously, you can access new information that your customer needs to justify the spend.

How to integrate Boxman Studios

The on-demand retail and experiential marketing trend is successful for brands and agencies because we make it easy to disrupt markets and interest your customer base. Without the significant risk of investing in real estate, you can freely test new locations, events and markets. When they’re successful, set down permanent roots. When they fail, changing locations is easy as packing-up and hopping on a rig.

One hundred percent of our focus is on the experience. We offer innovative, creative, wow-factor spaces for marketing campaigns and temporary retail. To get the ROI you’re looking for, make sure you’re utilizing the right data, the right capture method, and applying the information to help your brand. Boxman Studios can help bridge the gap by value-engineering our repurposed or purpose-built container options and offering competitive lease prices for pop-up events.