Marketing has grown exponentially over the years, welcoming new ways for brands to connect with their consumers and grow their loyal communities through internet forums and TikTok dances.

But experiential marketing isn’t quite at that level yet. The industry is still in the beginning phases, lacking visibility and a true community for consumer brand marketers to share their learnings, tackle key challenges, and ideate about the future of experiential. 

We surveyed experiential marketers in the wild and have a few predictions based on the patterns we saw. Here’s a few basics of what we found. There will be more:

• Focus on ROI
• Global Expansion
• Understanding of How to Measure Success

Where 2023 Left Us

As we move into the new year and the next phases of our strategies, it’s good to know what kind of foundation we’re starting on. Three big things we learned from our experiential marketer survey::

1. Brands are using experiential marketing to grow and deepen brand loyalty, with 43% reporting this as their primary goal
2. Event Attendance is the most commonly used metric, with 44% of brands using it as a measure of success
3. Experiential teams are often strapped for resources, with 60% citing their biggest challenge as not having enough team resources.

Plenty of marketers are learning the benefit of experiences as a brand loyalty strategy. However, we’re still seeing challenges with team bandwidth, making scaling and efficiency more important than ever moving into 2024.

So how do we start thinking about experiences moving forward with what we know now?

Proving ROI will be a major focus moving forward. 

With budgets slowing in 2024, marketers will be under more pressure than ever to prove that their experiences aren’t just useful; they’re tangibly contributing to brand goals. ROI will be the key to unlocking increased budgets, headcount, and scaled programs. 

Measuring ROI will be an asset to any marketing team and the lynchpin for helping mature and optimize your strategy. Proving the impact of experiential programs will also help teams secure additional investment and potentially alleviate some of the resource constraints teams are feeling today. But, experiential teams haven’t gotten on the same page yet about what ROI actually looks like. 

In 2023, the most popular metric, by a margin, was the number of consumers who attended the brand’s experience, but the other results were all over the map. There was no one clear metric every marketer surveyed agreed on. Even then, counting attendance doesn’t do much for teams in the long term; it doesn’t show how an experience changed perception or affected a consumer’s opinion or buying habits. And when it comes to proving something works, that’s not an ideal way to view your strategy.

We predict that 2024 will see a renewed transparency and connection in data collection and reporting, alongside a budding and in-depth conversation across all industries about what experiential ROI means to them. We’ll be moving beyond surface metrics to dive deeper into what makes an experience valuable in the long term.  

Brands will start investing more in global experiences.

With so many opportunities globally, brands are beginning to expand into new markets, focusing on new shores to accelerate growth. Technology plays a large role in keeping different teams on the same page. Tracking and consolidating individual reports helps teams understand the larger impact of the strategy as a whole versus each experience having siloed results. 

There are a few reasons for this new move in 2024.  First, it’s a great brand awareness strategy to get people talking and trying your product in new markets. In order to successfully expand your sales globally, consumers in new markets need to have some familiarity with your brand. 

Additionally, if you have your eye on tapping into the pockets of global consumers, you need to know a little about them first. Brand experiences offer an excellent opportunity to collect data directly from your consumers to understand exactly who they are and what they care about. These insights can then be used to make decisions about where you should distribute your products and how you should market them to see the greatest impact on product sales.

Our State of the Industry findings show that brands are spending significant money on experiences; clearly, many believe in the power of experiential to achieve their goals. Globally and at home, it’ll come down to using experiential to justify expansion and as a consumer research tool.

Brand teams will become more data-driven and savvy in measuring and proving success. 

Marketers are getting on the same page about using their experiences to grow and deepen consumer brand loyalty. And with teams now having access to dedicated analytics tools, more conversations are happening around what success means and looks like. We’ll see a huge uplevel of sophistication in how they measure and prove success.

Using living metrics that show a change in behavior versus static metrics that show one aspect at the moment will take the forefront of the measurement conversation. For example, net promoter scores remain an industry standard for experience measurement, but they only capture one moment. A brand conversion rate, which shows how an event changed a consumer’s perception, will be a stronger contender to prove value and denote success.

Experiential marketers will also hone in on how best to measure the success of their experiences based on their goals. For example, if a brand is super focused on driving awareness in new markets through their events, measuring the number of marketable contacts acquired during an event is likely a better indicator of success compared to NPS. 

Take a look at how AnyRoad collects and analyzes feedback data as an example of data-driven thinking.

The Takeaway

As we stride into 2024, the landscape for brand experience teams is set to evolve dynamically. The key takeaway? Achieving growth and fostering unwavering loyalty means learning how to prove success in order to grow budgets and improve team bandwidth.

Instead, the emphasis is strategically proving ROI, unlocking global expansion opportunities, and focusing on the right metrics. These pivotal elements are the compass for brands seeking to scale their impact in 2024. 

So, as the new year unfolds, let these insights guide your brand experience journey, propelling you toward success in an ever-evolving marketing realm.