Despite millions of dollars of annual investment in brand activations, even the most beloved brands in the world still struggle with the following:

• Scaling their brand activation strategy
• Growing brand awareness and loyalty
• Demonstrating activation impact and ROI

But don’t worry! In most cases, these challenges aren’t from a lack of effort. Many brands are just missing the right technology and data-backed approach to be as successful as needed. Really, your Experiential IT can be broken down into three steps:

1. Capture Consumer Data
2. Measure Impact
3. Generate Insights and Results

There are tools that go with these, of course, but when you break everything down into three simple steps, you’ll be less overwhelmed trying to figure out what tech you’re looking for.

It looks like this:

In this blog, we’ll break down the technology and tactics from the lens of this three-step framework used by brands and agencies that have developed successful, data-driven activation strategies.

Why Data-Driven?

There’s no single right way to run a data-driven brand activation strategy. However, having the data to make better decisions in your planning and execution will constantly improve your efficiency and return on investment. 

The best pieces of information help you avoid throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks; you’re empowered to take the juiciest tidbits of data, like target gender and age, and use your research to understand what experiences will resonate and where they’ll have the most significant impact. 

Some of our favorite data morsels include:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Purchase rate

For more important data pieces, check out our customer info checklist and make sure you’re collecting the right information! 

1. Capture Consumer Data

Alright, this one’s a little obvious. To use your data more effectively, you need to collect better data in the first place. So many brands don’t get this one right, or their tech limits them to an email address and a fond memory of an interaction.

When you improve the tech for your data collection process, you’re guaranteeing more mileage out of your planning in the future. If you’re unsure where to start improving your tools, this is the right step to hone in on. The rest of the steps in this blog, like measuring your impact or generating insights and results, are impossible without capturing your consumer data.

The right tech can show you:

• Who’s attending your event
• Who wants to hear from you
• Who your event was most effective for

Tech for this step includes:

• A data collection solution (whether an Experiential Marketing platform like AnyRoad or basic online forms)
• iPad kiosk or other mobile device on which consumers can register 
• QR code registration

For more QR collection tips, read our expert Shelby’s advice for some best practices!

Consumer Data Capture in Practice: The Flower Shop

The Flower Shop runs in-the-field brand activations 3-5 times per week to expand their marketable database and collect consumer feedback to evolve their product and packaging. With several wholesale brands underway, they need to consider each specific consumer demographic and how best to target them.

TFS used AnyRoad’s flexible data capture tools, like contactless QR codes and mobile registration, to gather first-party data on-site through sweepstakes, product giveaways, and VIP launches.

The team specifically focused on gathering:

• competitive intelligence
• shopping habits 
• zip codes

These data points were chosen after careful consideration because they had the unique ability to help with TFS’ wholesale strategy and empowered them to adjust their activations in real time for new locations, event sponsorships, and media buying.

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2. Measure Impact

When you go to measure the impact of your events, how are you gathering those metrics? With the right technology, it’s not as hard to send out a post-experience survey where you can ask for a net promoter rating, feedback, and more. Remember step one? This is where getting all that data about your consumers comes into play. 

Your brand’s and experience goals should be measurable within the scope of your data and provable. Typically, this might involve some marketing math, estimations, or maybe a backflip or two. But when you focus on impact measurement tech improvement, you can make a business case for your experiences and show how your efforts impacted the brand.

Measuring your impact is vital to understand how your efforts resonated with your goals. This includes:

• Net promoter scores
• Feedback
• Marketing Opt-Ins
• Database growth
• Additional Ticket Revenue
• And more

Tech for this step includes:

• Marketing opt-in follow-up email and survey
• Real-time database updates
• Online booking software with add-on ability
• A 24-hour follow-up survey email/SMS messaging
• A 6-month follow-up survey email/SMS messaging

Impact Measurement in Practice: The Flower Shop

“We spend a lot of time and money on activations and never had a way to measure ROI. AnyRoad has helped guide our activation planning, grow our email database, and measure conversion while managing the budget for multiple brands.” - Todd Grobstein, Vice President of Marketing

To measure their field activation strategy's total impact and return, The Flower Shop tracks the total number and value of consumer opt-ins they generate across all brand activations. This allows them to compare the returns with the costs and investments in their brand activation strategy to calculate their ROI. 

Example:

Retail data shows the lifetime value (LTV) of a cannabis customer is approximately $7,000.

Let’s now make a conservative estimate that with our brand activation strategy combined with your digital marketing efforts, we can turn 3% of consumers who opt into our marketing list into paying customers. 

With these figures, we can calculate the value of each marketing opt-in. 

[$7,000 customer LTV] * [3% customer conversion rate] = $210 value per marketing opt-in

The Flower Shop generates approximately 100 new marketing opt-ins per brand activation.

If we apply the estimates above to The Flower Shop, we can calculate the average return of each brand activation.

[100 new opt-ins] * $210 value of marketing opt-ins = $21,000 return

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3. Generate Insights and Results

Finally, taking all that data you’ve collected and finding trends and patterns might seem impossible. That is unless you’re willing to invest in endless manual hours of data aggregation and analysis.

The first two steps of this process can help build your strategy and make planning easier, but for longer-term growth and scaling, generating insights and results through analytics tech and AI can save time and create a larger understanding of how your experiences affect your brand’s goals.  

With the right tools at your fingertips, you can easily find:

• what’s working in real-time for immediate adjustments
• map consumer demographics for targeted marketing spender
• calculate ROI for a fuller picture of your results
• trends, patterns, and areas of improvement from seeing your overall benchmarks laid out over time 

For step three, the tools can include:

• Real-time results dashboard
• Reports and data integrations
• AI-powered feedback analysis

Generating Impact and Results in Practice: The Flower Shop

Back to our running example brand, The Flower Shop. The Flower Shop could test and improve their efforts once their chosen tech, AnyRoad, was in place. Measuring and evolving their activation scale became easier. 

For example, with their zip code aggregation, they learned key trends and AI feedback patterns about how their consumers discovered their offerings. With that information, they scaled their strategy to increase and adjust activation locations, event sponsorships, and overall out-of-home (OOH) media buying.

The Flower Shop was finally able to grow their confidence and certainty with their wholesale brand awareness campaigns and even full expansion into new retail locations.

The Whole Picture

Following The Flower Shop’s example, it’s clear that improving each phase of your experience IT game can help you win the activation season. You can use improved experience IT and an experiential marketing all-in-one platform to:

• Improve your database
• Make more accurate spend decisions
• Justify your marketing efforts and strategy
• Understand where your attendees are coming from and what they care about
• Prove and improve your return on investment 
• And more!

If you want to see the full picture, here’s how TFS’s strategy looks like laid out:

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Are you ready for online booking software and more? See where you land and find out how ready you are for tech in our blog, How Do You Pick The Right Online Booking System for Event Marketing?

DISCLAIMER: The products referred to in this study may contain cannabis, a schedule 1 controlled substance. The possession, cultivation and distribution of cannabis is prohibited under US federal law. Keep all cannabis and cannabis products out of reach of children and animals. Intoxicating effects of cannabis and cannabis products may be delayed up to two (2) hours. Use of cannabis while pregnant or breastfeeding may be harmful. Consumption of cannabis and cannabis products impairs your ability to drive and operate machinery, please use extreme caution.

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