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You’re busy, we’re busy. We get it. So here’s ‘Self-Care for Experiences: How To Give Your Events a Spa Treatment’ in four sentences or less:

When you focus on your experiential data, you can learn specifics about improving a stagnating strategy or not seeing any further improvement. You can discover actionable and provable ways forward when you pay attention to:

• Demographic Shifts in Interests
• Geographic Data
• Attendee Feedback

Dig In Deeper

Even with careful planning and precise execution, events lose their effectiveness all the time and performance decay happens to the best of us. But the decay can feel personal when the strategy you’ve spent months and months planning stops performing the way it used to. 

It feels like defeat. 

And like many experiential marketers, you burn yourself out trying to get performance back on track, throwing spaghetti at the wall, nervous that your stakeholders are losing patience. 

The next thing you know, you’re exhausted, and your self-worth depends on success, so you eventually want to scrap your plan altogether and start from the beginning. 

Rather than starting all over, there are ways to refresh your stale experiences in small, incremental ways to rejuvenate not just your strategy but also your confidence in what you’re delivering. 

In fact, refreshing your experiences might be easier than you think. You probably already have all the tools you need. We’re talking about helpful information like:

• Demographic Shifts in Interests
• Geographic Data
• Attendee Feedback
• And more you might not have thought of.

Where Does the Stress Come From?

Experiential marketing, whether hosting owned events, sponsoring third-party events, or inviting consumers into your brand homes, is becoming a huge strategic piece of the marketing puzzle. 

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But as anyone who has planned events knows, experiential can require quite an investment, and typically, the greater the investment, the more eyes you'll have on performance. 

That's where the stress comes into play. If your events aren't consistently performing, there's always the risk that the budget will be shifted from experiential to other marketing channels.

Why?

Continued success is vital for your performance, your team's health, and continued budgetary buy-in. But with so many marketing teams missing key resources that affect growth, like headcount, platforms, and bandwidth, you’re under pressure to perform with what you already have.

Why Events Have A Shelf Life

Events and brand experiences eventually run their course. There’s nothing wrong with what you’ve planned and executed; it’s the nature of experiential marketing. 

When your success revolves around emotional connection and memory, you slowly begin to lose impact after a period of great attendance, revenue building, data capture, and more. 

There are a few reasons for this downward (or static) trajectory:

• Your industry is seeing a demographic shift toward new interests
• Repetition has faded the event’s emotional potency
• The places you’ve targeted for your experiences have been targeted too many times to continue growth
• There’s been changes in the way consumers want to engage
• Industry trends have moved towards what’s popular at the moment in a new way

Keep Up With What Your Audience Cares About

Understanding your audience is what led you to success in the first place. But people change, and it stands to reason that your target demographic is always growing and learning, too. It always helps to check in and make sure your consumer understanding is still accurate or where it shifted to.

When you research changes to audience interests, you can tweak your experiences to accommodate your new information. 

Interests & Trends

What’s trendy and trending changes fast in our 24/7 digital world. If you’re not updating and monitoring what’s popular for your target demographic, you might miss out on the next big thing and risk having your experiences feel old or outdated to the very people you’re trying to reach.

Worries & Concerns

Between news broadcasts, shifting economies, and personal woes, we’re always worried about something new any given day. If your brand’s products help your consumers with their daily problems, maybe it’s time to consider if those concerns have shifted. It may even be that they no longer care about an issue that mattered to them a month ago. 

New Life Phase

Each decade of life brings about some kind of realization or life change. Whether going to college, starting a family, or retiring, there is always a transition period. If your events are losing their potency, it might be that your target demographic is not in the same mindset as when you started the strategy. Understanding the big events in your target demographic’s lives will help you re-vitalize your experiential strategy.

Manicure Your Audience’s Advice

Without the resources to buy fancy demographic studies or annual reports from data agencies, many experiential teams feel unprepared to meet their consumers' needs in the long run. That proven (and bought) audience understanding is vital for better marketing, more targeted messaging, and personalized experiences.

But in reality, the current state of experiential marketing reveals a secret weapon.

With so much tech involved in our day-to-day lives, you might have more to work with than you think.

Geographic Info

Are you capturing your attendee’s geographic information? Where your attendees are coming from can give you a lot of context for your ideal crowds, like cultural specifics that might differ from what you’ve been working on within your strategy. Even better, those geographic patterns can show you where your event could travel next, refreshing your strategy through new locations that haven’t experienced your brand yet.

Feedback

Take a look at reviews and feedback form responses, and pull out repeating topics. Those are the keys to what’s going well that you should increase your focus on and what pieces are opportunities for improvement. When your actual attendees tell you their opinions, it’s a good idea to listen. It can make the difference between stasis and success.

If you’re not already collecting feedback, this is also a great way to explore why your events aren’t working.

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Meditate On That

Your worth isn’t dependent on your success, but it can still affect your mental health when the event you worked hard on stops performing as needed. 

When you focus on specific pieces of your experiential data, you can figure out what kind of improvements you can make in a specific and actionable way. Those pieces include:

• Demographic Shifts in Interests
• Geographic Data
• Attendee Feedback
• And more you might not have thought of.

So, let’s all grab some soothing lavender candles and start healing our inner experiential strategist.