Measuring the success of your field marketing is one of the essential steps for creating strong, effective campaigns. But knowing how to measure those metrics accurately can be daunting if you need help figuring out where to start.
Luckily, we've got some tips on gathering data to assess performance and maximize your field marketing efforts—read on for more! We’ll teach you how to:
- Identify your key stakeholders
- Measure your impact
- Use your data to make your efforts go farther
Get the guide to building a first-party data strategy for your field marketing!
What’s field marketing?
Marketing experiences, or ‘field marketing,’ is a marketing strategy that directly engages customers, encouraging them to interact and be involved with a brand or brand experience. It can look like a brand home, pop-up, and even classes.
It’s a powerful part of your marketing campaigns that increases brand awareness. Knowing who your customers are is essential, driving more impactful engagement with your brand, and increasing their lifetime value.
Who’s involved, and what do they care about?
When you begin measuring your marketing experiences, you should consider your metrics and what metrics your stakeholders will care the most about. It’s all well and good to zero in on your top-of-funnel leads, but that’s not what operations or leadership cares about as much.
So here’s a breakdown of who you should communicate with and what they often care about to understand better and make a continued case for your field marketing.
Field Marketing KPIs for Heads of Marketing and your CMO
This is your team, but it doesn’t mean you'll all align. Consider these metrics when talking to your CMO or the heads of your different marketing departments about how you’re measuring your experiential events.
Here are the metrics marketing leaders care about:
Conversion Rates
This is a bottom-of-the-funnel metric that many marketing teams struggle with. Warming a customer enough from initial brand engagement to purchase can be challenging, and many brands seek different ways to drive that conversion. Field marketing can create a higher conversion rate for your customers, so consider using it as part of your KPIs (key performance indicators).
How to measure conversion rates:
# of buyers (or who take your desired action) / attendees or ad interactions = conversion rate
Marketing Qualified Leads
You probably know what these are if you’ve worked in Marketing for a bit. Marketing Qualified Leads, or ‘MQLs,’ are the leads you get when someone willingly gives you their information to learn more about your company. Often these are considered ‘inbound leads’ and markers for your marketing pipeline's success and effectiveness.
How to measure marketing qualified leads:
Measure MQLs through the number of forms fills or QR code scans to enroll in your event, minus those that don’t match your targeted audience or use case.
Field Marketing KPIs for Heads of Operations and your COO
If you’re not on the Operations team, figuring out how to showcase value with this group can be tricky. They measure for different needs than a traditional marketing department, so knowing what they care about will help you.
Customer Lifetime Value
The customer lifetime value (LTV) is a longer shot than immediate purchases. For brand homes like breweries and distilleries, this could look like how much a customer spends on your brand, from tour ticket revenue to merchandise and bottle sales.
For retail and other industries, this looks like how much the customer spends over time with your brand and how long they continue to purchase from you.
Field marketing is vital for increasing how much a customer spends with you over long periods. Brands like Absolut found that experiential marketing increased their average guest revenue by 36% over time.
How to measure customer lifetime value:
Customer Value x Average Customer Lifetime = Customer Lifetime Value
Return on Investment
Calculating a return on investment (ROI) is necessary to justify your budget and show if your field marketing is worth investing in for the future. It also can help measure which areas you may be spending too much on for the return and which could use even further budget boosts. When you measure through cash flow, you can more accurately zoom in on what finance and operations care about.
How to measure return on investment (ROI):
(Net income from each potential customer / cost of acquisition) x 100 = ROI
Field Marketing KPIs for Everyone
There are some key performance indicators for your experiential events that make everyone happy, from leadership to associates. These are more general but necessary to ensure your experiential strategy is aligned with your company’s larger mission. So always consider the following indicators when presenting your findings or measuring your experience.
Brand Conversion Rate
This metric captures not just your static net promoter score but the sentiment growth of the field marketing itself. It’s a more three-dimensional way of viewing your data, requiring measuring sentiment before and after the event. Brand conversation rate tells you how your event has changed the perception of your brand and whether or not it impacts buyer behavior.
Net Promoter Score
According to Gartner, NPS measures whether customers would recommend a company to a peer based on the question, “How likely is it that you would recommend our offering (product, service, or company) to a friend or colleague?” The NPS score is on a scale of 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely).
Measuring this is a great way to understand where you currently are with your customers. Curious about what questions to ask for better data? Here are a few we recommend:
Pre-Experience Top Questions
- How did you hear about the experience?
- Have you tried [BRAND] before this experience?
- How often do you buy [BRAND]?
For more, we wrote a quick blog on the WHY of an NPS score and even more questions to ask.
North Star Alignment
You have your goals for the quarter of the year, but think about how this experiential marketing strategy ladders to the larger goal — your team’s north star. Whether that’s increased revenue or more Marketing-Qualified Leads in a new vertical, you need to be sure your marketing overall aligns with that larger goal.
https://youtu.be/c4vBxvBnvMQ
Use data to improve your field marketing, not just measure it
There’s more to data than judging your field marketing efforts' effectiveness. Going deeper than numbers, with data like feedback and benchmarking, can give you more insight into your areas of improvement and how to fix them. Testing new products or experiences can be the key to success if you correctly measure their impact.
Feedback Loops
Asking basic questions for demographics and more tracks who’s coming through the door and where they came from. Still, it’s another thing to discover why they enjoyed or didn’t enjoy your campaign. Customer feedback is vital for any industry, especially for brand homes and field marketing.
That brand conversion rate gives excellent insights into how your experience changed brand perception, and asking for feedback after the event will help you determine why. From there, you can build an entirely new strategy with learnings and insights from the customers themselves, making your ROI and customer LTV metrics more reliable and improved.
Benchmarking
A good industry average, like the benchmark tour data in our ticket revenue calculator, helps you determine whether your event was successful from a larger perspective. By collecting your benchmarks, you can measure how your newest experience stacks up against past ones.
Once you have a proper benchmark collected from your experience analytics, you can better hone in on your other KPIs when projecting success and budget. Even using industry standards versus. When starting your field marketing, your own can give you a sense of where you need to be for success and how to measure your outcomes correctly.
Ready to measure your field marketing?
Measuring the success of your field marketing is essential to continue providing solid and effective campaigns. By taking the time to identify your key stakeholders and measure your impact, you can use your data to improve future campaigns.
Are you seeking more guidance on gathering customer data and why it’s important? Our team sat down with brand superstar Diageo to talk about how their field marketing measures up and how they make their moments powerful.
