Experiential and Live Events | Exposure Analytics

Slide 1

Experiential & Live Events

Experiential events can be extremely impactful for all kinds of organisations. Discover how our products can assist you at every stage of your experiential event, including measuring its success and gathering data on your visitors.

Exposure Analytics is a leading provider of event analytics solutions, especially when it comes to experiential marketing and live events. Experiential marketing is a lucrative avenue that can boost brand awareness and improve relationships between a brand and its customers.

Measuring performance at such events has never been easier with Exposure Analytics’ wide range of tools that collect unique data and provide useful insights.

We understand how important it is for your marketing to measure metrics such as footfall and engagement during experiential campaigns, which is why you can count on Exposure Analytics and our products to help you.

What Is Experiential Marketing?

Experiential marketing, also sometimes referred to as engagement marketing or live marketing, is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating an interactive experience for customers. In other words, this type of marketing sees a consumer being encouraged to engage with brands or the product, connecting the consumer with the brand.

Experiential marketing is commonly used to drive events, with a survey finding that 29% of marketers regularly use it for campaigns – of which 51% consider it to be the second most effective marketing tool.

So, what are some examples of experiential marketing?

Conferences

Conferences – regardless of whether that’s B2B or B2C conferences – are a form of experiential marketing. In particular, conferences bring people with similar interests together, giving them the opportunity to talk and listen to industry peers. At conferences, you can learn and network with others, including potential customers and industry experts.

Pop-up Stores

Pop-up stores may last days to weeks and act as temporary storefronts for your brand. For brands who may only have an online presence, they can utilise pop-up stores to trial a physical retail space.

Meanwhile, pop-up stores can also be used as a promotional ploy to attract new customers at locations away from main storefronts.

Product Demos

Product demonstrations, or product demos, are another type of experiential marketing, where a brand, usually a sales representative, highlights the value of a product and how it works to potential customers.

This type of marketing introduces the product to customers who may have otherwise not seen it before or understood its features, positioning the product as the most effective solution to the audiences’ pain points.

Why Experiential Marketing Is Important

Research has shown that consumer expenditure on experiences instead of material goods leads to happier consumers. This is because lasting memories and impressions of experiences provide stronger feelings of satisfaction, whereas these feelings don’t last long after buying material goods.

This shows the significance of experiences in today’s society, which can be termed as an ‘experience economy’, where experiences are dominating the consumption space. As a result, experiential marketing campaigns are becoming increasingly prominent – and justifyingly so.

Why wouldn’t you want to maximise your profits with experiences since that is what’s in demand by consumers?

Experiential marketing is undoubtedly an excellent way to create memorable experiences for customers. At the end of the day, we’re all humans who are intrinsically emotional beings – and you will most likely foster loyal relationships between your brand and customers if the customers feel connected to your brand.

An experiential marketing strategy goes above and beyond traditional marketing – you’re not simply selling products and services to a customer, you involve them in your brand’s story and make them feel like they’re a part of your brand on a personal level.

There are numerous advantages to experiential marketing that make it a gold mine for any marketing team. These include:

Clear Communications with Customers

There is an apparent disconnect between customers and conventional methods of marketing where customers are simply seen as another sale instead of an actual human being. Believe it or not, but customers notice this and are probably less enthusiastic about purchasing from the brand if there’s no human connection.

In particular, marketing campaigns that offer communication with customers do a fantastic job of connecting with customers and relaying the brand message, immersing them in the brand itself. Experiential marketing’s interactivity enables an open dialogue between brand and customer, which is something you can’t experience using other methods.

This is why experiential marketing is also known as participation marketing as it encourages customers to participate in the brand experience. Customers are no longer passive, but active participants with a voice of their own.

Hosting product demos or live events, for example, allows customers to ask questions about aspects of the product or service they’re uncertain about, plus being able to watch how it can be used. In fact, one study found that 65% of consumers reported that such events helped them understand a product’s functions better compared to adverts or other methods.

In addition, sometimes customers just want to be listened to by brands, so if you have the opportunity to allow your customers to engage with your brand and brand representatives, seize it!

Building Deeper and More Personal Relationships

Experiential marketing can help drive conversions, boost brand loyalty and customer retention. Once an emotional connection has been established between brand and customer, you’ll find that these customers become loyal customers due to the bond that has been formed.

Instead of perceiving your brand as just another corporation attempting to make money, loyal customers perceive your brand in a much more positive light, since they feel connected to it on a deeper and personal level. This can encourage them to recommend your brand and its products or services to their friends and family – otherwise known as ‘word of mouth’ referrals and reviews – thus exposing your brand to more potential customers.

By fostering a deeper and more personal relationship with your customers, you’ll receive a loyal customer base in return. Therefore, it’s important to cultivate connections that are genuine and authentic, otherwise customers may see it as fake and disingenuous, deterring them from purchasing from your brand.

In essence, when it comes to successful experiential marketing, you’re attempting to humanise your brand, providing customers with a sense of feeling that they’re simply making a transaction between friends or someone familiar instead of a business.

Creating Memorable and Engaging Brand Experiences

In an advertising landscape where consumers may find ads on every corner, it’s crucial that your brand is able to catch and hold the attention of the target audience. This is where experiential marketing excels, creating memorable experiences that aren’t intrusive, and are ones that your target audience can enjoy.

You can expect to find consumers who are already interested in your brand, products and experience that you’re selling, as an experiential marketing campaign often attracts a specific audience – especially when you consider that these are bespoke experiences made especially for them.

Consumers are demanding more and more personalisation – and, with experiential marketing, you can fulfil this demand. Particularly, experiences that encapsulate your brand’s values lead to a much more effective experiential marketing campaign, as customers are able to associate that experience with your brand.

Not only will you lure in your target audience, but it’s also possible that other members of the audience will feel compelled to engage with your brand simply from genuine interest. This can help improve your brand’s reach and increase brand awareness, which helps with generating sales and profit.

Experiential Marketing vs Traditional and Digital Marketing

There are distinct differences between experiential marketing and traditional or digital marketing that may define which type of marketing strategy your brand would benefit the most from. Whilst an omnichannel approach would certainly give your business a competitive edge, it’s still worth considering the differences between these forms of marketing.

As mentioned previously, experiential marketing focuses on experiences, whereas traditional and digital marketing often use straightforward approaches that simply aim to sell products to the customer. This means that customers are more likely to have an emotional investment when buying products as a result of an experiential marketing campaign, whilst the same may not be said for a traditional and digital one.

Instead of ads in magazines or newspapers, social media ads, or conventional TV ads, of which are all found in traditional and digital marketing strategies, you can expect pop-ups, live events, exhibitions, and other experiences to be part of experiential marketing.

The key difference is that the former opens a one-way communication channel between brand and customer – meanwhile, the latter offers two-way communication, supporting the participation and interaction of the customer.

Why Do You Need Experiential Marketing Software?

When hosting experiential or live events, you’ll want to know key performance indicators (KPIs) such as footfall or attendance rates, which may be useful to know for future business decisions such as finalising the marketing budget and improving return on investment (ROI).

This is made possible with experiential marketing software providers like us. At Exposure Analytics, we supply sensor technology to help you to measure the engagement within your experiential marketing activity.

Our solutions have been used in over 5000 events worldwide by major companies and brands such as Olympia London. We are an award-winning events analytics platform, so you can rest assured that our products are the best in the market for your needs.

Get Clarity on ROI

With Dashboard, you can instantly view the metrics that are currently being recorded during the event, or have already been recorded post-event. This means that you have complete access to live analytics as the event progresses, as well as access to a full report of the total engagement at the event once it has concluded.

Another Exposure Analytics product that can help with this is the Ex Sensor, which counts footfall by detecting smart devices of visitors. With features such as the Ex Sensor Statistics and Conversion Ratio, you can view unique visitor statistics such as the number of engaged visitors and engaged dwell time, as well as analyse conversion rates of visitors becoming engaged from passing.

The insights garnered from these products can provide clarity on performance indicators like ROI, as well as provide guidance on making decisions regarding future experiential marketing such as securing the marketing budget and staffing. Without such technology, it’s far trickier to ascertain the performance of the event.

Improve Your Customer Experience

Exposure Analytics’ solutions, including our popular Apex, do not disturb the experience of your customers during the event, but can actually improve it – both in real time and in the future.

Notably, Apex utilises a stereoscopic 3D sensor that accurately counts footfall – a market-leading product in the events analytics industry. With Apex Occupancy, the number of people in a certain space can be displayed both to you on our platform, and to customers at specific entry points.

Showcasing the live number of people in an area can help prevent overcrowding as it can inform customers that they will have to wait before they’re able to enter that area if the maximum figure has been reached. In turn, this can improve their customer experience during the event as overcrowded rooms may negatively affect their overall experience.

Further expanding on improving experiences, the Ex Sensor’s Ex Sensor Flowchart reports the busiest and most popular routes that visitors take as they move around the event space – this means you’re able to clearly monitor the flow of traffic.

This is especially useful for planning future experiential marketing initiatives when it comes to how a person moves around the venue, and how you can make it easier or more efficient for them to do this.

Understand Your Customers

Our People Co-ordinates product can also assist with traffic, especially as People Co-ordinates can track the movement and behaviour of customers during the event. With this product, you can measure specific interactions and dwell times of customers, seeing whether they’re engaging with your event in the way that the event has been designed for them to.

Whether that’s via a one-way system or other, People Co-ordinates can help you track their movement, which can help you identify how you can optimise your space better for your next event. Again, the Ex Sensor Flowchart can inform how your customers move around, thus you’re able to identify peak traffic times and areas that also can be optimised for future events.

The metrics that are gathered by the end of the event can be analysed to show customer behaviour during the event, of which this analysis can be used to help you gain a better understanding of how your customers interact with your experiential marketing campaigns.

Essentially, knowing how to serve your customers better – thereby investing in the success of your customers – also leads to the success of your brand as it gives them that extra nudge to finalise their decision to purchase products from your brand.

How Exposure Analytics Can Boost Your Experiential Marketing

To optimise future experiential marketing campaigns, you’ll need to obtain key metrics from your experiential and live events, which is where we come in.

We understand the importance of customer experience at these types of events, which is why our solutions provide a seamless experience that doesn’t detract from the immersive experiences that your brand aims to deliver.

In terms of measuring metrics at experiential and live events, our technology at Exposure Analytics can help you do exactly this. Exposure Analytics has supplied event analytic solutions to thousands of global corporations, helping them gain insightful data to inform future business decisions.

Exposure Analytics’ sensor technology is GDPR compliant and adheres to The Data Protection Act 2018 regulations. All data recorded is anonymous and does not identify specific individuals.

Should you have any questions, please feel free to check out our FAQs page for more insight. If the answer you’re looking for isn’t found there, then get in touch with our team – we’re more than happy to assist you with your enquiries.

Gather unique metrics about the movement and engagement of your visitors

We support some of the largest brands – both directly and through agencies – across 35 countries worldwide. Rather than relying on second hand data from the event organisers we can help you demonstrate engagement ratios, visitor dwell times and brand exposure through data that belongs exclusively to you. Our sensor solutions give you data that you can rely on and insights you can act on.

How do we help to measure success for experiential and live events?

Preparation

Our team of analytics experts spend time understanding what our clients want to measure and advising them on other metrics available through our state-of-the-art sensor system.

For clients that are touring experiential and live events in multiple locations around the country, the data gathered from our solutions can help compare different locations to determine which ones can provide optimum footfall and visitor engagement for better results.

Based on the data requirements, our team scopes out which sensors are required to capture the data; we work with our clients to formulate an install plan as well as getting them set up on their events dashboard.

Activation

During experiential and live events, the clients are able to use mobiles and tablets to access their Exposure Analytics dashboard, accessing real time data from the sensors. Based on this data they can adjust their space and staffing to encourage better results. If a client is launching a new product (a car or perfume, for example) and touring with it, our sensors can measure how engaged the audience is at each event location with their new product.

Consolidation

After the event, our clients can conduct more in-depth analysis of the data and join it together with data from other sources at the event (e.g. a market research survey that they have conducted). They can then use the insights gleaned from events to make better decisions and plan changes for future events.

The data can help clients determine the best locations for visitor engagement, as well as identifying which demographics were most engaged with their products and measuring the rate of conversion from passers-by to engaged participants.

Additionally, clients can identify whether the weather conditions had an impact on their event – for example, comparing visitor numbers on a rainy day vs. a sunny day. All this information is invaluable for planning future events and justifying and securing future event budgets.