With a great product and some exciting ideas for promotion, you’re unstoppable, right? We beg to differ. Successful event marketing and business building begin with having a marketing strategy. A solid strategy is based on as much valid data as you can get your hands on. The alternative would be like driving in the dark with the car lights off.
We spoke with Brad Wirz, an experiential industry expert for 30 years and co-founder of Encore Worldwide, about what makes event marketing successful and how data could make or break your event. Below are the insights Brad shared with us.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Why Good Data Matters
Good data enables you to make good decisions. Without being able to base your decisions on facts, you are relying solely on intuition. Intuition is not a bad thing, but it is much more powerful when backed up by data. Utilizing that data is when marketers and executives gain true insight.
Moreover, Following the data helps you understand your market better than intuition could have. Successful marketers follow similar steps for each new opportunity (or strategy) they are working on. They start with the customer and consider a range of third-party sources to learn everything there is to know about the customers they would like to attract.
Targeting with Data
In many cases, if you are working in an agency environment, your client will tell you who they want to reach. For the past few years, millennials have been the customer group countless brands want to target. However, that is quite a generic directive and perhaps not the best basis from which to build a marketing strategy.
When you are researching your target customers and target audiences, look for counterintuitive things. Once you identify results that you could not have guessed, data really comes into its own. These are the moments when millennials become narrowed down to new homeowners. In turn, many new homeowners are first-time parents.
As a marketer, you now have a niche market that you can target more efficiently. As a result, your marketing strategy can be much more customized, and your budget will stretch further.
(You can listen to the full episode of the podcast below.)
How Do You Measure Experiences?
For decades, marketing circles have debated how to measure success. Events and experiences are no exception. How do you put a value on enjoyment?
Let’s be honest, with the technology available to marketers today, anything can be measured. The question is how complicated measuring is, which directly affects the cost of the measurement. Good quality data is worth paying for because it allows you to make decisions based on fact rather than intuition.
Return On Investment (ROI) And Impact
Two key measurements are the ROI your campaign generated and the impact it has had on your potential new clients.
ROI is a measure that everyone in your organization’s or your client’s executive leadership team understands. Being able to show how much income an event or experience generated is the safest path to an increased budget for the following year.
When you measure the impact an initiative has had on your potential customers, look both ways. The impact can be positive or negative. Event impressions are a great starting point, but more detailed data allows you to see whether your work has actually changed customer behavior.
Resist Cost Cutting
Even today, the budget allocated to measuring the impact and ROI of marketing is cut first. Despite clients being excited about the potential to measure exactly how well their campaign performed, many decide to take out the budget set aside for measurement.
Here is the problem: without gathering data about the performance of your campaign or your entire marketing strategy, you will never know exactly what worked and what didn’t. You are back to relying on intuition.
In our next post, we will continue our discussion with Brad Wirz, tackling how data has changed the landscape of event marketing and sponsorship. For more information on Encore Worldwide visit their website at www.encoreww.com.
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