We’re excited to make our benchmarking database base available to agencies, brands, and industry vendors. This database is comprised of over 200,000 consumer interviews as they exit the event sets from over 75 brands. It tells you exactly how different industries trend, how venues differ, and what you can expect from your next experiential marketing campaign.
The database is results-driven and raw data. Let me take a few minutes here to review what the results-driven database contains.
Understanding Event Engagement Efficiency
We looked carefully at how many people are on-site working an event footprint, for how long, and what the number of engagements was. This allowed us to quantify a “total staffing hours” per event. Add up all the events in the campaign and you have a total campaign hours.
Cross-reference this with the total number of engagements and we’re able to provide you with an average number of engagements per hour of staffing activity. As you’d expect, some things differ based on what you’re doing (e.g., handing out flyers versus wet samples versus dry samples).
Industry Insight: Brand Ambassadors can hand out three times more dry samples than wet samples on average.
Benchmarking Event Impact
There are two key impact metrics we benchmark. The first is purchase intent.
We find that purchase intent will vary based on a number of factors. The consumer’s past experience with the brand is a strong driver of future intent. Those who have never heard of the brand before the event usually have a lower purchase intent than those who have purchased before.
How well the venue selection, time of day, etc. provided event staff with access to the right type of consumer (the consumer who fits the brand’s target) also impacts purchase intent. The nature of the brand itself and how it fits in the regular purchase cycle for the consumer (e.g., bought once a year, twice a week, etc.) will also directly impact purchase intent.
The second key metric is recommended intent. We find that this typically varies with purchase intent and is strong or weak based on the same type of criteria.
It tends to be a bit higher than purchase intent because you aren’t asking those who do not engage the category to buy it. You’re just asking them if they’d recommend that someone else buy it.
If it’s not for them, but they see the value, they’ll recommend it. The exciting thing about benchmarking recommend intent is that it allows us to also benchmark word-of-mouth behavior, which is a key component to understanding how far the reach of your experiential marketing campaign was.
Experiential Marketing ROI Benchmarks
When you have both reach and impact benchmarked, you can derive ROI and see how that trends across industry. This is a piece of information that the industry has lacked for too long.
We’re happy and proud that we can now make this information available to those working in the event marketing and experiential marketing industries. If you are interested in learning more about this benchmarking database, please click here.
Photo Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/teegardin/