Data is only as powerful as the insights you discover.
It’s important to understand the DNA of communities, understanding their trends, their people, and understanding what influencers are there. It’s absolutely critical to understand the trends and movement of the community, as this DNA continues to evolve. We have to learn and understand how these people are moved in a microscopic sense and event data will help us reveal those very details.
By their very nature as events, these engagements generate reams of invaluable data points on attendee behavior and event effectiveness. Every action and lack there of is valuable as information. What they say, what they do, where they go, that is transforming experiential marketing.
Great events will generate deep and rich information on every aspect of your attendee’s behavior. Technology today can paint a very thorough picture of what kind of engagement went on throughout the duration of your event and what kind of return it delivered to your bottom line.
So what sort of data can we expect to see from experiential marketing activations?
Technical Data
Technical Data comprises basic performance indicators such as popularity, impressions and usage.
With theses data points you can answer the fundamental question: Did they notice? An example of a technical data report may include social media impressions.
1.) Popularity
2.) Impressions generated from social media
3.) Usage Duration
In this example at the Fender play activation, we could use data to keep track of an individual guest’s time spent playing guitar, or how many people played the guitar? Was there a guitar that was more popular than the other?
Fender Play Experiential Activation
Behavioral Data
This data related more closely to your attendees. Providing tangible evidence of engagement, influence and opinion. It helps evaluate your product or service’s influence on attendees, and serves as a proxy for overall event performance. This more sophisticated level of data helps assess achievement of the event and stakeholder objectives. The scope and depth of this data far outweighs any other type of event data you could hope to gather by other means.
1.) Rankings of the most influential, active people at your event
2.) What people think of the sessions, the speakers or anything else
3.) What people think about products or services and details within
Knowing what interests your audience will hep you better understand their preferences as you follow up and plan the next event. By analyzing the level of engagement on a product-by-product basis we can help understand what people think of certain products. For example, at this Cotton/Rue La La Pop-Up Shop, we can help understand trends among styles by looking at how guests are engaging with them individually.
Cotton Pop-Up Shop in Boston, MA
Contextual Data
With both technical and behavioral data, you will have everything you need to measure the impact of your event. In order to truly measure how the event impacts your business you will need to include data from other external sources such as customer relationship management (CRM), or learning management systems (LMS). By aggregating the data from all sources will paint the complete picture.
-Whats the return on investment for any one event?
-Whats your return over the course of all events?
-What was the difference from before and after with regard to the business or customer?
-Has any Technical or behavioral data improved since your activation?
Event Data in Action:
When companies build on event data, they can accelerate their businesses in ways that weren’t possible before.
-Anticipate what users will need and take the product in the right direction by using event data to improve the guest experience
-Provides deep reporting and quantify ROI for the event
-Analyze which events perform better than others by venue, city, event & activation type, demographic, and help you to run the most efficient event strategy possible, without the guessing.
Teva Brand Activation at Bonnaroo in Nashville, TN
So what platforms are companies using to capture data on events?
There are a variety of options to gather data about events. Typically events are comprised of several individual components which can be measured differently. Sometimes one platform may do the job, and sometimes several, it really just depends on the insight you’re looking for.
Social media has become a focal point for brands and marketers online and many companies are being discussed by endless users. This provides the perfect platform for being able
#1 NUVI.com
Nuvi provides a great platform for being able to capture sentiment analysis, impressions, demographics, influencer analysis, reporting tools that show you trending topics, virality, competition, and location.
#2 Keen.io – Event Data Platform APIs
Keen.io allows event marketers and developers to create their own unique data capture opportunities through existing apps, websites and internet of things devices. Developers can weave keen.io into their projects as needed to capture rich data insight on a variety of topics relating to: publisher analytics, iot, gaming, e-commerce and retail, and b2b.
#3 Minter.io
Minter is great for Instagram analysis. It gives you just the information you need. It’s not dressed up, it’s not giving you fluff, just the essentials.
#4 Exposure
Exposure actually places physical IOT wifi beacons around the event space to track foot traffic, flow and potential friction in your event space. They also include a really cool dashboard to help visualize this data.
There are a lot more options for capturing data from events it really just depends on the type of data that you’re looking to capture. These are simply a couple options that we have found useful. If you have some that you would like us to add, comment below!
If you’ve got questions about event metrics, or event analytics contact BeCore today! We’d love to partner with you!