Experiential marketing, very often, is measurable in the best ways – the normal question, therefore, erupts are all parts of experiential marketing truly measurable or quantifiable in terms of ROI? Whether it’s the little memories that it creates or more, what exactly is the appropriate measure of ROI in experiential marketing campaigns, and what defines their success?
Involving Aparajita Parashar, Founder, Made of Honour Weddings and Events and Naveen Gupta, Co-founder, Spalba in a panel discussion with Shantanu David, Senior Correspondent, exchange4media group as moderator spoke to them about the metrics of measuring ROI of experiential marketing campaigns and what it means for them.
Intangible Measures
Parashar is of the view that coming from a creative space, sometimes, it gets difficult to quantify where the ROI is coming from. “The nature of the wedding business is very emotional. You're getting somebody's daughter, somebody’s son, married. It gets a little difficult to think and analyse such a categorisation because there are multiple touch points.
The mediums are there like always about how we've been following the methods of categorising, following up, keeping in touch, and recording the footprints and the impressions because it's imperative for the business model. But, with the audience having their own set of fun, I think the measures are intangible. We can do the standard procedure that we do, but we cannot commercialise the wedding. In some cases, we're not even allowed to touch base with the guests who have come in at the wedding. So the nature of business stays very emotional.”
Measuring ROI from the backend
Gupta, though, has a different perspective, “As the tech founder of an event tech platform and marketplace, there are very less times where the ROI is being calculated from our side. We do a lot of stuff, but a lot of ROI is being calculated on the client side. And it is very rare that we, as an agency, get to know about the success of the event, the various parameters of calculating and measuring its success.”
He spells out the example of exhibiting an event in Singapore - and after the event, he came to know that the client had asked its social media agency to come out with a score. The client informed Gupta that the event was a success based on the score of the social media agency. He brought out that there are a lot of times wherein the clients are working in the back end but they are unaware of it from scanning QR codes, sending them emails, receiving their feedback etc, attendee attendance is measured and the feedback is made known to the client. They understand, analyse and calculate whether they were more successful.
“Data is the new oil, they say. But sometimes you cannot use it. The likes of HubSpot, aren’t available. Having worked with the biggest tech companies, I am aware that you cannot take any data stores at any of the events because there's something called personal identifiable information (PII) which the government doesn't want the companies to use. As a company, they cannot use that data.”
Talking at the exchange4media Red Carpet Experiential Marketing Summit 2024 which took place on 27 December, 2024 at the Eros Hotel in the capital, from discussing getting would-be couples to engage in interesting experiential marketing activities for their choice of colour and style palettes, to using AI in experiential designing – the panel concluded on an interesting note.
