Mastering Experiential Data Intelligence: Part 2

Experiential, Retail and Event Marketing creates rich opportunities to gather data on your customers. In our last post we helped break down the five categories of data you can gather from experiential marketing. In this post, we’ll help you understand how to move from raw data to actionable insights. 

The first step in achieving a level of genuine intelligence from your experiential marketing is to set up the systems to manage the data. Opt-in data gathered during event registration; behaviour data tracked during a live event; social media data generated as a result of the event — all of it should be funnelled into a database that lets you study outcomes in one place. We created the customisable Quander Dashboard to be that solution for our clients. Your dashboard should surface key performance indicators that you know you want to track from a brand experience. Things like how many people were engaged or what aspects of the event were most popular. If linked with an EPOS system, it’s even possible to capture how much revenue was generated at the venue. 

The possibilities for data intelligence are endless, but here’s a few examples from our clients.

How often have you been in a meeting sharing performance data on some kind of marketing effort and had someone ask, “So… is that good?” It’s all relative until you have something to compare it to. By collecting data on your brand experiences over time, you can start to see trends that indicate what’s working, or what’s maybe not. 

Our clients at Sky worked with us on the Game of Thrones retail tour and saw per-day traffic grow year over year. Knowing that interest and reach were growing, they were confident re-investing in the experience. We recently successfully executed a fourth annual tour.

Don’t want to wait a year to act on performance data? Real time insight and optimisation is also possible. 

We’ve had clients offer up multiple content options to customers for things like photo booths, green screens and video experiences and then tracked which content is getting the most downloads. It’s helped clients understand things like which celebrities or sports teams are most liked among fans, or simply which branded content is most appealing so they can focus on the good stuff.

With WiFi tracking within retail or event venues, we can track attendees’ movements in real time. It’s possible to view footfall data, heatmaps of what is drawing the most attention, and dwell time data that shows how long people linger.

Clients have been able to use this traffic data to adjust staff to cover busy hours. Others have learned what aspects of a brand environment — certain experiences or certain showroom products — are garnering the most attention and applied that knowledge to optimise future events.

Capturing photo and video content at events is not only fun for customers, it leaves clients with a treasure trove of images that show the joy they’ve delivered to attendees.

But photos are also a tremendous source of data on who’s engaging with your brand. The latest technology can automatically read photos from your experiences and give you a profile of age and gender. And by capturing that data, you can segment to find trends in who you’re reaching from one event or experience to the next.

Once you get all the customer data working together, it’s possible to make your re-contacting efforts more tailored and effective. Personalise emails based on which elements people engaged with at your event, what photo or video content they chose, or demographic and personal data you collected. Then watch your email open and click rates improve!

Our Quander Mobile app enabled the National Basketball Association to re-contact attendees from their touring NBA Fan Zone event with e-mails customised to the attendee’s local language and featuring an image from their local event, making the message more relevant for the recipient. 

Capturing data with event marketing is easier than ever with today’s digital technology. But capturing data is only half the challenge. You need a system to organise and analyse so that you can harness true insight — not just piles of numbers — and be able to take action that grows your business.

Contact us to get a tour of the Quander Dashboard and to learn more about the possibilities of our Cloud API.