Say you converted 12% of your leads from your experiential marketing last year, do you consider that a win?  It's hard to say if you were successful without knowing how the industry performs.  Data is "need to know" and benchmarking provides key information that every event marketer needs to make informed decisions.

What Metrics Are Most Important to Your Team?

If you can't compare your event marketing program's success against your industry then you are missing a big opportunity. Benchmarking provides key data to not only review your program but also to plan for the future or to make informed, real-time program changes.  The following areas are just a sample of the possible benchmark metrics that can be available to your team:

Consumers Engaged

Opt-In Rate

Consumer Follow-up

Viral Social Media Sharing

Lead Scoring

Net Promoter Score

Click-Through Rate for email follow up

Don't you agree that having access to internal and industry benchmarking for data points like this would give you an upper hand on your competition?

Competitive Position

Did your event program successfully convert consumers at a higher percentage than your competitors? Did your photo marketing event team engage fewer or more consumers than your top competitors at similar events?  Answers to questions like these provide great insights into your competitive position; don't ignore industry data when judging your campaigns.

A/B Testing

If you want to increase your consumer engagement across your entire campaign, you should be testing multiple variations of your activation.  Benchmarking each activation against not only your own events, but your industry as a whole you can gain valuable, quantifiable data to help you make more informed decisions.

Identify Your Leverage Points

By using data from your A/B testing you can determine areas where you can leverage your strengths to gain share over your competitors.  Did a particular technology increase your consumer participation? Did a particular event day activity, which only your company is offering increase your success? By identifying your strengths early you have a better chance to affect your overall program success.

Is Your Event Staff Falling Short?

By benchmarking against your own individual events and against other industry rivals you can determine if certain event activation teams aren't performing.  If one team is consistently averaging between 130-150 engaged consumers per event and another is only in the 50-70 range, it is a big indicator that on-site performance is down.  Insights like this give you the chance to fix critical errors before they become bigger, program-wide problems.

Planning for the Future

By benchmarking your data over time it will become easier to accurately forecast your projections. Long-term planning based on accurate internal and industry benchmarks gives you more reliable projections than using your own historical data alone.  Additionally, event attendance is not always consistent but being able to match your forecasts against industry data helps you validate your own forecasts.

Day-to-Day Tweaking

Seeing the trends across the industry give you the agility to make subtle or dramatic program-wide changes from day to day.  Have you noticed that your green-screen photo marketing tech has stopped compelling consumers to share via Facebook and Twitter and now you're social media sharing is behind your competitors? Quick access to this information allows you to make on-the-fly changes to improve your program.

Review, Adjust and Succeed

It should be clear now that having access to all this data will give you the unprecedented ability to review and adjust your event or experiential marketing programs.  Knowing exactly where you stack up to your industry's averages mean better planning, modifying and forecasting.  If you practice event marketing, make sure you have all the tools you need to make the most informed decisions possible.

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