Brands constantly seek new and effective ways to engage with and expand their audiences. Traditional advertising and marketing strategies are losing steam, and companies are shifting towards brand activations to create memorable experiences. So, what is brand activation? Brand activation is a campaign, event, or experience that creates awareness, cultivates lasting relationships, and leads to sales. Time, creativity, and preparation go into creating powerful brand activations. However, many companies still need to learn how to measure the success of their brand activation strategy. Measuring success is critical to reaching your goals, and we at Hamilton want to clear up the mystery. This guide outlines the qualitative and quantitative metrics used to measure brand activation success.
How many existing and future consumers do you intend to reach with your brand activation? Are you looking to create an exclusive, intimate experience? Or do you want to generate a crowd? Define the number of engagements you hope to receive. Keep count during the activation to monitor progress, reflect upon the factors that may impact turnout, and use this information to define your degree of success.
Understanding the number of engagements each brand representative holds throughout the event provides insight into the impact of your outreach efforts. If some brand representatives generate more engagements than others, explore the differences in their approaches and build upon the successful techniques. Make sure to establish measurement criteria, ensuring your data is consistent and productive.
While it is often important to draw a crowd, your audience must be composed of individuals who care about your brand. Measuring the conversion ratio will provide you with insight into the percentage of engagements that are qualified leads. These numbers will help you understand how your activation reached your target audience.
Brand sentiment is how consumers feel about your brand, which is an essential qualitative factor to measure as it directly relates to sales. If an activation makes a positive impression and generates positive emotions, participants are likelier to purchase and recommend the brands to friends and family. Measure brand sentiment, and other qualitative factors, through surveys, interviews, and focus groups.
Brand awareness is the extent to which consumers are familiar with your products or services. The more hype and buzz you generate, your brand awareness will increase. Measure brand awareness to understand the scope of your brand’s reach. Assess awareness before, during, and after the event and consider further segmenting based on population, geographic area, or other demographics.
Social media coverage is a powerful indicator of brand perception and relevancy. Collect data on the number of people who use your branded hashtag, the new followers you gain, and the number of times your brand is mentioned online. This information provides insights into trends, word-of-mouth marketing, and overall brand impact in the social sphere.
Return on investment (ROI) is a top priority for branded events and entails driving sales. However, for brand activations, the emphasis is more on the return on experience (ROE), which is more challenging to measure. An increase in sales directly related to brand activation is a strong indicator of success, but ROE involves more nuance. To determine your ROE, review the product sales before, during, and after the activation. Measure the product samples during the activation, and total the number of new and returning customer purchases.
These days the best way to measure success is with the help of advanced digital tools. Regarding brand activations, success, and lead generation go hand in hand. Hamilton inSIGHT is our proprietary lead capture solution designed to capture qualifying information from every booth visitor on your own device, regardless of where they are engaged in the booth. It includes the same badge scanning and survey qualifiers as show-provided lead retrieval, plus key differentiators such as compatibility across all mobile devices, branding opportunities, on-demand reporting dashboard, lead scoring, text alerts, image capture, in-booth engagement integration, custom CRM formatting, and voice-to-text notes.
To take your brand activation to the next level, contact Hamilton today.