Experiential Marketing Today

How do you get the most out of a marketing event? Extend it. If we treat the event as the middle, instead of as the finale, we find new opportunities to reach prospects.

In this episode, we’ll talk about specific ways to extend the reach of events through technology and word of mouth.

Click to Play:

[right-click to download: http://s3.amazonaws.com/xmt-podcast/xmt-007.mp3]

Show Notes

00:00 Introduction

01:51 Experiential Events vs. Traditional Marketing

• EventView 2008: Events provide the highest ROI
• 78% of attendees share their experience with others who did not attend (Word of Mouth!)
• 50% of attendees purchased
• 29% of those influenced by attendees purchased
• No other marketing tool has that kind of power

05:41 Key Performance Indicator: Cost Per Touch (CPT)

• Example: $100,000 event / 1000 attendees = $100 CPT

08:46 Event Impact Zones

• Zone 1: Those attending the event
• Zone 2: Those influenced by attendees shortly after the event
• Zone 3: The residual impact that continues over time

11:23 The Event is the Middle

• Treat the event as the middle of one long continuous engagement
• extend the event backward to the pre-event
• extend it forward to post-event
• Effect: Improve CPT dramatically

15:06 How to Extend the Event

• Get your mind right: 95% of your effort should not go into the event itself
• Don’t “plan the event,” rather “design the experience”
• Use virtual and online to extend forward and backward
• Measurement

24:40 Conclusion

• get help from an experiential agency
• start small

26:21 Resources, Links, Comments

Additional Resources

• Full transcript of episode seven
• New York TImes article: The Vampires are Coming, but Only After Months of Warnings
• EventView 2008 survey
• Experiential Marketing Summit
• AT&T US Open Sponsorship

Tags: event, experiential, measurement