If you’re in experiential marketing, be sure to have a strong plan in place to maximize ROI through lead capture.  Follow these tips to produce sales-ready leads from your next Enterprise-level program.

Get Everyone on the Same Page

Common goals and shared metrics drive consistency and accurate measurement in experiential programs. The first critical step in experiential and event planning is to work with your team to make sure that everyone involved is working towards the same goals. If your event’s onsite team doesn’t understand the overall program goals set forward by the planning team then they may not be able to achieve your objectives. Secondarily, it’s important that everyone from management to onsite staff are all working with the same metrics. It’s hard to measure the event’s effectiveness if management is measuring “quality” leads while the onsite staff is working with “total” leads collected. The bottom line is, communication is key when planning for events.

Scalability and Reliability

If you’re planning a large, national experiential program then you know that scalability and reliability are major concerns. In terms of scalability, you need to implement an ultra-reliable platform, that can accurately activate hundreds or even thousands of event days per year. Having a platform that requires constant back-end programming or re-development will not be able to deliver consistently accurate, reliable data capture tools, so be sure to look for a technology partner with experience scaling to hundreds of event days for a single campaign.

Training: Onsite

Brand Ambassadors are the consumer-facing arm of your program, don’t send them into the field unprepared. Not only do they need to be trained on products and messaging, but they need to be trained to use and maintain your data capture equipment and who to call if things go wrong. Hopefully, you've chosen a technology partner with a strong client support plan in place.  Even the best technology faces hiccups from time to time, did your iPad freeze or did a staffer accidentally drop it and crack the screen?

CRM Integration and Security

It's important to have enterprise-level automation when it comes to your experiential lead capture technology. One of the most critical aspects of any lead capture strategy is how you integrate your new data into your existing CRM.  Some technology providers offer automated, real-time integration offering your sales teams quicker access to data. In terms of data security, more and more brands are requiring deep technical audits for their vendors to ensure that their data is protected. Make sure to ask your technology suppliers how they plan to protect your data during collection, and more importantly, during transmission to your CRM.

Analyze in Real-time and Post-Event

It’s important to analyze your program’s performance during and after your event. For analysis during the event be sure to log into your reporting platform many times throughout the day to identify trends taking place, in real-time. This gives you the chance to make small adjustments to address unexpected issues like bottlenecks caused by staffing mistakes, for example. After the event is where a deeper analysis can take place. After your leads are captured, uploaded in real-time and automatically sent to your CRM it's time to review your strategy.  A debrief of the on-site staff management is a good place to start.  Was there enough staff?  Was the technology easy to use and functional?  Did the giveaways entice people into your space?  How many leads did you collect and what was your opt-in rate? These questions and more are important to understanding the success or failures of your event.  Don't miss the chance to use event data you have captured to refine and improve your event lead capture strategy.


For information on how eshots can help drive a higher event ROI through data capture, email us at info@eshots.com or visit www.eshots.com.