As the world advances digitally, more and more tools are available to marketers to allow them to better understand how the event goers feel about their brands and events, and ultimately better measure its success. These tools should be utilised and analysed to best cater to the audience and best ensure a higher return on investment. The key areas that should be examined are: social listening, website traffic, app downloads and usage, re-targeted messages statistics, and digital surveys.
Social Listening
Social listening is essentially better understanding what people around the globe are saying about your brand on websites, online discussion boards, social media outlets, etc. This is information in its purest form, as people are going out of their way to express their opinions about things in familiar settings and not feeling pressured to give an answer (as is a problem in many focus groups). There are several free social listening tools out there that can help measure and understand what people are saying about your brand. Google Trends is a useful tool, where one can see how frequently anything is getting googled. You can type in your festival here and see how many people are actively searching for it. You can also look to see how many people are searching for it with certain words, like bands, cities, etc. Another useful tool is Social Mention. Social Mention allows you to type in a brand or event and measure its strength (the likelihood your brand is being talked about), sentiment (number of positive mentions to negative), passion (the likelihood that those talking about your brand are doing so repeatedly), and reach (range of influence). In addition, you can go to the social media websites themselves and type in your brand and event name and scroll through and overall look at the comments, discussions, etc. By examining what others are saying about your brand, you can better understand what they think of it.
Website Traffic
Before, measured primarily in ticket sales, an event's interest can also be gauged by its website traffic. By examining the traffic before, during, and after you can analyse and better understand what people are looking at and where the interest lies. For example, you can analyse what headliners webpage on your site is getting the most attention to see who individually is driving more buzz for music festivals. You can also see when to start promoting for an event, by understanding when people start to look at your website and start inquiring. In addition, by adding in code to your promotions you can also measure what online advertising is driving the most website visits and ultimately sales. In addition, you may also learn more about who your target audience is. Google Analytics allows you to monitor website traffic as well as understand where people are coming from, other competitors, demographics, etc.
App Download and Usage
A major trend in events, especially music festivals, is developing interactive apps for the audience. These apps often include maps of the festival site, schedules of the headliners, and general information about the festival itself. Although apps generally cost a couple of thousand euros to create, these apps can bring you, the marketer, loads of information about your target audience. Similar to the website traffic, you will learn more about the individuals themselves. You can also track the app locations and better examine what areas of the festival ground tend to be the most popular. You can get emails in this fashion, to allow for re-marketing in the future. You can also use the app to engage with the audience and better create an experience and bring more people together. In addition, you can monitor the overall usage of the app to better understand what times are the busiest or most popular.
Re-Targeted Messages
When purchasing more tickets online today, an email address is required. By storing these email addresses, a marketer can use A/B testing to figure out what most of the event goers are excited about by sending different groups different emails leading up to the events and seeing which event has a higher open rate. In addition, as technology advances, you can also use these email addresses to get social media accounts and more statistics about your followers (most user emails are tied to their social media accounts). However, by running different re-targeted messages and advertising, you can better understand your events strong points and what people are interested in. This is the same for display ads and re-targeted campaigns on other websites as well. By better understanding what ads are being clicked on, you can adjust your marketing strategy to include the strong points.
Digital Surveys
Another simple way to understand what people are thinking about your event or brand is to outright ask them. By utilising digital surveys (on your website and app), you can ask the people who are interested in your event their exact thoughts on the festival itself, what they associate the brand with, the venue, the digital platforms, etc. This can help give you insight on why your event is or is not performing as you expected it to. Then you can use this information to alter the marketing mix, user experience on the digital platforms, physical events themselves, or any other areas that attendees feel need improvement. This is a relatively cheap and easy way to better understand your audience.
As one can see, these digital strategies can help bring about stronger insight about the general public's views on your brand, your target audience, what methods your audience is finding you on, and ultimately why your event is over or under performing. These means are all cost efficient, and although they may take time to create and set up, ultimately will help your brand in the long run. It is important to not only implement these strategies, but all measure the data, understand the data and trends, and ultimately implement new strategies to better cater to what your audience wants. If you can achieve this, you will ultimately be a better equipped and integral asset to your team.