When you work in the experiential marketing world, there’s never a dull moment. Sometimes a hurricane rolls in on the day of your outdoor activation. Sometimes you use hay to soak up the water left behind by the hurricane rains, only to discover your tour manager is severely allergic to hay. Sometimes you are trying to fix your broken tent, when your client walks up to see how things are going and as you try to pivot to speak with them, you spill not a little, but a LOT of water that was pooled in the tent canopy on them. Sometimes all of these happen at the same event.
There are so many elements of events that you can’t control – the weather, surprise allergies, and broken tents. But the key to successful experiential marketing events is to control what you can so you have the bandwidth to handle the inevitable twists and turns.
Did you know only 1/3 of our full-time employees actually staff our events? The rest work behind the scenes on the details that make our trade shows, guerrilla marketing activations, and retail demo programs successful and unique.
There are too many details to list in one blog, but here are some of the things we do to help set our clients and brand ambassadors up for success at their events and demos:
Did you know we have an entire person dedicated to shipments? Yep. You read that right. Initial shipments and restocking supplies take hours of our bandwidth each week. We document the tracking numbers in our task system so our account manager and our on-call manager (who covers the weekend) can easily track the packages to ensure they arrive in time for the event. We also document what was sent and update each individual brand ambassador’s inventory so we can see who has what at a glance.
2. Parking information
We share parking information with our reps whenever it’s not an obvious “drive to Sprouts and park in their parking lot” situation. This way the reps aren’t late due to searching for parking. When you’re talking about a busy convention center or music festival, having parking information prior can help your brand ambassador plan for the day and they will be much more likely to arrive at their designated spot on time.
It doesn’t sound like much, but this little detail saves so many activations! If you’ve worked with us at all, you know we send little reminder texts each morning you’re scheduled to work, usually with sunshine emojis. There’s a double motive here. First, we genuinely want to wish our brand ambassadors a good morning and wish them well at their shift. Second, this text serves as a reminder of their upcoming shift and opens up the conversation in case anything needs to be addressed prior to their scheduled start time.
We offer performance-based bonuses on many of our programs, but in order for these to drive sales, we can’t have reps making up numbers on their reports. So, we spot check 50% of the demos/events to ensure that the focus metric, usually units sold, is accurate. We contact the store manager or event director to have them verify what was listed in the report. This makes sure there is integrity in the numbers we report to our clients.
While these may not sound like much, both our clients and brand ambassadors see the difference these details make on the quality of their experiential marketing campaigns.
Does the idea of managing the details of your program seem daunting? Let us help! Click on the contact us link below.
