First, the familiar. A key data input into a metric report is the survey. Surveys are imperfect – no argument, but they are the best method we know of to understand what people are thinking and are planning on doing. You have to ask them! So, surveys are a critical part of our methodology.
As you might imagine, a LOT of thought and experience has gone into how we survey and the types of questions we ask. We believe surveys must be short and intuitive. There are opportunities to ask people about their experience before, during and after it has happened. Our questions have been, and are continuously refined to get to the point, make it easy to respond, and focus on what matters. We hate long confusing surveys as much as anyone.
Finally, with the surveys we develop with clients…we are going for consistency. Consistent and repeated questions event over event enhance benchmarks, so we can advise on what ‘good’ results look like. To add to our benchmarking, we’re founding members of a critical industry body, the Experiential Marketing Measurement Coalition. A key mission of this group: shared metrics and benchmarks across our global industry.
Another key input in our analysis of experiences is behavioural data: what people DO within an experience (and, if you have access to understand it, what they do afterwards because of the experience). The rise of virtual events and digital experiences has resulted in lots and lots of data, as these tools can track just about everything a digital participant does. Our key insight: more data is not necessarily better. We carefully evaluate what data is truly useful (in terms of insight about impact or how to improve an experience), and we have to be brutal to ignore that which is not.
With physical events returning and the emergence of hybrid, we’re applying digital thinking to data analysis of physical settings. Essentially, we want to understand what people are doing IRL just as we do in URL for a holistic analysis that drives improvement over time.
We’re busy working towards real-time reporting of event data through online dashboards (we’ve got near real-time working, but the eventual goal is as it happens). These dashboard views can inform live optimisation of event elements as they are happening to ultimately improve end-results. Smyle dashboards can also be used for event-by-event comparisons for a client program with multiple similar activations – like a trade show program or customer event series.
Finally and importantly, measurement innovation. Everything described above is work we take pride in, but what truly differentiates us is our distinct Return on Emotion metric. The Smyle approach to evaluating emotional impact comes from our genuine belief that events must move hearts and minds – that the emotional journey is critical to driving measurable results. Using facial analysis (NOT recognition) tools, we can understand how an audience feels throughout an experience journey – helping guide future decisions to deepen impact. This is experimental stuff at this point, but we are super excited about it!
All of this makes up our Metric offering, which more and more of our clients are adopting every day. If you are interested in learning more about it, drop us a line.