Experiential marketing – also known as engagement marketing, event marketing, and even live marketing – invites consumers to participate in a brand experience, either in person or virtually. Since it can be more engaging than other forms of marketing, it helps create lasting relationships with consumers and provides brands with immediate data.

According to a report from Event Track, 91% of consumers say they have more positive feelings about brands after attending events and experiences, and 85% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product or service after attending a live marketing event. Another report from Harvard Business Review showed that event marketing drives more business value than other marketing channels, at least according to 52% of respondents. If your jewelry brand isn’t already taking advantage of experiential marketing, you could be missing out on major opportunities.

So what does experiential marketing look like exactly? In another blog post, we discussed the six most common types of experiential marketing for jewelry brands, which include the trunk show or pop up, styling event, influencer event, workshop or class, VIP experience, or contest/award. Depending on your audience, budget, product assortment, and goals, one or more of these events might work for your jewelry brand, but you should always strategize carefully before moving forward with an event.

Like with any marketing initiative, planning and goal-setting are key for effective experiential marketing outcomes, so you can see how well your efforts are working and gather valuable data that will help you in your future marketing initiatives. How can you plan for experiential marketing? Follow these tips:

Set Your Budget

Even though event marketing drives more business value than other marketing channels, as we mentioned above, marketers still have trouble quantifying the value. Your first event may not result in an overwhelming increase in sales, but it will definitely boost brand awareness, as long as the event is executed correctly. You must decide how much you can afford to spend on such a marketing initiative, since your budget will affect the type of event you’ll be able to execute.

When setting your budget, you’ll want to remember that your costs will include more than just the venue, assuming you’re hosting your event in a physical space. According to this guide from Eventbrite, 43% of the budget typically goes toward marketing and promotion, 32% goes toward speakers and talent, 29% goes toward printed materials, and 18% goes toward venues. Of course, this budget breakdown will vary from one brand to another, but it gives you a good idea of how you can expect to spend your money.

If you don’t have a large budget to allot to experiential marketing, you can always consider a cost-saving option like a virtual event, which can be hosted on social media or through a live video platform.

Create Goals for the Event

What are your ultimate goals for your event? Would you like to build brand awareness? Would you like to expose attendees to a new product or collection? Would you like to do market research on the people you think are your target customers? Whatever the goal, you must define it clearly and set targets.

Organize and Communicate

Once you know your budget and goals, you’ll need to coordinate all the logistics for putting together the event, which can either be simple and straightforward or consist of many moving parts, depending on how complex you want to get. If you have the resources, you may even want to hire an event planner to handle the communication and planning efforts or designate someone on your team to be responsible for coordinating the event.

Create a shared document or folder – like a Google Sheet, Google Doc or Dropbox folder – and share it with all the event stakeholders. This central document should include every piece of information, including event timeline, costs, vendor contracts, a contact log, to-do list, attendee information, etc.

You’d be surprised how many minor details are involved in executing one event. For example, if you decide to move forward with a trunk show in a clothing boutique, then you’d have to coordinate the logistics with the shop owner and any employees who will be working the trunk show. If you’re going to be serving appetizers alongside your jewelry, you’ll want to iron out the details with your caterer. Finally, if you’re going to hire a professional photographer or videographer to capture marketing content (we highly recommend this, so you can have lots of social media content), you’ll want to set clear expectations.

Promote the Event

The only way to attract the right people to your event is to promote it to your target customers early and often, and the best method for promoting your event is to incorporate promotional content into your regular overall marketing strategy.

As a general rule, you should start promoting your event 3-4 months in advance, but some smaller events may only need about a month of promotion time. Look at your upcoming content calendar, including your social media posts and blog posts if relevant, and decide how you can intersperse news about your event into your regularly-scheduled content. If you don’t already have a content schedule, then hosting an event can be a great motivator for you to understand the importance of a marketing/content calendar and fully embrace it.

Facebook advertising is excellent for event promotion, since you can turn an event listing into an advertisement and expose it to a very specific target demographic. Email marketing is also an excellent tool for promoting your event, since you can personalize your email communications and create tailored event invitations. Finally, you can use social media platforms like Instagram Stories to engage your followers and pique their interest in your event.

Gather Data and Measure Results

Most jewelry brands that come to us for marketing advice admit they struggle with mining data from their customers, since they don’t often have the time to ask customers for feedback, or they’re not quite sure what to ask. As a result, they barely understand their customers, and they’re always playing a guessing game when it comes to marketing.

Experiential marketing presents a major opportunity for interacting directly with your customers and asking them about the customer experience, how they feel about your brand and products, and what they’d like to see in the future. Events allow you to understand your customers more intimately.

After you execute your wildly successful event, you’ll want to measure your results. When it comes to event marketing, the most commonly tracked metrics include number of attendees, brand awareness, social media mentions, and amount of sales generated. The results you measure will vary depending on your original goals.

Have we piqued your interest in experiential marketing? Planning and executing an event is definitely more time-consuming and expensive than posting a photo on Instagram, but you’ll have more control over the total customer experience and gain immediate feedback and results. Which type of experiential marketing would work best for your goals, and how would you go about executing it? We’d love to read your thoughts in the comments.