The State of Experiential Marketing 2024
An inside look into how consumer brands approach experiential today and the trends impacting your strategy in 2024 and beyond
Marketing has grown exponentially over the years, welcoming new ways for brands to connect with their consumers and grow their loyal communities through internet forums, TikTok dances, and even your own secret marketing team Slack chats. Yes, we know about the memes and the marketing team playlists you share throughout the day. Keep on keeping on, team!
But experiential marketing isn’t quite at that level yet. We’re all starting to come together in the same channels, but our community is still in the beginning phases.
Why? We’re lacking visibility and a true community for consumer brand marketers to share their learnings, tackle key challenges, and ideate about what the future of experiential looks like.
This wonderful new field is still developing; we’re learning the power of experiences together. So consider this your look into the heart of our shared experiential marketing world from the last year.
We’ve asked experiential marketers and leaders to share their plans, challenges, and more to bring you a holistic view of experiential marketing today. So, use this report to get greater visibility into what’s happening in experiential marketing and leverage it to map out your 2024 strategy.
What is AnyRoad?
Listen, before we start, we need to get down to brass tacks: who are we, and what do we know about experiential marketing?
We’re AnyRoad: the leading experiential marketing platform for consumer brands. We’ve been helping brands streamline, scale, and power greater ROI from their events and experiences for over a decade.
End-to-end experience management meets with rich data capture and analytics in our platform to help brands realize greater impact from every event. We believe in the power of experiences, plain and simple. Each one is an invaluable opportunity to build long-lasting relationships with consumers, using emotion, memory, and delight to create a community of brand superfans and accelerate revenue growth.
We are committed to building an experience community in everything we do, from this report and beyond.
We get it; as a marketer you’re likely wearing multiple hats and may want to cut right to the good stuff. Here are the biggest takeaways you need to know from our research.
plan to increase their experiential marketing investment from 2024 through 2026
aim to grow and deepen brand loyalty through experiential marketing.
measure success based on the number of people who attended their experience.
invested in ticketed events in 2023, making this the #1 event type.
said their biggest challenge in experiential marketing is a lack of team resources.
We surveyed experiential professionals at consumer brands across various industries, geographies, and company sizes. Here’s the breakdown of our respondents:
Your Company?
Represents Your Role?
Company Based?
Represents Your Function?
Consumer brands are seeing the impact that experiences have on building loyal fan bases and driving long-term revenue growth. They’re investing more than ever before.
Here’s what the rest of our community thinks about experiential marketing going into 2024.
Do You Invest In?
the Success of Your Experiences?
Activations, Which Types?
Why Ticketing? We Dug a Little Deeper.
46% said they measure experience success based on ticket sales.
Ticketed events aren’t necessarily right for everyone; it relies a lot on what kind of experience you’re building. For example, tickets might work for a free pop-up, but not for a festival activation. Even if you’re not charging for tickets, it’s a great way to collect data upfront and know who’s attending.
9 out of 10 marketers say that experiential marketing is important to their strategy.
The Takeaway
Brands care more than ever about earning brand loyalty, and the industry agrees that experiential marketing is a powerful tool for achieving their goal, and are willing to start putting more money into their strategy to make it happen.
In one sentence: Experiences are improving brand loyalty, and the industry is taking note!
More than ever, return on investment has been the main topic of conversation in budget meetings. As we all rode the see-saw of 2023, here’s what the industry’s financial planning was up to.
Approximately how much are you spending on experiential programs annually?
How do you anticipate your investment in experiential programs will change in the next 1-3 years?
The Spirits & Alcohol industry is investing the most heavily in experiences, followed by Retail.
Not all of a team’s budget goes towards the experience itself. Some of it finds its way to other areas of the process and other countries entirely.
Remember! 85% of those surveyed are in North America. However, they’ve now indicated that their prioritized markets are farther afield. More brand experiences are starting to invest globally, not just in their original country.
Your Experiences?
The Takeaway
Brands are spending significant money on experiences. The most popular answer for annual investment was $500K to $1M. That’s not a small cut of the pie. And, as you’ll see later, 85% use tech to support their experiential marketing strategy.
So clearly, brands believe in experiential to achieve their goals. Globally, brands are expanding their experiences while still trying to keep their overhead on a tight leash.
It’s about quality over quantity right now in our industry, and with tourism shifting and buying habits constantly fluctuating with the economy, it makes sense.
Remember! 85% of those surveyed are in North America. However, they’ve now indicated that their prioritized markets are farther afield. More brand experiences are starting to invest globally, not just in a brand’s original country.
In one sentence: Brands are investing significantly in experiential marketing corresponding to their size but are trying to make their current annual dollars go farther.
Let’s Review What We Know so Far
Brands use experiential marketing to increase brand loyalty.
Overall, experiential marketing is considered “Important” — 90% said so themselves.
Brands are expanding their experiences globally.
Brands are increasing their budgets, but 42% say they’ll be keeping their spend flat.
How can all this be true? Experiential marketing works and the majority of responses pointed to an increase in 2024 spend. So why are those 42% keeping their investment the same?
Does That Clear Things Up?
It Did for Us.
Let’s dig deeper into the two biggest and unpack what’s going on with this slow-down.
Teams are strapped to execute, meaning scaling and growth investment for experiences are tempered by bandwidth. And with many budgets staying the same, agency help and even additional headcount might not be in the cards this year for many brands.
rely on an in-house team only for their experiential marketing
said one of their challenges was that they didn’t have enough team resources
Trend Alert: Technology is a Necessary Resource.
The tech wave makes sense; after all, 59% said they don’t have enough team resources. Teams are strapped for extra help and need to find ways to make their teams more efficient. Technology and automation can make a significant impact when it comes to a brand team’s bandwidth.
Experiential Programs?
Return on investment is a hot-button topic. With such high investments in experiences, if there’s no way to measure and prove ROI, teams can’t know what’s working, and stakeholders have a harder time understanding (and proving) the value.
So why is it so hard for teams to showcase their ROI? One more survey question helped clear up what was going on: the metrics poll from earlier. You’ll notice an interesting pattern start popping up.
There are two interesting things to look at here. The first is that there’s no one overwhelming majority for one metric or another. There’s an uneven distribution of answers, which leads us to believe that there may not be a common understanding of what ROI actually means for consumer experiences.
Secondly, the three most popular metrics don’t actually measure impact longer than short term.
So, when you stack the three most popular metrics against ROI…
Doesn’t quite measure up, does it? Now remember 43% said the main goal of experience marketing was brand loyalty. Let’s add it in and see what happens.
There’s a fundamental mismatch between the perceived goal of experiences and what’s being measured.
In the field of experiential marketing, many brands are still thinking short-term. The most popular metrics in the survey don’t speak to what consumers think or show anything about deepening and growing brand loyalty.
The Takeaway
Brands overall are all dealing with the same issue: they just don’t have enough bandwidth to scale experiences effectively. That means slower growth across the board, especially since ROI is difficult for brands to showcase. Intention and design will be a bigger theme, seeing fewer small experiences overall and more complex, larger investments over time.
In one sentence: The industry isn’t being specific enough about what we’re reporting on, meaning that the experiences brands create need to be more intentional.
Now we better understand the ins and outs of our community from 2023, but the past is the past. How will that help us going forward?
Proving ROI Will Be A Major Focus Moving Forward.
With budgets slowing in 2024, marketers will be under more pressure than ever to prove that their experiences aren’t just useful; they’re tangibly helping the brand. ROI will be the key to unlocking increased budgets, headcount, and scalable strategies.
For more on why, see “The Challenges We Face”.
Brands will start investing more in global experiences.
With so many opportunities globally, it’s looking like brands are focusing on expanding outwards towards new shores and markets to tap into more diverse consumer bases as a way to accelerate growth.
For more on why, see “The State of Budgets and Investments”.
Brand Teams Will Become More Data-Driven and Savvy in Measuring and Proving Success.
Marketers are getting on the same page about using their experiences to grow and deepen brand loyalty with consumers. And with teams now having access to dedicated analytics tools, there are more conversations happening around what success actually means and looks like. We'll see a huge uplevel and sophistication in how they measure and prove success.
For more on why, see "The Evolution of Strategy".
The Final Takeaway
Our community is growing. The new experience field is emerging as a powerful marketing tool that taps into our very human need for connection. In a crowded digital world, making room and time for moments designed to take us out of our routine is deeply impactful.
In one sentence: Experience marketing is still getting on the same page as other marketing functions, but 2024 will be the year we finally see the community come together and make exciting strides forward.
Methodology of This Report
This report is based upon survey responses collected between November and December 2023. We surveyed 73 marketers from various industries participating in experiential marketing.
Additional data points included in this report were sourced from AnyRoad’s platform, which powers hundreds of thousands of events with over 3 million consumer attendees each year.
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