Event marketing can be extremely effective for businesses looking to engage with their target audiences and drive everything form brand awareness, to demand generation, to customer loyalty. Unfortunately, event costs in 2022 were 22% higher than 2019, and are expected to rise an additional 7% in 2023 according to CWT. Rising event costs can quickly eat into your marketing budget and impact your bottom line. In some cases, event marketers take an approach to cost cutting that’s highly tactical and compromises event performance, or worse, arbitrary. Here are six ideas to on how to use event strategy to reduce event costs, while improving ROI.
1. Start with Event Objectives
Before deciding on cost-cutting measures, step back and consider what the purpose(s) of the event is in the first place. Thinking about what you are trying to accomplish will help prioritize which events and elements are mission critical to achieving objectives, and which are nice to have.
2. Know Your Target Audience(s)
Understanding your target audience(s) is critical in reducing event costs. By knowing their preferences and behaviors, you can make informed decisions on which events they are likely to prioritize attendance. Remember, in an economic environment where budgets are held flat, or reduced, attendee companies will cut back on business travel and education budgets as producers are cutting back on the costs of their events. Know their triggers and pain points. Understand which event formats, locations, content, and experiences will resonate with them. By creating a personalized and memorable event experience tied to attendee wants and needs, you can drive focus on the most important brand experiences, increase attendance, and improve the ROI of your events.
3. Review Your Event Portfolio
Examine the entire events calendar. Remembering event objectives, make sure the right events addressing your target audiences in the right regions are included. Look for gaps and overlaps in coverage. Adjust event roles and experiences, combine events where it makes sense, and eliminate events that are less likely to meet objectives. Wherever possible, examine past event performance against objectives to help prioritize actions. Another way to look at it is zero-based planning. If you could only participate in one event this year, which would it be? Why? Slowly include additional events until you’ve built a portfolio that meets objectives, addresses audiences, and fits the event budget.
4. Align Brand Experiences to Event Strategy
When designing everything from the attendee journey, to the event agenda, to sessions and tracks, to expos, content, and brand experiences, make sure everything aligns to your objectives and audience wants and needs. Build a short business case for each and every element of your event. Does it further the strategy? Does it help meet event objectives? Does it address target audience wants and needs? If the answer is yes, great! If the answer is no, adjust or remove the element.
5. Repurpose Content
Events tend to be forcing functions for content development. They are also great places to capture or broker new content. Content could be in the form of in-person, social, or digital elements and can take on many formats like copy, photography, video, keynotes, sessions, etc. By capturing as much of the content as possible, editing, expanding, and repurposing it for other events, social or digital content syndication activities, or even as promotional fodder for future events, you can build a powerful cost avoidance plan to reduce the costs of future content development.
6. Leverage Technology
Technology can be a powerful tool in reducing event costs. Consider leveraging virtual and hybrid event formats to reduce travel and venue costs. Find the right project management tool to improve team productivity. Leverage AI in registration, check in, content development, attendee acquisition, content syndication and everything else. Invest in the right registration tools to automate processes. Use chatbots to engage registrants and attendees. Leverage mobile technologies to enable attendees and reduce on-premise support. Put the right measurement platforms in place to take the guess work out of performance and optimization. There are hundreds of technologies and tools that event planners can use to improve productivity and reduce costs.
Being smart about reducing event spend can not only help meet budget requirements, but also improve the performance of your events. Taking a strategic approach is more about optimizing and maximizing ROI of your event marketing program, than cutting it.
Lastly, you don’t have to go it alone. Connect with peers in the industry, experts, partners, and others in your ecosystem to learn what they’re doing. Also, investing in the right strategic partner to objectively review your program and guide you through the right approach for your specific situation can be worth its weight in gold.