If producing great events and staying on top of your event planning game are at the top of your list of priorities, your marketing efforts must be absolutely on point! We’ve gathered a list of 3 Event Marketing Trends Event Planners in NYC Can’t Ignore to help you achieve your goals.
Event marketing is undeniably changing as fast as the speed of light over the past and upcoming years. A lot of those changes have come from the advances in technology within the event planning business. Shifts in what your clients want to experience when they attend events is also a cause of these new changes. One thing we know for sure is that it doesn’t look like things will be slowing down anytime soon, and especially over the next year. As a matter of fact, there are key trends that should be opening the eyes of Event Planners in NYC, so if you ignore the 3 trends below, you’re doing so at your own risk!
1. It’s Not About the Giveaways; It’s About the Experience
Altogether, consumer trends are focusing more on how enjoyable an experience is and less on how much they like materialistic things. So of course, marketing efforts are following closely and matching the consumer’s needs. The proof is always in the pudding so if you look around you will notice that advertising campaigns are leaning more towards how a product, service, or event will make you feel. Pay attention to commercials and print ads and you will plainly see that the focal point is how much a person is enjoying a product or service rather than focusing on the actual product or service itself. While you’re paying attention, notice how they emphasize on how whatever they’re advertising has made the person’s life better in one way or the other.
An experienced event marketer knows that the primary goal is to connect with the target consumer and the best way to do that is by focusing in on this “enjoyable experience trend.” Yes, giveaways are an added bonus but at this level of the game, everyone is overloaded in event t-shirts and trinkets so start focusing on the experience itself by offering something like tickets to a show or sporting event with free admission. Even tickets to a family outing to the zoo or an amusement park will work wonders!
2. The Power of Engagement
Sales pitch opportunities are not the goal anymore when it comes to marketing an event. It’s all about getting your potential clients to build a connection with your brand and structuring a lasting relationship with one another. If an individual sees a deal they can’t turn away from; they’ll feel forced to buy. People who feel an emotional connection to a product or service will not only make a purchase, but they will surely recommend it to others. This is an excellent way to get them to keep coming back for more and also the perfect way to maintain a referral network. This method has worked wonders in content marketing and is now being used in event marketing as well.
In the upcoming years, Event Planners in NYC that host or participate in events will be more likely to focus on ways to engage attendees through interactive entertainment than any other event function. You will also see an increase in entertainment that generates an emotion in the audience rather than something that just looks or sounds pretty in the background.
3. Measuring ROI for Event Planners in NYC
What method do you use to measure how successful an event was? Do you calculate the number of business cards you collected throughout the event? Do you monitor your website traffic during the upcoming weeks after the event? Measuring ROI can be tricky because there are numerous factors to consider, and chances are it’s prone to error because there is no way to be absolutely sure that the event is the cause of any increase or decrease in revenue. For this reason, gathering ROI data is becoming a multi-faceted task. Event marketing teams will start posting surveys immediately after an event, collecting event app data, and using other methodologies to examine each event and determine if they reached their event goals based on the ROI.
To ensure that you stay on top of all successful event trends for your business, be sure to attend The Event Planner Expo 2016 in NYC.
