Sponsored by Cvent
It’s no secret that event costs are rising –along with the cost of everything else–and budgets are tightening. In the face of a looming recession, the need for planners to cut costs and justify spending is stronger than ever.
So how do you ensure you’re meeting your goals while prioritizing and achieving cost savings? With a comprehensive savings strategy, the right technology, and open communication; cross-departmental communication, to be precise.
Event Planning in an Era of Aggressive Cost Savings
When cost savings is your goal, penny-pinching won’t be enough. It requires more than maximizing your budget and finding the best deals to create the level of savings organizations are looking for.
Being thrifty with your budget is still important, of course, but there are other factors at play in the game of cost savings. When events went virtual, planners became masters of many trades. They became marketers, AV production specialists, and even connoisseurs of automation and artificial intelligence to adapt to the new event environment.
This model of a well-rounded planner has created great opportunities for cost savings –not because planners need to do it all, but because they understand what needs to be done and what technology they need to do it; now, it’s about communicating those needs.
Cross-Departmental Benefits of Events
Communicating the need for events can be an onerous task if you don’t have cross-departmental buy-in –especially when there’s a heavy push to cut costs. Whether your event is a revenue driver or sees a different form of ROI, you can communicate the value of your events by speaking the language of other departments.
Try thinking in terms of organizational goals. Your organization may prioritize program visibility across departments, brand management, risk management, brand engagement, etc.Identify these universal goals, and frame the value of your events to fit those goals for each department, from procurement and finance to marketing.
Trouble translating? Check out this guide to cross-departmental communication. Once you’ve established open communication and aligned your priorities, you can discuss how to meet those goals –starting with the right technology.
Leveraging Your Tech Stack to Support Cost Savings
Planners got a taste during the pandemic of how valuable event tech can be, when the only way to continue hosting events was to leverage technology. Now, using that same event technology isn’t a requirement, but after seeing all the ways it can help cut costs, it’s imperative to continue thinking in terms of how your tech stack can help you save.
Automation is really the key to cost savings with event technology. What saves you time saves you money, and by automating some of your processes, you’ll spend less time marketing your event, finding a venue, searching for deals that will help maximize your budget, and so much more. Here are just a few ways your tech stack can help:
- Venue Sourcing Technology: Venue sourcing can be a huge cost driver. In-person site visits alone drive up the cost of venue sourcing, but add in the time it can take to find venues, evaluate health and safety standards, and make sure you’re getting the best deal can really set you back. By automating all of this, venue sourcing tech can help you quickly find venues, manage RFPs, and view properties online without dipping into your restricted travel budget.
- Venue Diagramming and Seating: Just as you can use technology to source venues, you can also use it to get detailed information about the size of the space, layout possibilities, and seating arrangements –all without visiting in person.
- Marketing: Your events have a huge impact on marketing efforts. Events drive leads, increase engagement, and build brand awareness, and they can do all of this for your marketing team automatically. Create automated, targeted email campaigns, build branded websites and campaign materials, automatically draw insights from attendee engagement to inform your marketing strategy –without hours spent sorting through data.
- Lead Capturing: Capturing leads can be a cumbersome process –but it doesn’t have to be. Automate your processes so your sales team can capture, qualify,and follow up with leads more efficiently and effectively.
If you’re struggling to achieve cross-departmental buy-in to your events program, think creatively about your cost savings strategies, and communicate those strategies in terms your colleagues canget behind.
To see how you can use organizational goals to communicate your event cost savings approach across departments, check out this eBook from Cvent: Event Program Translation File.
