Look after the pennies: Pay close attention to every pound and dollar spent, as even small savings can accumulate to significant budget reductions over time. These can sometimes be easier wins than trying to make significant savings.

Consolidate Providers: Working with fewer service providers can help maximise economies of scale and lead to cost savings. Streamlining your vendor relationships can also simplify management.

Reevaluate Relationships: In a post-COVID landscape, the importance of relationships, when it comes to venue finding, appears to have diminished. Negotiating pricing has become tougher. Therefore, it's crucial for both the client and agency to seek better deals and ensure operational efficiencies.

Collaborative Efficiency with Both Agencies and Suppliers: Foster a strong partnership between the agency and client. Collaboration can lead to better results, even with constraints, when you trust your agency to deliver efficiently.
Treat your suppliers as partners and build trusting relationships. The power of a strong supplier relationship can lead to better terms and service delivery.

Utilise Internal Experts for Panels: Consider using subject matter experts within your organisation as speakers or presenters at your events, whatever their role or management level. This can help reduce costs associated with external speakers. However, when doing this, it is important to ensure that presentations don't come across as sales pitches.

Leverage Customer Advocacy: Your customers can be valuable speakers and advocates. Their authentic stories can save money while conveying trust and credibility. Use them as speakers when appropriate.

Optimise Recruitment: In a flatline recruitment scenario, it's crucial to have the right people in the right roles. Properly aligning your team's skills and responsibilities can maintain or even improve service delivery despite limited resources.

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How do you deliver the same, or better results with decreased headcount and budget constraints?

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Distinguish News from Noise: Amidst various global uncertainties, it's essential to discern genuine news from sensationalism. Focus on credible sources to stay informed about real developments affecting your industry and economy.

Leverage Historical Data: Human nature and economic patterns remain relatively consistent. Analyse historical shocks and economic behaviours to create scenario models for budget planning. Preparing for a worst-case scenario provides a solid foundation.

Adapt to Revenue Changes: When revenue streams dry up, pivot by exploring new opportunities or adjusting your strategy. Cutting advertising costs may yield short-term gains, but maintaining a presence in the market is crucial for long-term success. Studies show that by year 3, sales start to drop even for large brands. There is a need to stay visible.

Stay Informed Globally: Economic trends often follow similar patterns across regions. Keep an eye on global perspectives and trends, as they can provide insights into what might happen in your local market.

Review Budget Continuously: Economic forecasts can change rapidly. Regularly review your budget and adapt as needed. Monthly assessments ensure you stay agile in response to evolving conditions.

Macro Trends in Marketing Mix: Economic uncertainty can impact macro trends in the marketing mix. Consider reinventing your brand strategies, such as using celebrity endorsements, social media, and brand ambassadors, to target specific demographics effectively. Traditional methods like discounts and promotions still have their place in uncertain times. 

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Ensure creative aligns with brand positioning: For example, don’t push budgets if this is not in line with your brand positioning. 

Focus on both content and distribution for engagement: Be conscious of the long tail of the event. Spend 50% of the time on content and 50% of the time on distribution and getting engagement. 

Creative must be on brand, always: Maintain consistency with the brand in all creative aspects. This will create ultimate impact of brand. 

Align creative with event objectives: Understand the objectives of the event before briefing any creative. Is the creative going help deliver on your objectives? Deliver a precise brief that is driven from clear objectives. 

ROI of creative ideas: Always question and demonstrate the ROI of creative ideas. Be sure to optimise creative efforts before, during and after the event. 

Sustainable branded merchandise can boost exposure: When people start wearing your brand because they WANT to, you are in a strong position. 

Creative doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel:  Small creative tweaks can pivot the event effectively. 

Utilise your whole team: Look to everyone for creative ideas, regardless of their role and foster open communication for innovative ideas 

Agencies should proactively suggest creative ideas: As an agency, think about how you can go to your clients with creative ideas that you have not been asked for. Show you are listening, looking externally and understanding their objectives.
AI can be used to visualise creative ideas allowing for enhanced understanding and efficiency in creative work.

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How can we ensure we get the most impact and engagement from the creative design of events and experiences?

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The Responsibility of Procurement: Procurement is fast becoming a responsibility for all employees, especially in smaller companies with limited budgets, often without the need for dedicated procurement professionals. This means mixed capabilities. The role of procurement varies significantly and is largely influenced by industry regulations. 

Relationships are Key: Successful procurement relies on building strong relationships and trust with agency partners. 

Procurement is Essential for Efficiencies:  Procurement, although sometimes seen as non-essential, is critical for setting budgets, achieving targets, and driving efficiency in event management. 

It’s no longer ‘Good Cop/Bad Cop’: Collaboration between procurement, finance, and event teams is vital to streamline supplier selection and ensure both the business and agencies are set up for success. Early involvement of procurement in the event planning process promotes a team-oriented approach, aligning objectives and negotiation strategies.

Procurement Isn’t All About Cost Saving: Forward-thinking procurement departments focus not only on cost savings but also on sustainability, environmental responsibility, diversity, and risk management. 

A Bird’s Eye View:  In large companies, procurement often acts as a central hub, offering visibility into the activities of all departments and facilitating cross-departmental efficiencies. 

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With a greater reliance on procurement, how do you balance creative and commercial KPI’s?

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Understand what perceived overspend looks like: Lavish venues and entertainment may suggest a lack of budget sensitivity. Make choices that will land well with both employees and shareholders. 

Engagement is essential for a healthy company culture: It is important to understand what good engagement looks like to you. Ensure you can measure the ROI to justify future internal events. 

Hybrid Working Demands Internal Events: In a hybrid working environment, internal events gain increased importance. People spending less time in the office makes culture-building and engagement challenging. Internal events can go a long way to delivering on these. Employees value internal events as opportunities to regroup and engage. 

On Brand, Always: Foster creativity for both internal and external events, but always maintain brand consistency, recognising employees as primary brand ambassadors. 

If Internal Event Budgets are Cut – Get Creative: If the budget for internal events is cut, explore creative solutions to sustain engagement. Consider synergies between internal and external event teams for efficiency and explore the possibility of utilising external campaigns for internal purposes. 

How can we continue to deliver internal events that are seen as cost effective for shareholders and staff alike?

Recognise Demand and Budget Constraints: There's a clear desire to return to in-person events, however post-COVID budgets often don’t support this demand making suitable demonstration of ROI can be challenging. 

Address Attendance Challenges: There is a need to address low attendance and the cost implications across in-person, hybrid and virtual events. However, there is also a need to make it easy for people to consume the content at a suitable time for them. 

Regional Variations in Preferences: Different regions may have varying demands for multi-channel events, so it is important to set appropriate KPI’s and objectives based on this. Establish measurable KPI’s before the event and base decisions on achieving key objectives tailored to the event type. Example: Germany prefers virtual events, while APAC desires in-person gatherings. 

Measurement Beyond Attendance: While attendance is almost always a KPI, it is important to encompass not only attendance but also engagement. KPI’s should always be based on key objectives. Maximise engagement by creating content that can be reused and amplified. 

Stand Out in an Influx of Post Covid Invitations: With the influx of invitations going out post Covid, standing out from the crowd is more important than ever. Earning the attention of the audience, rather than demanding it is crucial. Take time to develop strategies to make your event unique and enticing. Understand what your audience want. The power of the shared experience is often just as much about networking.

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How can we demonstrate ROI for in-person events in comparison to virtual and hybrid events?

There is a common implementation of technology to simplify processes: Apps are commonly being employed for basic event logistics, such as delegate management and travel planning. 

Is AI really able to help with event speech writing? While AI can certainly assist with speech writing, it may not be as personalised as traditional scriptwriters. It is this personalisation that can really make an impact. 

Validating budgets is crucial: The uncertainty around AI adoption can be a barrier to validate budget decisions. 

Can AI save time? Technology drives progress, but its impact on efficiency depends on clear goals and outcomes. AI offers an opportunity for the implementation of more automated processes to achieve better efficiencies. 

Adoption of AI in Regulated Industries: Regulated industries face significant limitations in adopting AI. Many companies are deploying a complete ban on the use of AI. 

Ensure technologies used across the organization work cohesively: When implementing new technologies, it is critical to ensure that it works cohesively alongside other technologies used within the company. Continuous testing and adjustment are essential when implementing technology solutions. 

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How can emerging technologies like AI deliver efficiencies and save costs?