4 Future Trends for Event Organizers to Watch

BY S. DAVID RAMIREZ

The events of the past few years have changed everything for event organizers. Right now, we’re in the middle of a post-lockdown spike in business. People have been stuck at home for over a year and now there is record setting pent-up demand. But, like the revenge spending after a bad breakup, this current demand is temporary. All indications are that the events, travel, and tourism industries have three years of slow rebuilding ahead of them.

Let’s gaze into the crystal ball. There are a number of clear trends that festival organizations can leverage to make these rebuilding years easier, more sustainable, and set themselves up for success.

Social Commerce

One-third of all US social network users will make a purchase directly through a social platform before the end of the year. They will choose to skip websites, elaborate eCommerce flows, and traditional buyer journeys. Why deal with the extra work when their favorite brands let them connect and buy with a few taps of their fingers?

The continued expansion of Social Commerce requires a mental reset. 2020 forced people of all ages and demographics to adopt technology at record paces. Baby Boomers infiltrated Instagram. Gen X and Millennials became powerplayers on TikTok. Gen. Z now has significant disposable income as more and more of them graduate from college and enter the workforce.

Previous hesitancy about online and mobile purchases has decreased across all sectors. Even as the world starts to open up, people have become accustomed to the speed and convenience of digital transactions.

Social networks have moved quickly to deploy tools and functionality that supports this changing paradigm. All the major sites have ways for users to interact and purchase from brands, all without ever leaving the page.

Question for Event and Festival Organizers:

• Do I have a clear understanding of how social media fits into my buyer’s journey?

• Have I explored all social commerce or shoppable social tools on my preferred platforms?

• Have I talked to my fans, attendees, and staff to understand how their social media usage has changed in the past two years?

• Do I have tools in place to track how social media is driving engagement and accelerating purchase patterns?

• Am I actively targeting Generation Z as a source of attendance, volunteerism, or staffing?

Hybrid Experiences

Early research into event attendance and consumer sentiment has found that people are still years away from returning to the mega-conferences that dominated the 2010’s. Now, people seem more inclined to regional and niche-topic activations. Event organizers have an opportunity to capture market share and gain new audiences by engaging these hesitant consumers. We’re already written about hub-and-spoke as a strategy for engagement. If multiple simultaneous events make you concerned, consider operating with one foot in the physical and one in the virtual.

Hybrid events should still be considered as two events. Consumers have higher expectations for streamed media. They want to be able to experience all aspects of the event, whether they’re there in person or participating from their couch.

Question for Event and Festival Organizers:

• Do I have the technical ability and staffing capacity to operate an in-person and virtual event simultaneously?

• Can I replicate experiences like vendors, cultural elements, and placemaking using digital technologies?

• Do I have a mechanism to sell and fulfill merchandise to remote attendees?

Bleisure Travel

We are experiencing a release of pent-up demand for events and travel. But experts are speculating that once this passes, there will be years of rebuilding for travel, tourism, hospitality, and events.

After major global events, the first thing to recover fully is business travel. This has turned savvy marketers to consider targeting a persona known as the Bleisure traveler. Bleisure is a portmanteau of the words business and leisure. It references a person who is traveling to a destination to conduct business. They can often be incentivized to add on “shoulder” nights and include leisure activities outside of business hours.

Best practice is to make sure your event is staying in touch with local tourism authorities, convention and visitors’ bureaus, and other destination marketing organizations. They, along with other hospitality organizations, can ensure that business travelers know about opportunities to participate in local events.

Question for Event and Festival Organizers:

• Are your event listings updated with your local travel information authority or DMO?

• Are there any local business events, tradeshows, or conferences happening in proximity to your event?

• Is there an opportunity to offer “excursions”, offsites, or other cultural enrichment programming to local business events?

• Do you have a program or marketing piece in use that targets businesses who are seeking “team-building” or other group outings?

Hyper-personalization

Changes to tracking and privacy laws on the internet are bound to impact marketing efforts around the world. But regardless, marketing and communications professionals are moving towards a practice called hyper-personalization. Using information from your CRM, along with data enrichment from other sources, you can hyper-personalize your outreach to get the best results and drive the most revenue.

For example, let’s say that Person X attends every jazz livestream you hosted in 2020. You know from their eCommerce purchases, they love to buy jazz CDs and t-shirts from the jazz performances. Now that in-person events have resumed, you see they are buying tickets to live jazz music. Your loyalty program shows they are also buying jazz merchandise at the live events. Why would you target them for anything other than relevant programming?

The previous example is very straightforward. But, using technology, you may discover that there are specific buyer personas that you have missed. These new technology solutions let even smaller marketing teams get incredibly granular in their targeting. The more specific and personalized the messaging, the more likely it is to drive revenue.

Think about the groups you target for marketing and communications messaging. Consider how you can encourage action by speaking to them on a hyper-personalized level.

Question for Event and Festival Organizers:

• Are you practicing some sort of customer segmentation in your CRM (or general marketing practice)?

• Do you have personalization parameters set-up to make messaging feel more intimate?

• Do you have technology in place, or plan to implement tools that will help you understand and better target your audience?

• If you already have strong segmentation, have you reviewed your criteria since 2020?

The Future is Murky, but…

The future may be murky, but it is clear that people miss events. They want to engage with brands on social media. They want to have the option to participate in their preferred method. They want to experience new things. And, they want things to be personalized to them.

S. David Ramirez is a digital marketer and events manager at TINT, the world’s most trusted platform for adding authenticity to your digital media. He is the Executive Director of San Japan, an annual convention that brings 20,000 people to downtown San Antonio. David presents and facilitates workshops worldwide on topics like digital marketing, social media, and user-generated content. Mostly, he’s a nerd. Talk to him about movies or video games.

WWW.KALIFF.COM