2024 Planning - Experiential Marketing and Trade Show Programs
As we approach 2024, we understand that strategic planning for your experiential marketing and trade show programs is a top priority. At NPARALLEL, we are committed to partnering with brands from coast to coast to ensure every brand activation is successful and aligned with your company's brand. To help you start the new year with excellence, we're sharing how you can plan effectively to make 2024 your most strategic and impactful year yet.
Key Information for 2024 Strategic Planning
Get a Head Start
If you haven't already engaged with us, or your agency, it's never too early to start planning. The earlier you involve our team, the more time we have to create and implement experiences that save time and resources and also integrate emerging technologies and solutions.
Be Results-Driven
All marketing efforts should be aligned with the results that your organization wants to achieve. Experiential marketing and trade shows enable teams to connect brands with people and drive important business objectives. When planning, engage with your organization's stakeholders to determine crucial business objectives that we can partner with you on to drive these objectives through meaningful brand experiences. Many of our clients utilize our lead capture tool, which facilitates guiding individuals and organizations through a sales funnel with meticulous content capture and delivery that seamlessly integrates with your CRM. Our robust tool, NP Capture, can be deployed wherever your brand activation occurs, whether it's a pop-up experience or a trade show hall.
Save Time with Comprehensive Program Management
NPX is our proprietary, custom program management solution. This innovative tool saves clients time and money by providing them with 24/7 access to project details and a clear understanding of the status of every program element in motion. If your organization participates in events, experiential marketing, or trade shows, this is a must-have solution that will help you save time and resources. Our cross-functional teams partner with clients and implement NPX for their ongoing event management. If you haven't already adopted it, you'll want to plan for onboarding in 2024.
Make Space for Collaboration
In every partnership, collaboration is essential. Whether you work with our team or another, it's important to allocate time in your calendar throughout the year for planning strategic initiatives, brainstorming, measuring results, and setting aside time for check-ins and opportunities. We work alongside your team by striving to understand your unique situation, asking challenging questions, and guiding you toward creative, thought-provoking, and dynamic solutions.
Budgets and Inspiration
Budgets are an important component of planning. In 2023, 75% of CMOs reported being challenged to "do more with less" (source: "The State of Marketing Budget and Strategy in 2023 — Insights from the CMO Spend and Strategy Survey"). As your partner in experiential marketing, it is our responsibility to help you establish a budget, identify efficiencies, offer recommendations, and inspire projects that align with your budget and have business impact. When it comes to budgeting, bringing in your experiential team helps with planning, productivity, and a strategic map to position your brand in front of your audiences.
Develop Creative Briefs
When planning your programs, it's important to provide your agency with a creative brief. This should define your goals, measurements for success, ideal experience, go-to-market strategy, opportunities and challenges, key messages, and the products or brands you need to feature. This helps us to create opportunities, solutions, and activations that align with where your organization is headed. If you need a creative brief, just ask; we have one for you!
Notice Industry Changes
In this ever-evolving industry, there are some significant changes to be aware of. One of our favorites is that technology integrations are becoming increasingly more affordable for brands to incorporate into their activations. We are also continuing to see companies press into personalization throughout their creative brand experiences. On a less exciting note, we continue to see rising event site fees, such as drayage. For all our clients, we are collaborating with them in forecasting and anticipating these changes to allocate for them in 2024.
In conclusion, your success is our success, and we are committed to helping you plan and execute experiential marketing and trade show programs in 2024 that truly resonate with your audiences. Engage with us early, share your vision and challenges, and let us be your strategic partner in crafting unforgettable experiences for your audience.