We read recently of a study done by the Destination Marketing Association International on trends in the meeting industry.  Their research called out a number of factors meeting planners need to be aware of, including:

• A volatile economic environment
• The battle for attention
• Smart and friendly websites
• An electronic culture 
• Going Green

 With corporate budgets tightening, meeting planners are thinking about how to best market their event to get the attention of their prospective attendees.  Strong innovative branding for events, that is reflected in electronic invitations, event websites,  and search engine marketing are all part of a marketing strategy designed to break through and catch the eye of prospective attendees.   Once you have captured their attention, making registration easy and accessible is key.  Increasingly, attendees expect that they will be able to register for an event electronically.  Using online registration can increase your registrations because you can convert their interest to a registration by giving them a means to register as soon as they have decided to attend.

The Going Green trend is good for the environment certainly, but increasingly it is a strategy for reducing the cost of producing an event.  Replace paper forms with online registration forms. Instead of mailing registration credentials, email a barcoded receipt that can be printed and presented at the door.    Replace post-conference surveys with electronic surveys.  Replace hand-outs with document downloads. Just think: iIf you have 200 attendees and you give them each a 20-page conference program, that’s 4000 pages. If you have 12 speakers at an event, and each one brings 75 copies of a 10-page presentation — that’s 9000 pieces of paper.  At $.10 per page, the savings just from switching to document downloads would be $1300.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Meeting Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.