Meetings

Why You Should Sync Meetings and Marketing Strategies

A new report from the Global Business Travel Association Foundation and the tech firm Cvent makes the case that event planning is more successful when the marketing department is involved—even if syncing those departments can be a challenge.

Events can often be a huge revenue driver for a given organization. So, logically, you’d want your marketing team to put its imprint on the effort, right?

According a study from the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) Foundation, a lot of event planners feel the same way. Just about half (49 percent) of planners who responded to the foundation’s survey said they always or almost always work with their organization’s marketing team on conferences.

This kind of collaboration might manifest itself in a number of ways, including helping to determine the event’s theme (49 percent), logo (49 percent), and color scheme (37 percent). More than half of marketers (54 percent) work with event planners on signage at the event. However, this collaboration between the teams, which generally occurs over email, tends to drop off after the conference ends.

So why isn’t that level of collaboration higher? According to the foundation, which did the survey in tandem with the event tech firm Cvent, it comes down to the turf wars that arise in any organization. Kate Vasiloff, the foundation’s director of research, suggests a formalized collaboration approach to dealing with the problem.

“Like any cross-company collaboration, getting to a good working relationship often comes with challenges along the way including lack of communication, control issues, budget constraints and delays,” Vasiloff said in a news release. “While there is no single roadmap to successful collaboration between marketing and event planning teams, establishing clear lines of communication, demonstrating an openness to fresh ideas and accounting for time and money spent is a good place to start.”

The study, based on a series of in-depth interviews and an online survey of 157 travel buyers, will be highlighted in a webinar later this week. The full study is available for free to GBTA members and is available for purchase to nonmembers.

(iStock/Thinkstock)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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