Why are marketers prioritizing events in 2025?
Coming off the Thanksgiving holiday, we’re feeling extra thankful at Hotwire—and with CES 2025 just around the corner, it’s a great time to reflect on how valuable industry events really are. In a world that’s craving more real-world connections, events create a space for something special. By bringing people face-to-face in authentic, thoughtfully designed environments, brands have an opportunity to foster a spirit of community, belonging, and collaboration beyond the screen. Events are some of our favorite opportunities to build visibility both for companies and their visions, establish thought leadership with new perspectives, provide an instantly engaging launchpad for product news, and generate organic leads and networking opportunities.
Approaching 2025, now is the time for marketers to be thinking about what key moments in the year could benefit from a touchpoint with their community, and how they can stand out from the crowd to get the longest return. Some things to consider:
Is your audience at events like CES 2025?
Sometimes a core audience is at the big flashy events like CES and Cannes, other times they are at more niche events tailored to their role, like a developer conference or practitioner level event. Get clear on what your audiences are looking for to make their jobs easier (i.e. what will make their boss approve a trip to your event), and then create a place for them to congregate and engage. Your audience will be most actionable when they are in a space that feels supportive and authentic to their needs.
OpenText World 2024
Female Quotient Equality Lounge at SXSW 2024
How do you want to engage with your audiences?
There is no rule that an event must be a person on stage presenting to a room full of people – don’t be afraid to mix things up! Identify what you are needing from your audience and what touchpoints would be helpful for informing your marketing or product strategies. Maybe you always launch your products at major tech events but you’re needing to build a stronger connection with the individuals who will make those products successful. That could call for a complementary event to engage more directly through 1:1 or 1:many forums with smaller audiences. Start by identifying how you want to relate to your audience – do you want to inform them, educate them, collaborate with them, hear feedback from them? Creating an event experience that solves for that and then building your content to support will yield the biggest impact.
How much do you want to invest in this?
Get very clear from the beginning how much time, money and resources you are ready to put into your event strategy and then ideate realistically from there. Bigger is not always better, and if you know what your limitations are then you can identify where to be scrappy versus where to invest in creating the bespoke experience your audience is craving. Remember to factor product and narrative development, thought leadership work, project management, and speaker prep into your resource plans so you can be sure a team is ready to support at the right time.
Whether you’re looking for last minute support or recommendations for CES 2025 or planning for your industry and owned events in the new year, Hotwire has a team of experts who are here to help. Drop us a line if you’d like to connect – we’ll also be onsite at CES 2025 and would love to find time to meet in-person. Get in touch!
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