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New Year, New Trends: Navigating the Landscape of 2025
Following ongoing client attendee interactions and our extensive research, our findings indicate a key focus of event trends in 2025: putting individual attendees at the heart of the brand experiences. In this blog, we’ll be sharing the practical tips needed to harness manifestations of this core trend across your business and create impactful events that align with your wider business goals.
Technological Innovations
The key to event marketing success in 2025 will be incorporating emerging trends in technology in a way that is relevant both to your brand, your audience, and the current event planning landscape. To create this approach, brands should focus on using these innovations to transform the connectivity, engagement, and accessibility of their brand experiences. Consider:
- Creating an internet of things for truly smart events, facilitating a truly seamless and connected attendee experience.
- Integrating AI, AR and VR thoroughly into your campaigns, not just as a novelty.
- Rethinking your virtual and hybrid strategies, with a focus on accessing and actioning real-time feedback from your event.
Sustainable Practices
In 2025, people want brands to take the lead on their sustainable living, with 62% of people stating that they expect CEOs to manage wider societal changes (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2024). For event planning, this goes beyond zero-waste events, and outsourcing to sustainable suppliers and venues. Now, people want businesses to do sustainable deeds on their behalf, giving them visibility on how much impact they can have on people and the planet. By giving people clarity over the consequences of their sustainable actions, guests will feel more centred on the brand experience, deepening their connection with your business.
The rise of personalised, data-driven brand experiences
Hyper-personalised brand experiences are an incredibly effective approach to achieving brand loyalty, with 56% of shoppers stating they’d be more likely to buy from brands that offer personalised experiences. This starts with looking at the data you have on your audience, and using these insights to create individual attendee journeys that truly engage different segments of your audience. Whether you achieve this through AI-driven personalisation, or creating micro and local events to engage different regions, successful data optimisation will depend on integrating with an advanced analytic platform, for tracking and interpreting attendee touchpoints.
The growing focus on wellness and mental health
In line with the main, attendee-focused approach to 2025, people are expecting hyper-personalisation to manifest in how brands are looking after their mental health and well-being. However, due to the saturation of these popular markets, people have grown sceptical of the impact of health and wellness initiatives. In 2025, this trend will create the space for brands to lean into the data behind their wellness initiatives, offering deeply targeted and personalised mental health and wellness interventions.
Enhancing networking and engagement
With approximately 2.5 million adults in England reporting that they are chronically lonely, people are looking for opportunities to make real connections with people who already have shared interests. Brands can meet this need by using AI matchmaking to ease the pressures around social situations, and rethinking their virtual and in-person event strategy, to bring a hybrid-first event design, rather than seeing virtual elements as a last-minute add-on, often to the exclusion of virtual attendees.
Want to navigate the event trends of 2025 to create long-term success for your brand?
Get in touch with the First Event team. As your full-service event agency partner, we can help you implement emerging event trends through a tailored strategy designed to bring you closer to your business objectives.
