Cost-Saving Event Planning Strategies that Don’t Sacrifice Impact
It’s no secret that the events industry comes with a hefty price tag. According to Statistica, global experiential marketing revenues exceeded an estimated 128 billion dollars in 2024 and are expected to grow in 2025. While businesses are budgeting more money into building memorable brand experiences, most event requests come with a limited budget to work with. So, how do you design and produce show-stopping results for your clients when their budget is smaller than anticipated? Below are four proven cost-saving strategies to stretch your event dollars without compromising creativity or quality.
Design for Re-Use: Built Once, Activate Often
The single best way to reduce overall event costs across a fiscal year is to design your events with forward thinking and planning, planning that involves identifying elements that can be reused for future events. If you have multiple events on your calendar for a particular brand/client/organization, you may find yourself re-purchasing items you tossed after the first event, not knowing that keeping them would have helped you down the road. This waste can be minimized by designing your events for reuse. Whether managing a series of trade shows or internal brand activations, designing modular event elements allows you to repurpose signage, display assets, lead desks, and branded installations across multiple touchpoints.
Partnering with an experiential design agency that offers long-term strategic support ensures you don’t discard valuable assets after just one use. Full-service partners can also refresh and rebrand existing pieces, offering creative updates while minimizing material waste and future expenses.
Branded “N” installation for Northeastern University, originally created as a photo opportunity and strategically reused across multiple flagship events. Repainted and refreshed in various styles, it serves as a versatile yet powerful brand activation that reinforces identity and maximizes ROI through repeated use.
Be Strategic with Venue Selection
Venue selection is one of the most influential decisions in your event budget, and one of the easiest to optimize with thoughtful planning. Choosing a location that’s either centrally located or near the majority of your attendees can significantly reduce transportation costs. Rather than coordinating expensive group shuttles, consider offering individual Uber or Lyft vouchers. This approach is not only more cost-effective but also improves attendee experience by offering flexibility and convenience.
Additionally, venues that include in-house AV, Wi-Fi, rigging, or catering can save you thousands compared to blank-slate spaces that require bringing in every service à la carte. Even unexpected locations—like museums, academic institutions, or coworking hubs—often include built-in infrastructure and staff, making them a smarter, more affordable choice for event planners.
Smart Partnerships: Selecting full-service agency partners
It is increasingly common in the events and experiential marketing industry to contract various vendors for different services leading up to the day of. Costs and fees may slip through the cracks, and with multiple partners, these can add up quickly.
Many experiential agencies can design your event, but have to go through 3rd-party vendors for production and labor services. By partnering with a full-service experiential agency, you benefit from price transparency, in-house production capabilities, and streamlined project management. A full-service partner consolidates your vendor list, ensuring materials, labor, and logistics are efficiently managed under one roof, resulting in fewer surprises and more strategic alignment from start to finish.
Go Paperless
While paper printing costs may seem negligible at first, items like programs, menus, badges, surveys, and promotional flyers can take up a sizable portion of your budget, especially at scale.
To save on snowballing paper fees, go paperless for your event! Applications like Cvent and Rainfocus can act as a one-stop shop for registration, programming, content management, attendee and speaker management, and more for in-person and virtual events. Plus, these easy-to-use applications can also run attendee surveys and provide analytics for your team post-event. Consolidating event technology and registration to one platform will also improve productivity and ensure small last-minute details don’t slip.
RainFocus chose dynamic digital signage over traditional print materials, enhancing flexibility, reducing waste, and streamlining real-time updates throughout the event.
Make Every Dollar Count with the Right Partner
Stretching a limited event budget doesn’t mean compromising on experience. It’s about working smarter: designing for scale, leveraging tech, choosing efficient partners, and planning logistics like a pro.
With over 500 years of combined experience, VDA is your trusted full-service experiential agency for immersive event design, in-house fabrication, and strategic cost management. Whether you’re planning a corporate activation, trade show booth, or global brand experience, we’ll help you make the most of your investment.
Ready to plan smarter? Contact VDA to bring your next event to life—on budget and beyond expectations.