It’s a new year. Time to start preparing for the various events, conferences and tradeshows on your marketing calendar—not to mention all your other projects and priorities.

Unfortunately, adding headcount right now is difficult if not impossible. Current economic conditions are forcing businesses to tighten their belts. Even if you could find and hire the right talent, building a full-time team to handle spikes in activity surrounding individual events doesn’t make financial sense.

PPAI Expo 2023, held in early January in Las Vegas, attracted the country’s biggest promotional product providers and distributors to showcase what’s in store for the coming year—everything from new products and apparel to event material and order programs.

As with the previous few years, 2023 includes a host of uncertainties that will impact this year’s buying habits. Post-pandemic behavior continues to influence decision making, forcing companies to be cautious about spending. Couple that with an increasingly fragile economy and it’s clear that budgets will suffer.

After two years of COVID-related shutdowns, events—conferences, seminars, tradeshows and the like—are coming back in a big way.

Weekly, if not daily, organizations are asking us to help them ramp up their marketing event support activities. They want to get back out there and start meeting with customers and prospects again. Only now, they’re facing a host of new challenges.

During the pandemic, everyone had to find a way to keep your employees and customers engaged in new and creative ways. At-home marketing campaigns and events became the new tradeshows and meetings, and small giveaways turned into home-delivered corporate gifts.

While some of these trends did start to fade as the world started to open up, a few did stick around and are predicted to become the new regular for promotional buying. One of the trends that seems to be enjoyed by everyone is the end of the day happy hour with coworkers