Event Marketing Outlook: 5 Trends for 2022

Where 2020 was a panicked scramble by the events industry to adopt digital event tools and halt the rapid loss of revenue, 2021 was about honing and doubling down on digital strategies and beginning to establish a new set of best practices around events and event marketing.

Digital tools and platforms have experienced rapid growth over the past two years, and it shows no signs of slowing down as organizations settle into the new normal.

To dig a bit deeper into the biggest event marketing trends shaping up for 2022, XLIVE caught up with Eric Holmen, CEO of event marketing platform Splash, who joined the company just weeks before the pandemic hit New York City last year.

While the pandemic has been incredibly challenging for the events industry, Holmen notes that for him, “as a lifetime marketer, the last two years have been exciting because they’ve been filled with experimentation on how to deal with fluctuating market conditions for event marketers.”

Throughout 2021, that experimentation has been largely focused on hybrid events as marketers explore a mix of in-person and virtual engagement opportunities. Splash recently conduced a survey of event professionals in the United States across a variety of industries to get a better view of the current event marketing landscape, and Holmen shared some preliminary findings (the full report will be available in January) as well as his predictions for the year ahead and beyond — here are five of the biggest trends on his radar:

1. Data, Data, and More Data

“The punchline to what the landscape looks like now is that event marketers and planners have embraced data,” says Holmen. Event strategy has previously largely been about getting more attendees at the event, but data has changed the game.

“It's been much more about using data to drive the right kind of events and curating events based on the data that you get about the attendees and target market,” he says. 26 percent of respondents to Splash’s recent survey indicated that their first priority when measuring event success in 2022 will be to attract the right attendees, while only 16 percent noted that it will be to attract more attendees.

This more targeted approach is helping marketers drive conversions at events and deliver more value to both attendees and exhibitors/sponsors, and means that ensuring their tech stacks play nicely with each other is more important than ever, which leads us into the next trend…

2. Integrations Will Be Essential

Holmen shares that event software, including Splash, has seen a massive increase in available integrations across different tools. In the past, he explains, not as many worried about their integrations with CRM or marketing automation systems, but that’s now a market requirement.

“That’s super exciting,” says Holmen, “because that's essentially the digital transformation headline that we've been seeing across marketing tech for 10 years now. Now it’s coming to event marketers for the first time.”

In addition, he predicts that the integration of virtual and in-person event programs on one platform will continue to drive growth in the space. Event tech software has already been doubling down on its “all-in-one” messaging, but Holmen notes that according to Splash’s data, around 67 percent of companies are still using the same virtual tools that they had been before the pandemic, such as Zoom.

“I think there's going to be a big disruption as event marketers put in-person events and virtual into one platform,” he explains. “Zoom is fine for podcasts and webinars, but it doesn't create a great experience…I think there's going to be some changes on the virtual tooling.”

When it comes to marketing automation tools alone, there is still a lot of exploration going on — he shares that the number of B2B companies using Splash’s freemium product is up over 300 percent just in the last couple of quarters, as “they’re starting to dabble into how these tools make sense for them and how to they fit in. It’s been great for our business, and I think the rest of the market is seeing that. There's a lot of value in this market.”

3. Hybrid Event Programs Will Be Better Defined

“If data is the big headline for what's going to happen in the future with events, the sub headline is this context of, what is a hybrid event, what's a virtual event, what's an in-person event, and how do we configure these things together?” says Holmen. “And it wasn't a question that event marketers really asked a couple years ago.”

Before the pandemic, things were much more siloed: there were webinars that were usually run by digital marketers, and in-person events run by event marketers. “Those two things really lived in different parts of the organization,” notes Holmen. “And now, event marketers are really learning to master when and how to use a virtual event.”

He shares that based on Splash’s data, virtual events tend to average eight to 10 more registrations than their in-person counterparts, while attendance rates tend to be lower — around 35 percent. However, event marketers started to see the increase in registrations as a great tool to build a database of target attendees. They can then use in-person events as part of the same program to convert the higher-value attendees and use the data they’ve collected to build an even more curated, impactful agenda and experience for the in-person event.

“We're seeing that hybrid events aren't necessarily simulcast,” says Holmen, “but they’re a set of programs for event marketers where they have a virtual event, and then following that, they have a number of in-person events. So the hybrid part is really the total program, not just the single event.

“We're seeing that just under half of companies are planning to do more virtual events next year than they did this year (46 percent), which is pretty amazing. And about the same number (50 percent) are planning to do more in-person events, so it looks like hybrid is the future.”

4. Event Marketers Will Play a Bigger Strategic Role

According to Holmen, event marketers are getting a much bigger seat at the table, and the reason comes back to data. “Event marketers have learned to manage digital tools so much more during the pandemic,” he says, “so they’re coming in with more than the typical ROI. The old event marketer data set was pretty much how many people registered, how many attended, did people feel good about the experience. And now they're coming in reporting on actual ROI, actual pipeline development and pipeline conversion rates in ways that they just historically haven't done.”

He shares that more and more, event marketers are getting the authority to run what had previously been webinars, and turn them into true events and experiences that relate to the full program. Historically, he explains, the big difference between event marketers and digital marketers is that digital marketers tend to think and operate programmatically, while event marketers tend to think and act episodically — they have this one event, and they put all of their effort into it.

“Now, event marketers are becoming more programmatic marketers, rather than episodic, and that's really exciting. New tools and playbooks have to emerge to support that, which is starting to happen.”

5. Competition Will Increase

“Because event marketers are becoming so good at getting the right mix of events, the space is also going to become more competitive,” says Holmen. “Those attendees that are in high demand are going to be chased with smarter tools and smarter event marketing.”

The ability to stand out and stay relevant to those attendees will become increasingly challenging, which is something many events are already dealing with. “There really need to be consistently great experiences and very tightly curated content,” says Holmen.

All in all, despite the challenges, Holmen notes that it’s “an amazing time to be an event marketer. It's like being in a catalog business and then having internet happen — you’re just in the right place at the right time. And event marketers are in the right place at the right time for what we're calling the Roaring 20s. The return to in person events after a two-year pandemic is going to be thrilling, and what a time to be in event marketing.”