The widespread adoption of virtual events during the pandemic has brought marketing and event teams closer together as events suddenly needed to leverage digital marketing strategies and more audience data has been collected than ever before.
According to a new report released by the CMO Council in partnership with Cvent, titled NextGen Events: Optimized for Outcomes, many organizations are increasingly working towards aligning their event portfolios to marketing outcomes — although there is still work to be done. The majority (57 percent) of respondents to their survey, which included 150 global marketing leaders, said that events across their organizations are now owned and managed by marketing and aligned to an overarching marketing plan.
20 percent indicated that their events remain siloed and managed by multiple departments, but the overall outlook is optimistic: 65 percent believe that as a result of lessons learned during the pandemic, event marketing will mature, and events of all formats will move under the marketing team’s umbrella.
“The digital transformation within the meetings and events channel has driven positive changes that will remain even after in-person events fully come back…This tighter alignment between teams and tech will allow CMOs to look closer and more holistically across an entire channel of events, aiming to draw out deep insights and scrutinize both single-event and cross-event performance of any format or type,” said Cvent CMO Patrick Smith in the report.
However, event marketers are still facing challenges when it comes to organizing virtual and hybrid events that deliver value — they prefer and are more comfortable with in-person events, by far. 36 percent indicated that they are effective or very effective at executing virtual events and 42 percent said the same for hybrid, compared to 76 percent for in-person.
Furthermore, 36 percent of event marketers have experienced a drop-off in engagement for virtual events and webinars. There is certainly still a place for virtual events, especially when it comes to audience reach, but after two years of nearly exclusively virtual events, the industry will need to find a balance moving forward between in-person and virtual formats — which is the name of the game in 2022.
GfK Global CMO Gonzalo Garcia Villanueva presents a potential strategy for differentiating hybrid event audiences, which, interestingly, is what Salesforce did for its Dreamforce event last year: “You know who you want in person so you invite them only to the live event,” he noted in the report. “You know who’s probably not going to travel so you invite them to the digital one. For those who haven’t engaged with your communications, you offer digital at the last minute. That was a massive learning.”
Moving forward, event marketers plan to continue to experiment with different formats for different types of events to determine what works and what doesn’t — 71 percent of respondents said that they will be trialing new event formats, agendas, or designs as they prepare for future events. As part of this learning and experimentation, in-person events will increasingly include digital elements to appeal to a wider audience, with the top three being online event platforms, on-demand content, and connecting in-person and remote audiences.