Brandon Rafalson
Brandon Rafalson is the Content Marketing Strategist at Bizzabo, an event success platform that helps organizers manage, measure and grow professional events across the globe.
Bizzabo recently surveyed over 400 mid- to senior-level event marketers about the future of the industry. The result is Event Marketing 2018: Benchmarks and Trends.
With contemporary digital marketing practices, brands have the ability to reach more people with more targeted strategies than ever before. Yet at the same time, nothing can quite compare to a face-to-face conversation. This isn’t a nostalgic longing for simpler days. It’s what the data says.
The average Chief Marketing Officer allocates 24 percent of their total annual budget to live events in order to connect with customers, educate attendees and generate new leads. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, GE, HubSpot, Salesforce, L’Oreal, Google, Ford and Wells Fargo all understand the value of live events and have committed themselves to marketing strategies that place face-to-face interaction front and center. We are seeing unparalleled growth in marketing-led events.
An increased emphasis on live events being essential to marketing strategy has been aided and abetted by a new generation of technologies that have made it easier than ever for event marketers to manage, market and grow their events. Chief among these is the “event management software” industry, which is valued at $28 billion and is projected to have a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 3.3 percent moving forward. And there’s good reason for the industry to be growing, given that B2B events account for $512 billion in annual spend.
With these figures in mind, we set out to grab an authoritative pulse of the events industry. We asked over 400 mid- to senior-level event marketers from across the globe about their perspectives on where events are now and where they see the industry heading in the future.
The results were staggering.
Over the course of this month-long study, we expected to see event marketers express some degree of investment in the events industry. What we did not expect was the sheer enthusiasm for and commitment to events that respondents reported across all levels of the organizational hierarchy.
Below are key findings from the Event Marketing 2018: Benchmarks and Trends report.
Want to download the report for more insights? Grab your copy HERE.
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