Last week, our Club Ichi crew headed out to Seattle, Washington for our monthly in-person gathering and got to go behind the scenes at an escape room in Bellevue for some lunch-time brain twizzling.
But during lunch, we kicked of a meaty discussion about what's top of mind among our B2B event marketing friends.
Here's what we heard:
There's a lot of drinking from the firehose.
The volume of events has increased, but the staff and budget to execute them has decreased.
There is a desire to be with like-minded professionals to share challenges, but no time to step away and actually do it.
It's an omnichannel world out there, and there's no good answers to getting people's attention.
There's a lot of drinking from the firehose. Several of our participants were new to their roles, and this is indicative of many companies overall. While there hasn't been a ton of hiring across the market, the mass layoffs in tech had forced reorganizations and some rehiring of roles to fill some gaps. This means that many event professionals are in roles that are new to them, taking on a scope much larger than their predecessors and roles got smashed together for operational efficiencies. Newly opened roles on the market tend to be down-leveled from previously-held positions, often merging a Director role with a Senior Manager title and responsibilities. While Title Inflation may have been a post-pandemic trend, now Title Deflation and market salary corrections are rampant.
The volume of events has increased, but the staff and budget to execute them has decreased. Mega conferences have become downsized but replaced by multi-city roadshows, without adding team members or agencies to support them. Micro-events at third party tradeshows have taken "just the booth and the sponsorship" to a new "full funnel event" strategy where even the smaller shows are a full time job - again, without the added support of additional team members. Headcount is frozen, and budgets that could be put toward outside help are being eaten up by the cost of executing the events (with costs in general skyrocketing by over 30%).
There is a desire to be with like-minded professionals to share challenges, but no time to step away and actually do it. B2B event professionals want to commiserate with each other, validate that they are not the only ones feeling this, and share how they are managing these challenges, but the sheer overwhelm of time constraints prevents them from leaving the office, joining community gatherings, and actually networking with others.
It's an omnichannel world out there, and there's no good answers to getting people's attention. The standard marketing rule used to be that it takes 7 touchpoints to get someone to take action. In our noisy, omnichannel world, reports now say that is 15-21 touchpoints. And you have to hit them on social media, email, through advertising, content, word of mouth, referrals, and direct invitation if you want to get their attention. The reality is that this approach just ADDS to the noise and feelings of overwhelm on the sender and the receiver, but no one had any answers on how to fix it.
Personally, as a creator of micro-events, we continue to be overwhelmed by the challenges of getting people to show up. Even with a registration fee (though modest at $35), we had FOUR cancellations on the DAY OF THE EVENT. A 30% day-of cancellation is huge hit for anyone planning micro-events, no matter what industry you're in - and always a punch in the gut to have fellow event professionals do it, knowing that catering orders and other purchases have already been made.
This is a pattern for all of our monthly lunches, so it's not a surprise, and it's in line with industry averages, so the lesson for any micro-event producers is to continue to throttle down catering and gifting orders to plan for 30% attrition on paid events, and we heard that for free events, the no-show rates are in the 50% even for in-person events.
We'll be looking more into this kind of benchmarking data with our data partner, Vivastream over the coming months and releasing insights reports to Club Ichi Insiders.
Be sure to join us for our July Sounding Board to contribute to our data, metrics, and benchmarking roundup and help guide our reports!
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