While 2021 was a much better year for events than 2020, the industry is poised to see more massive recovery in 2022, even if the year started out a bit rockier than we would have liked. Trade show organizer Emerald recently released its first annual B2B Events Industry Outlook report for 2022, illustrating some of the trends that will shape the industry moving forward.
The report is based on a survey of over 1,000 B2B vendors, planners, and attendees in the US and Canada and was developed by Content4Demand, G3 Communications, Emerald’s content strategy and marketing agency.
Notably, the report indicated that B2B vendors and attendees are looking for more ways to connect throughout the year, outside of live events — whether digitally or in-person. 62 percent of attendee respondents said that they would like live event organizers to offer webinars throughout the year. The next most popular suggestions were meetups and networking opportunities (54 percent) and online roundtables or forums (50 percent).
All three groups indicated that their top three success metrics for 2022 and beyond will be the quality of contacts, the level of engagement with key contact, and the level of engagement beyond the few days of the event. When asked what they want more of from event organizers, attendees and B2B vendors both indicated more livestream offerings of keynotes and other event content as their top request, with better online access to sessions coming in second.
In addition, the report reflects a growing demand for e-commerce as part of year-round engagement opportunities. 84 percent of attendees and 67 percent of vendors indicated that they expect the ability to place orders online via e-commerce year-round will become more popular in their industries and that they want organizers to help facilitate these transactions. These trends are in line with other industry research, including ExpoPlatform and LECTURA’s recent report on heavy machinery buying.
“As we enter a time of recovery and resurgence, companies are re-evaluating their value propositions and go-to-market strategies to ensure they can quickly and effectively respond to changing B2B customer behaviors in both shopping and buying,” said Issa Jouaneh, Emerald Executive Vice President, in a statement.
Andrew Gaffney, President of Emerald’s G3 Communications division, added, “Events have served as the central part of pipeline building strategies for most B2B brands, and while the survey responses suggest that will continue, there are evolving expectations around how events will guide more of the entire buying journey.
“While the core, in-person aspect of an event will remain critical, companies appear to be looking for year-round engagement, diversification, commerce and community. Event organizers would do well to consider using content to build dialogue, meet buyers where they live and make it a more seamless process to move from discovery to evaluation to selection.”