MARIETTA, Georgia — In a recent webinar presented by the Society of Independent Show Organizers (SISO) Marketing Interest Group, Ken Holsinger, senior vice president of data solutions at Freeman, told it like it is: Connection is the driving force behind attendees’ willingness to return to live trade shows. “Attendees have different priorities now. Trade shows are more densely populated per capita, and people are ready to make purchasing decisions. Even at professional education events, we see more people in the networking areas than in the sessions.” When he recently spoke at the annual meeting of Meeting Professionals International, he said there were more people mingling in the lobby than in his session. “And I was happy about that.”
Holsinger has been tracking attendee sentiment since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has collected 3 million survey responses. This latest iteration from June, with 7,778 participants and 1,220 respondents, found that 85% of surveyed attendees plan to return to B2B events this winter (December 2021-February 2022) and 94% plan to return by next spring. For the first time in 8 waves of research, “Ready” is now the dominant sentiment, replacing “Cautious,” and overall positive sentiment about returning to events has increased from 45% to 57%.
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On the exhibitor side, Holisinger said companies should share data on how the demographics of the average B2B trade show attendee (in terms of age, education, income), when tracked alongside data on who has been vaccinated, can be used to predict that about 89% of attendees will be vaccinated. If manufacturing is excluded, that number jumps to 92%.
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Holsinger acknowledged that the Delta variant was “the elephant in the room,” but he had encouraging news regarding where the United States stands on this latest threat.
“We’ve been following the UK situation 2-3 weeks before the end of the year and they’re starting to come out of it. It’s not just because of an increase in vaccinations. Some of the relief they’re seeing may be related to that, but a lot of it is related to the most vulnerable populations getting vaccinated. That’s slowing things down. It’s easy to get lost in the headlines, but we have to let the data do the talking.”
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Exhibitors need to rethink how they think about trade show ROI, he said. “The model we were looking at pre-COVID, where we were always talking about quantity, like the number of exhibitors and attendees, was an exercise in futility. We need to focus on quality. We need to think more like a hosted buyer community and match audiences to their business needs, rather than saying, ‘If you build it, they will come.’”
Find this and other research by Freeman here.
Contact Ken Holsinger at (214) 445-1000 or ken.holsinger@freeman.com