Are In-Person Events Worth the Investment?
When I ran a software company, we agonized over spending on the HIMSS Global conference and regional HIMSS events. We also struggled with how do virtual events well.? In this post, we will dive into questions I have wondered about for two decades: What is the value of in-person events, is there a positive ROI and are virtual events the future of events?
Why We Continue to Do in In-person Events
Last week, I spoke with a dozen healthtech marketing leaders to get their thoughts on events. Their companies ranged from sub $5 million to $1 billion+ in revenues.
While they were all skeptical about the value of events there were five key benefits of why in-person healthcare events beat out virtual events:
Do In-person Events Deliver a Positive ROI?
?The overall theme from the healthtech marketer group was that they were skeptical of positive ROI from large trade show booths and saw better results from small meetings and targeted outreach.
The revenue impact was hard or impossible to quantify for most.
Only one of the group could provide metrics showing his events do generate MQLs and opportunities. This marketer said that their presence at events generated about $500-600k average deal size and 70 MQLs from their investment, which he saw as a decent ROI.?
None of the other marketers felt that in-person events delivered a measurable ROI. The main value was brand awareness and networking with partners
Moreover, third-party data on the positive ROI is hard to come by. In my research, I could not find anything that I felt proved empirically that there was a strong positive ROI.
Is Virtual Overtaking In-person?
The COVID-19 pandemic forced a near-complete shutdown of in-person conferences and trade shows. As every healthtech firm went virtual over those two years, there was a big question after the pandemic subsided as to whether or not in-person would come back. Or would everyone stick with virtual events?
For healthcare providers, research and surveys suggest the answer is in-person events are still king.
According to a survey by Onyx Health, 70% of healthcare professionals prefer in-person over virtual events [1]. Reasons include better networking, engaging content, seeing/touching products, and meaningful conversations [1].?
Another survey found 72% prefer in-person events for networking, engagement, product interaction, conversations, and immersive learning [5].?
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Can't Live With Them, Can't Live Without Them
The conclusion, I came to through my conversations with marketers and various resources I came across is that:
The marketers I spoke with fell into two camps:
Any experimentation is going to happen with smaller, more targeted, and regional events.
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Chief Marketing & Experience Officer
1 年Adam this is very useful as it also is applicable to start-up through large company- sometimes “we have always done this show / what would people say if we aren’t there?” becomes a justification for attendance- and this mindset needs to be brought current given the other ways to #getpersonal
Recovering healthtech entrepreneur and self-confessed ABM nerd
1 年BTW and on the subject of events we are doing a webinar about webinars next week https://www.dhirubhai.net/events/howdoimaximizethevalueofwebinar7102721403417759746/comments/
Je fais cro?tre votre entreprise | Consultante Growth Marketing | ABM | DemandGen | Trilingue anglais, fran?ais et espagnol
1 年Great points. I believe omnichannel events (leveraging digital and offline channels) Ia a good way to go about events in orden to keep events budget and KPIs under control. I
Strategic Sales Leader who GETS Marketing | Growing Revenue | Executive Member @ Pavilion
1 年Good insight and haven't seen another post like this. Thanks for highlighting this. My experience validates the ROI challenge. I would add that Marketing budgets can be based solely on 12 months (fiscal or calendar) and therefore often can't track leads that mature out of cycle. This means that there can be an ROI but it doesn't show in your metrics. I agree that smaller venues seem to produce more. I would also add that the appointment based events surprisingly don't yield measurable value - I am seeing more offers for these this year.
As a B2B Go-to-Market Leader for High-Growth, Mid-Market and Enterprise Companies I help executive leadership orchestrate GTM for better outcomes.
1 年Adam Turinas This is so true. Events are elusive to measure. But in my last article about connecting event marketing to overall GTM, I touch on ways to measure events successfully: 1. Pre & Post cSAT and NPS Surveying Analyzed by ICP / Stakeholder 2. New Logo & Deal Pipeline Acceleration But the key is event teams are still in the rat race of connecting events to list acquisition. And this is a false metric. More here: https://theb2bbuzz.beehiiv.com/p/3-keys-to-ensure-your-events-strategy-aligns-with-your-gtm