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Flagship (or tentpole) events have played an essential role in many business strategies for decades. However, amongst a crippling pandemic, labor shortages and a drawn-out period of challenging economics, some of the excitement around events — and their business value — has led to a slight shift in philosophy. Recently, there has been an emphasis on smaller-scale events that deliver targeted content to highly curated audiences of varying sizes.
In fact, a soon-to-be-released Splash survey found that 36% of marketing and event professionals said intimate events produced the most ROI for their organizations, while just 16% pointed to larger events. It’s not surprising that more intimate events have outperformed larger conferences and exhibitions in the last two years. At Splash, our customers generally define these “everyday” events as serving between 70 and 150 well-qualified people. Rather than sending invites to an entire database, these organizations create a highly curated list based on their target audience.
Our internal research shows that, unlike tradeshows, the average number of attendees in the corporate meeting sector is 108. Conversely a Skift Meetings study uncovered that attendance numbers across events are down, trending at 65% of 2019 numbers. This convergence of data points indicates “right-sized” events are growing in importance and effectiveness, and there are three compelling reasons:
1. Relevant Attendance
In the events space, the saying “quality over quantity” is true: Repeatable everyday events that focus on connection and engagement provide attendees with more (and more valuable) networking benefits, better learning opportunities and highly customized content.
By contrast, massive events focus more on the size of the audience than the quality, and often create a disconnected, “lost in the crowd” feeling. When viewed through this lens, larger events appear less worthy of the enormous effort needed to execute…..
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