CHICAGO — In 2026 and beyond, attracting and retaining audiences and attendees will make the difference between a healthy show and a weakening one. As workforce demographics begin to skew toward Millennials and Gen Z, show organizers need to focus on not just bringing new audiences in — but keeping them coming back — to ensure their shows don’t suffer from the increases in Boomer and Gen X workers retiring.
To address this industry issue, Trade Show Executive (TSE) is publishing a special feature on tried-and-true attendee acquisition and retention strategies to give industry leaders a leg up on their competition.
To keep young professionals and early-career professionals on the cutting-edge, TSE put together a special sneak peek at our upcoming attendee acquisition strategy story for the Young Professionals Corner.
Trends for 2026: What’s Hot and What’s Not
To get some expert insight into what’s trending across the board in 2026 for attendee acquisition, TSE checked in with Caitlin Fox, President at mdg, a Freeman Company, to get the lowdown on what’s in and what’s out this year.
Here’s what Fox shared:
HOT
- Hyper-personalized journeys
- AI-augmented audience engines
- Influencer & peer stories
- Ongoing digital community touchpoints
- Real-time insight loops
NOT
- Spray-and-pray email blasts
- “Event feature”-first messaging
- One-off seasonal campaigns
- Rigid audience personas
- Siloed sponsor/attendee strategies
Bringing in New Audiences
When it comes to attracting new audiences, TSE talked with Leaders at Coffee Fest and The NAMM Show to learn what tactics are moving the needle in bringing in first-timers.
Coffee Fest, which is produced by Clarion Events North America, runs four shows per year with two of those moving to new cities each year. As the show heads into new cities, the team starts from scratch in building up a local audience with a strategy guided by three main pillars: awareness, community and content.
“Social media gives us the opportunity to tell a story about Coffee Fest. We can show through images, testimonials and stats what our event is all about,” said Samantha Grimaldi, Senior Group Marketing Director at Clarion Events North America. “We focus a lot on show images, specifically with people enjoying the show, so that we can help prospective attendees really picture themselves at the event — whether that be in an education session, taking a hands-on learning class or enjoying the show floor.”
Along with using visuals on social media to draw new attendees in, Coffee Fest relies on peer-to-peer marketing to help build trust fast and lower the barrier to that first registration.
For The NAMM Show, which is produced by the National Association of Music Merchants, the team dug into their existing audience to find groups being overlooked.
A deep dive into subsegments of their audience revealed that there were “new” audiences within the existing groups that could be targeted and attracted with more personalized messaging and programming tailored to their needs.
“Segmentation is important to us. The NAMM Show is not just one audience, but a collection of dozens of audiences defined by the value they bring to exhibitors,” NAMM CEO John Mlynczak said. “We look at core industry relationships like buyers, retailers and distributors, but also value-add relationships like artists, influencers and educators. Within each audience, we then determine if we are attracting them for each industry-product segment and globally. The core new audience is influencers and content creators, but we also look at new as a part of an existing audience that we may not getting from a certain region.”
Generating Team and Group Registrations
Another way to increase registration and participation numbers is to attract groups and teams to your events. TSE checked in with Manifest and FDIC International to get best practices for attracting teams.
At Manifest, an event for the logistics and supply chain industry, a focus of the attendee acquisition strategy has been on bringing buying teams to its event.
To attract these groups, the show has a small team of people who do direct buyer recruitment, and this team has conversations with buyers and directly sells them on the benefits of bringing a team to the show. The process of convincing a company to invest in sending a team to the show can take multiple cycles, and the quality of the relationship between the Manifest team and their buyers is of utmost importance to create a kind of trust that leads to increased participation.
“This takes a direct approach of targeting people and companies, building relationships with them and sharing the benefits directly through conversations,” Muller said. “We do have a hosted-buyer page on our website that outlines all of the benefits, but the teams usually come in when one of our team members has had a direct conversation, and has explained to them the benefit to their organization of having all the cross-functional people in attendance and how it can transform their business.”
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For FDIC International, a significant driver of group registrations is its package pricing.
In order to create group plans that best served the audience, the FDIC International team took feedback from attendees seriously — and budget predictability was a recurring theme.
“Our group packages had two key components. First, we introduced tiered pricing that started with as few as three department members. The more people you bring, the more you save,” said Sarah Domzalski, Senior Marketing Manager, Fire Rescue, at Clarion Events North America. “This was a major shift from previous years, where discounts only applied after bringing 10 or more attendees. By lowering the threshold, we made group savings more accessible and incentivized departments to add more members to maximize their discount.”
The feedback also led to two different registration passes: the traditional conference pass and the all-new Training All-Inclusive pass.
Earning Loyalty and Driving Retention
Retention is a clear signal of whether a show is delivering real value to its audience, and it’s a metric that the Equip Exposition team tracks closely.
“For returning attendees, our messaging assumes familiarity with the core experience — they already know the scale, the energy and the value of being there,” said Kris Kiser, CEO of the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute, which owns and produces Equip Exposition. “So, we focus on helping them go deeper: highlighting new exhibitors, emerging product categories, fresh education tracks or experiences they may have missed. It’s about showing them there’s always more to discover, even if they’ve been coming for years.”
Along with intentional messaging that highlights what is new from the year before, Equip Exposition focuses on enhancing the elements of the show that help drive people back year after year.
To get the full story from all these leaders and more, subscribe to receive TSE today. Subscribe to the print magazine here, or sign up to get the digital edition and regular TSE updates here.
Feature Photo highlights the show floor from FDIC International.
