DALLAS — Freeman recently released its Trends Report: What’s Keeping Audiences Away, outlining the way non-attendees evaluate and value events to help organizers understand where they can enhance marketing efforts and ultimately win over this group of untapped professionals.
Unlike prior Freeman Trends Reports, this new report focuses on the insights collected from non-attendees, a critical cohort to understand in order to unlock greater growth and relevance.
Trade Show Executive was onsite at Freeman’s Inside LIVE event at the National Restaurant Association Show when the report was released, and caught up with Annie Malone, Vice President of Strategy and Insights at Freeman, to dig into the report’s findings more.
Key Data Points
- Most non-attendees cited “value for the cost” as the main reason to miss an event.
Non-attendees are just as focused on their business objectives as attendees are, but non-attendees do not see how an event’s programming will help them achieve their goals.
“There was a time when we all used to say, ‘We get to go to this event.’ You’d get to go, delegate your stuff to someone else and when you come back there was a very low bar for ROI,” Malone said. “What we’re seeing in the industry, and in particular among younger generations and post-pandemic, is people looking at it as, ‘I have to go.’ And once the conversation changes to you have to go, now you must have a clear value proposition. You have to be intensely curious about your audience to figure that out.”
- 60% of non-attendees said education sessions on topics of interest and only available in person would be valuable enough to make them attend despite the cost factors noted previously.
Events that lead with clear value propositions around learning in their marketing toward non-attendees could appeal enough to convert them into participants.
“With the non-attendee report, what we’re really uncovering is that there is a huge audience that is thinking critically about the education organizers are offering and saying it’s not enough. It’s too high level; I can get it online. They’re looking for much more,” Malone said. “We’ve been talking about it through the lens of ‘Monday morning value’ — I want to be a better professional than I was when I left for an event.”
- 51% of non-attendees said top experts attending and being available for networking would be valuable enough to make them attend despite the cost factors noted previously.
Subject matter experts remain a top draw to events for non-attendees and attendees alike, who prefer to connect with them in the exhibit hall and sessions rather than salespeople and celebrity speakers.
- 79% of non-attendees said advanced education was very or extremely important to the onsite experience, while 66% said hands-on learning was very or extremely important.
While recent attendees put high value on network-building elements of an event, non-attendees need to understand what they’ll learn at a B2B event that they can only get face-to-face to make them become attendees.
“Our research shows there is a missing element around education, and it goes back to online versus in-person,” Malone said. “I don’t think the education has to be so unique that you can’t find it anywhere else, but it has to be better than what they can find online.”
Related. Freeman’s Learning Trends Report Reveals What Attendees Value at In-Person Educational Experiences
- The top three most important experiential elements for non-attendees are: hands-on interactions or immersive experiences; a customized guide for how I can make the most of an event; and technology that makes consuming the event easier.
For non-attendees, the experience of an event is driven by the achievement of objectives and hands-on or immersive opportunities. Special events and even an event’s location are not as important to non-attendees as they are to recent attendees.
“There is an element of wanting to have fun (at an event), and there’s an equally important element about optimizing what I came to do and my objectives as an attendee,” Malone said. “I would say organizers are putting a lot of time and energy into what we’ve historically thought of as experience, but not what the attendees think of as the experience.”
- When looking at the top factors that positively influence networking experiences at an event, 48% of non-attendees said they’d value professional challenges discussions and 47% said they’d value industry topic-specific discussions.
Networking opportunities that revolve around professional challenges or industry-specific topics are highly valued by non-attendees, who haven’t yet built up their network of other attendees and contacts.
“There are some findings in the report around networking and truly building your network. That can be hard for organizers to wrap their heads around because they have opening receptions and a big party and all these happy hours,” Malone said. “But, let’s face it: That’s where you’re basically hanging out with people you already know. When it comes to meeting new people, that’s where roundtables and things like that come into play.”
What Next: How Organizers Can Leverage Insights
Like previous Freeman reports, the Non-Attendee Audience Report offers event organizers action items that will help them in attracting more of their desired audiences.
- Speak to the priorities that non-attendees identified as key to their work and careers
- Share content that leans into the learning elements at an event, particularly around advanced education and hands-on or participatory opportunities
- Center networking around problem solving and topic-based discussions and showcase how it delivers substance through marketing efforts
- Make it clear to non-attendees that an event offers hands-on opportunities to evaluate products and services
“One of the biggest revelations we’ve had about the XLNC framework and through the Trends Reports is the findings disrupted how we think about these things (experience, learning, networking, commerce),” Malone said. “One thing that can be helpful, although it’s harder than it sounds, is to start to break that paradigm of what you think these XLNC elements really are at your event and start creating more opportunities to deliver on them better.”
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