Dive Into The 2024 State of Conferences Report
As comms and marketing professionals make plans for conferences throughout 2024, many are feeling optimistic — but so much remains uncertain.
Will marketing team budgets stay frozen? Will costs rise or fall? How does that affect teams’ abilities to successfully put together a conference, or send C-suite executives to speaking engagements? What does in-person conference attendance look like in 2024? How can organizers manage attendee expectations?
We sought answers to these questions and more in our State of Conferences report, presented with support from PR Week and AdWeek. For the second year in a row, we’ve surveyed hundreds of communications and marketing professionals to get answers to questions like: What is driving those decisions? Where will PR pros go and send their speakers? How much do in-person events impact key business metrics?
Here are just a few takeaways from our report:
In 2023, 49% of the respondents said they strongly believe speaking engagements at in-person conferences have the potential to materially impact their business; a four percent increase from the previous year. 78% of respondents say it's "very important" or "somewhat important" to attend in-person events in 2024. And 72% are responsible for gauging the ROI of attending, sponsoring and speaking at industry events — an uptake of 57% the previous year.
Across industries, comms and PR pros play an active role in determining speaking engagements for spokespeople — but nowhere are those numbers higher than at agencies (91% report conference and speaker strategy as part of their mandate). The vast majority of respondents work with a small number of company or brand spokespeople. Overall, though, it is clear that speaking engagements are a part of the majority of our respondents’ purview.
61% of our respondents say they anticipate the number of overall speaking engagements taken by their company’s/clients’ spokespeople to increase in 2024.
49% of respondents say they strongly believe speaking engagements at in-person conferences have the potential to materially impact their business, and 48% of respondents say it's "very important" for their company’s leadership and spokespeople to speak at in-person events.
Don’t miss out on key insights you need for planning your conference strategy this year. Download the report today.