Here a nice report with figures about the overall event business in the US publiced on 17-07-2007.

CMP Report 2007

This is the link to one of the resources for the report:
Futurewatch 2007

Here a few links where you can find some nice reports about (event)marketing and trends.

CMO Council - Staging and Gauging

CMO Council - Marketing Outlook 2007

Global Intelligence Alliance - Market Intelligence in Large Companies –Global Study 2007
For the full report read the last page of the presentation

The Economist Intelligence Unit - 12 Megatrends in B2B marketing

The Economist Intelligence Unit - CEO Briefing 2007

Hope they are of some use to you.

Kind regards,

Daan

Knowledge is power.
In the land of the blind, one eye is king.

These are just a few sayings that apply to today’s corporate jungle.
In a report of the GIA (Global Intelligence Alliance) you can see that Market / Competitor / Customer Intelligence is finding it’s way to the board room to assist the CxO’s in making strategic decisions which way to go.

In another report of the CMO Council the following key challenges are addressed:

• Quantify and measure the value of marketing programs and investments (44%)
• Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the marketing organization (39%)
• Grow customer knowledge, insight and conversations (34%)

A report by The Economist Intelligence Unit sums up the 12 mega trends in B2B marketing.
Mega trend no. 1 is the shift to a 360 degrees thought leadership.
When the marketers were asked what the most important non-traditional marketing activity was the majority said Meetings & Conferences (A 3.85 out of 5, First place)

In all of these reports the aspect of ROI on marketing investments is mentioned.
To be able to generate maximum ROI on your investments knowledge of the possibilities you have, where to spend your marketing budget on, is a very important necessity.

This is the primary goal of CXO Event Network when it comes to event marketing.
Event marketing is is such an important element in the total marketing strategy because it’s one of the few occasions that (potential) customers want to be informed on what choices they have when looking for a solution to their problems or what the possibilities are to move forward. This is also called ‘Permission’ marketing.
With other traditional marketing methods like E-mail marketing, advertising, tele-sales decision makers are confronted with your companies information when they don’t want to be bothered most of the time, also called interruption marketing.

Another important element why event marketing is so successfully is because of the face-to-face contact.
Instead of creating a monologue like in advertising and e-mail marketing the customer is able to give input and get the exact information necessary to come to a decision what’s best for his organization.

CXO Event Network enables marketing departments of all companies to determine:

• What is the best event to reach my target group
• What event is best suited for sponsoring, supplying speakers, attending with a stand
• What is the best time frame to initiate a in-company event for customers
• What is my competition doing (exhibiting, sponsoring, speaking)

Marketing departments will also be able advertise on CXO Event Network. This way without attending or sponsoring the event-organization they are able to reach an even broader audience than if they would sponsor the event itself.
In a report of the Event Industry Alliance (E.I.A.) a graph shows the the no. 1 reason for exhibiting on an event is the increase of brand awareness. CXO Event Network enables to increase the awareness by providing companies with a number of services:

• Sponsoring (based on industry, tag words, search queries)
• Option for visitors / customers to ask questions from our website about products/services (like Yahoo’s Q&A).
• Talk to an expert option for visitors. This option will make sure that the right people will be available when the customer comes to your stand.
• Possibility to attach your corporate blog to our site or create one directly attached to our site

The blog function is added because we want to give companies the ability to show their thought leadership on certain subjects.
On this mini-site all the events that a company attends with a speaker, stand or sponsors is showed.
Visitors can select to get an alert if one or multiple mini-sites get updated with new data.

Why should event organizers use our website?
The most important reason is probably that they get more exposure of their event. Which will increase the number of attendees.
Because the looking for events are interested in solutions to the issues they are struggling with and not the organization that organizes the event they will rather go to the CXO Event Network-site than to a event organizer-site (a link to the official event-home page is presented in the event details).

In the E.I.A. report there’s also a graph that shows the sources companies use to decide where to exhibit.
If you add up the values mentioned for the sources Search Engine and Expo Database it comes in on second place below Trade associations.
We are planning to provide these associations with a free calendar service that they can integrate in their website, which will redirect visitors to our site.
This service will also be made available to companies

Some other tools for event organizers that we’ll provide:

• Event rating system
• Location rating system
• Speaker rating
• Reports on trends in the B2B event business based on polls and intelligence out of the CXO database.
• Sponsor matching (what are potential sponsors for your event based on previous sponsoring)

In the future our website will also provide assistance in finding experts on certain topics, by using the speaker-search option, online event organization collaboration-tools and more…..