Emerging Trends for Events Industry in 2022

On 10 March 2022, Venuerific hosted their first physical event after two years, exclusively attended by 45 corporate event organisers. “Emerging Trends for Events Industry in 2022” was hosted to provide an outlook of the events industry with new data and insights, presented by:

1. Veemal Gungadin, the Vice President of Digital & Innovation at SACEOS as well as the Founder & CEO of GEVME, a fast-growing event tech platform.
2. Firdaus Salim, Marketing Evangelist at Mice Neurol, a company for creating impactful virtual and hybrid events.
3. Robert Lai, Founder & CEO of Kaliber Performance Marketing, a leading consultancy for fast-growth companies in APAC.

Click here to download this article and share with your colleagues!

SMM Update for MICE Events

To begin, Veemal explains the newest update on Safe Management Measures for events in Singapore. The updates including: 

Starting 29 March 2022,

1. The permissible group size for social gatherings will be increased from 5 persons to 10 persons for mask-off activities.
2. Mask-wearing is mandatory for indoor settings when people leave their homes, but will be optional in outdoor settings. 
3. Safe distancing is encouraged but will not be required between individuals or groups in all mask-on settings. However, a safe distance of 1 metre will continue to be required for mask-off settings. 
4. For smaller events and settings of up to 1,000 pax, events can proceed without being subject to any capacity limit.
5. For large events and settings of more than 1,000 pax2 and that are mask-on, capacity limits will be increased to 75%.
6. Outdoor live performances and busking will be allowed to resume at all venues, including F&B establishments.

Parameter	Current Posture
Group Size	10 at a time
Mask-wearing	Required for indoors, optional for outdoors
Safe Distancing	1 metre safe distance when mask off
Capacity	75% for large settings and events sizes of >1,000 pax

Hybrid Events are Not Something New?

Veemal gives an insight about the long history of hybrid events, which were introduced by UBM Studios. 10 years ago, UBM Studios offered many products to complement and enhance in-person events by providing added digital or online components. However, this product didn’t attract many customers as online events weren’t prevalent a decade ago. However, Covid-19 has driven people to seek for a solution on hosting events making hybrid events and emerging trends.

Omnichannel Experience

In order to make use of the emerging trends where people no longer depend on solely one channel, Veemal introduced us to Omnichannel Experience for events. Putting the customer at the centre of focus allows us to use multiple tools to reach them. Therefore, those multiple tools should be used to promote the events throughout the event lifecycle itself. Some examples could be Twitter Feed, Facebook Livestream, Text Messages, Gamification, and many more. 

The Importance of Micro Events

One strategy that are used by many organisers of a successful event is to create micro events. Micro event is an event with a small number of participants to talk about some topics that resonate with a niche audience that is more engaging and held at higher frequency. It’s best to use micro events to grab the attention of the customer, leading up to the main event. 

Moreover, producing micro contents for social media is also a key to engage with more audiences, such as making use of blog articles, videos, and interactive social media posts.

---

3 Key Lessons for Hybrid Events

Firdaus from Mice Neurol continues to explain the 3 key lessons he learned from organising one of the largest hybrid conferences in 2021, the World Cities Summit 2021.

Interaction, Interaction, Interaction!

The success in hybrid events comes from the interplay between physical & virtual. We need to provide the audience with the ability to interact physically and virtually seamlessly. Interaction itself comes from a few different aspects such as consistency, perceivability, learnability, predictability, and feedback.

People are Fussy About Agenda

It is crucial to share a precise schedule of the event to your audience and make sure to follow it through. People’s behaviours during physical and virtual events are different. During online or hybrid events, people will most likely only attend specific sessions that they’re interested in. With a published event agenda, the audience are most likely to have an expectation on what’s coming, prepared a question, and ready to engage.

Engineering Engagement from Ground Up

There’s a multiple layer in achieving successful engagement, starting with the interface, data/content, to the tech side. Hybrid events are all about an integration of experiences. It is not merely an event with a separated physical and online participation. With the right preparation, event organisers can create an Integrated Hybrid Events that have physical participation combined with virtual ones. 

---

Why Use TikTok for Events?

TikTok is considered a new player when it comes to social media platforms. However, Robert pointed out many reasons why TikTok is a great platform for promoting events and why is it the events industry’s emerging trends. Right now, TikTok has a significantly higher engagement level than any other social media platform. With 35 minustes per day, TikTok is the number one social media platforms with the most average time spent per day by US adult users. In Singapore, the average time spent on TikTok by adults is around 70 minutes. 

Moreover, TikTok also has an advantage when it comes to funnel-ad solutions. What TikTok does is drive awareness for your content as the first step. They do it by focusing on increasing the number of reach or home many times the video shows on For You page. After that, it will show your content towards a more targeted audience. Lastly, TikTok will help you to add a call to action tool with their features such as Display Cards, Voting Stickers, and many more.

For targeting, TikTok has a robust range of targeting options to align our event with the right intended audience. What’s interesting is that the cost of advertising on TikTok can be 4 times cheaper than other leading social media ad networks. Depending on the number of targeting options selected, the CPM (Cost per Thousand) in Singapore can be as low as SGD $2.50.

TikTok Creator Marketplace

TikTok Creator Marketplace is a collaboration platform that gives the opportunity for brands and creators to connect. With this, creators can collaborate with brands on both paid and reward-based campaigns. This platform allows brands to work with multiple creators for a campaign. However, it is important to avoid making repeated content across the creators. Last but not least, Make sure the creators can translate our brief into their own branding, personality, and style to make a unique content that resonates with their audience. 

The key learnings from Venuerific’s “Emerging Trends for Events Industry in 2022” are going to help organisers in promoting their events for pre, during, and post events. Corporate event organisers could implement these data and insights in order to achieve the most out of their product launch, corporate seminars, training, and many other events. Stay tuned on Venuerific’s social media for upcoming insightful events!