Marketing B2B Events to GenZ and Beyond
Gen Z is not the future—they're already shaping the B2B world with their unique digital consumption habits. Learn why outdated tactics fail and what steps businesses must take to engage with this digital-native generation authentically.
By

Adam Malik
in

In this episode of the current podcast series, I hosted Karin Hausmann, and our conversation focused on the shift in the world of B2B marketing, particularly around events. This is unsurprising, as one of the main reasons I reached out to Karin was some research she had done regarding Gen Z. Let's call it "The Gen Z Wake-Up Call."
Listen to this article:
We touched on many things, and this article contains more research and facts supporting some of the podcast's statements.
There has always been a shift and difference in how generations consume information. With the rapid changes in technology, this shift is now rather less glacial. In fact, it is alarmingly rapid but still demarcated. This will become a challenge for many businesses today.
The concentration on email blasts and traditional tactics for audience acquisition is dangerous. The solution may not be plugging in generative AI to create a firehose of drivel. How do we adapt our audience acquisition to be more nuanced and highly authentic?
The Gen Z Wake-Up Call and What it Means
Karin's recent research highlighted the need to understand how Gen Z consumes information. This isn't just about understanding social media trends – it's about recognising that younger professionals are already in the workforce, making B2B purchasing decisions, but their information consumption habits are drastically different from what we have seen before.
They are used to quick, concise, visual content delivered through platforms like TikTok and Instagram. The same old tired email blasts won't cut it. We need to move past outdated, 2001-era marketing tactics to truly connect.
They're entering the professional sphere, making purchasing decisions, and influencing organisational strategies. However, their consumption habits diverge significantly from those of previous generations, demanding a rethink of long-held assumptions about effectively engaging with a B2B audience.
It's no longer sufficient to treat all professionals with the same tactics. This generation grew up with smartphones and social media as the central hubs of their information gathering. They've been nurtured in a digital world of quick hits of information delivered by visual content.
As Karin says in the podcast
Gen Z now, get lots of the news and information from social, from TikTok, wanna watch a video and wanna have it quick and short, but these people are already in the workplace… But currently the campaigns that are run across media and events are the same campaigns we used to run at least 2001 when I joined the workforce.
Now, contrast this statement with the tactics still in play, like lengthy emails, in-depth reports, and static, non-personalised website pages. This creates a significant barrier to reaching and resonating with this vital segment of the workforce for whom authenticity matters greatly. We are talking a different language than these digital natives we are trying to influence, not just in the future but now.
It's about recognising the fundamental shift in how this generation processes information. They are accustomed to immediate gratification and are more likely to disengage with overly verbose or difficult to consume inauthentic content. This has far-reaching implications for B2B marketing and event strategies.
The challenge is translating complex business information into a format that aligns with Gen Z's preferred consumption methods - video content, concise messaging, and user-friendly design with authenticity, I feel our normalised B2B speak may finally, I hope, be consigned to the recycle bin.

When Old Aquisiton Tactics Stop Working
This is the first truly "digital-native" generation, and this is reflected in their media consumption habits. These figures show us how much current B2B marketing leaders may have to change and invest in the knowledge or tools to engage with the B2B decision-makers of the future.
The numbers from various research results worldwide are consistent and help us paint a picture of this digitally native generation.
83% of Gen Z (ages 16-24) consume news online, compared to 68% of adults overall
93% of Gen Z own a smartphone, spending 57% of their daily audio time listening through mobile devices
Gen Z spends an average of 10.6 hours online daily, compared to 8.5 hours for Millennials
Social media plays a central role in Gen Z's world
63% of Gen Z (ages 16-24) access news via social media and do this on their mobile phones, compared to 39% of adults overall
Instagram (44%), Facebook (33%), Twitter (31%), and TikTok (29%) are the top news sources for Gen Z, with BBC One, (33%) being the only traditional media source in their top five from this UK centric research
94% of Generation Z use social media, but they are less loyal or concentrated on one platform
And there is a firm preference for visual content
95% of the online Gen Z population uses streaming video
Gen Z is 35% more likely to watch YouTube live streams than live TV, with even higher percentages for Instagram Live (51%) and TikTok (53%)
61% of Gen Z prefer short videos under one minute in length
The primary sources for these statistics are how younger generations consume news differently and Gen Z media habits.
Returning to the podcast, it is not just future channels that may need a rethink; there are other trends. As Karin says
Average email open rate, across B2B, is 25%, which is often a celebration of success. But actually, this means that the majority do not open your emails.
This starkly illustrates how much noise now exists in today's email ecosystem. Most emails sent by businesses are either ignored or relegated to spam filters. More emails may not be the answer.
This data suggests that we should question the effectiveness of email-centric campaigns and diversify channels to capture attention. The time, energy, and resources deployed in email marketing can and should be used elsewhere.
While a staple for B2B networking, LinkedIn does not provide the silver bullet for reaching the target audience. According to Karin
The average, I think only 16 percent of LinkedIn users log into LinkedIn every day.
In an experiment I conducted—to leave LinkedIn alone for two months—I received over 100 messages, effectively the same as cold emails. That, in my view, makes LinkedIn just an online Bazaar with vendors shouting naive variations of the same message.
The Problem with Personas and Why They dont work
As we closed out the podcast, we invariably touched on personas, which prompted me to make the statement.
Personas personally should be banned. I don't think they're fit for purpose.
It was in response to an observation that most events don't really know their audience. Personas are static and don't reflect the dynamic nature of today's workforce. What's important is understanding the audience's behaviour, motivations, and the job or outcome they are trying to achieve.

Here is some evidence to back up that statement and the realities we should accept
People behave differently across channels (e.g., social media vs. email) and contexts (e.g., work vs. down the pub).
Static personas fail to capture these evolving behaviours, making them less effective for addressing the fluid nature of modern consumer journeys.
They are more often than not done in week-long workshops, stuck into PowerPoint slides and forgotten.
They also oversimplify audience complexity
Modern segmentation techniques incorporate psychographic and behavioural data to create more nuanced audience profiles.
This approach allows marketers to craft personalised experiences that resonate with individuals rather than generic groups.
Neglect Data Driven Personalisation
AI and machine learning now allow for predictive segmentation, tailoring campaigns based on real-time insights into consumer preferences and behaviours.
Platforms like Netflix and Amazon exemplify this shift by using dynamic segmentation to deliver highly relevant recommendations.
Ignore multi-channel demands
Traditional personas fail to account for the diverse touchpoints in a multi-channel strategy.
Digitally focused personas or dynamic audience models are better suited to adapt messaging for different platforms and stages of the customer journey.
Are essentially ineffective in delivering results
They often require significant effort to create, usually by an agency or consultant, but fail to deliver actionable insights or measurable business impact.
Modern approaches focus on "jobs-to-be-done" frameworks or behavioural motivations rather than static demographic profiles.
The problem we are trying to fix, especially for annual B2B events, is that we need to know our audience; the problem is that these personas are too fixed and are not flexible enough to be actioned and used effectively.
Personas are typically built around job titles, demographics, and some generic interests. They often fail to consider more profound emotional and behavioural drivers influencing decision-making, particularly in B2B settings.
Another common pitfall of using traditional personas is that businesses create too many. Often, they will try to make one for every job role, and as Karin mentioned,
I've seen companies, big companies where they have like 30 personas. What do you do with 30 personas?
The sheer number of personas can become overwhelming and challenging to manage, leading to paralysis in decision-making and a loss of focus on the broader goals. They become an administrative exercise, a task to be ticked off the list, and as I have observed countless times, they are then pushed into a drawer and never seen again.
Getting to the outcome of understanding the motivations of your target audience means understanding the real-time behaviours and hooking up your data flows behind that outcome.
The Power of Community In Understanding Your Audience
Smaller, more agile companies are in charge of creating genuine communities. The value of these communities goes back to the need to understand your audience. If the value is solely measured in transactions to your event, you will miss the power of a genuine community.
The key difference between a community and a traditional marketing approach is its focus on shared purpose rather than sales. As Karin explained,
There's a lot of focus around real, it's often something with community anyway... and it's done differently and more meaningfully, and slowly because there is no, there's no shortcut for community. It doesn't just appear because you decided now that you want to create one.
Community is not a marketing channel or a sales tactic but a living, breathing entity that evolves organically over time. It certainly can't be done by buying an out-of-the-box ‘community platform’ and expecting a community to materialise overnight. This is a long-term process, not a quick fix.
The most successful communities are often built around a genuine desire to help members grow and succeed. This means focusing less on selling products and more on fostering knowledge sharing, peer-to-peer support, and collaborative problem-solving.
What do traditional trade show businesses need to do?
Shift Focus: Move resources from operations (which can be commoditised) to marketing and audience understanding.
Agile Teams: Breaking the mould on the distinction of sales and marketing, instead, focus on knowing who you target and focus on community before events.
Long-Term Community Building Forget the idea of turning on "community." It's a slow process that requires focus, effort, and a genuine reason for people to be there.

Reimagining Audience Acquisition: A Move Beyond Conversion
The core concepts of the marketing funnel—awareness, engagement, and conversion—still hold true, but how we execute them requires a rethink. Some key themes emerged in the podcast.
Embrace a Top-of-Funnel Approach: Instead of focusing solely on immediate conversions, you must invest in top-of-funnel awareness. This might mean experimenting with platforms like TikTok and Instagram, even if they don't seem like the most apparent B2B channels.
Consistency and Content Marketing are key: Forget the "quick win" approach. You can't expect big hits from one-off emails or social posts. An audience-centric approach needs to be consistent, offering valuable information rather than always trying to sell. Be present and active on key platforms over the long term, building your brand's authority.
Conversation Marketing Matters: Audience acquisition is no longer a one-way street. Focus on building genuine conversations with your audience rather than only pushing out sales messages.
Data-Driven Decision-Making: Use real data to understand the interplay between all the signals, like open rates, platform engagement, CVIs and what content is truly resonating. This data should guide adjustments, not based on gut feeling, to make informed decisions.
In the trade show/events industry, there is an institutional mindset heavily focused on immediate conversions. However, this is becoming increasingly inadequate in the modern B2B landscape, creating a bias that leads to diminishing returns.
It's really around how you can get people in on different ways. I think changing the money, the way you spend your budget and the way you spend your time from the typical conversion campaigns, which is often email to bit more top of the funnel and looking at. Do I need to be on TikTok and Instagram, even if it's not the most obvious place to be.
It's not necessarily about generating leads from these channels but getting the right eyeballs on the brand at the right time.
The mindset shift required to modernise B2B audience acquisition for events is not simply about implementing new technologies or platforms.

Evidence for The Challenge to Change
Changing entrenched practices is not easy. Decision-makers who might be used to outdated methods need to be convinced. Some powerful numbers from various research reports indicate what the bigger picture may look like.
Impact on ROI and Aquisition
A Nielsen meta-analysis of consumer packaged goods campaigns found that full-funnel strategies, which include TOFU activities, can achieve up to 45% higher return on investment (ROI) and 7% increases in offline sales compared to marketing campaigns across a single purchase stage.
According to a Google study, brands that added upper-funnel marketing efforts to existing mid-funnel campaigns were able to boost ROI by 70%. Furthermore, those who added upper-funnel tactics to campaigns covering the mid and lower funnel saw a 13% increase in ROI.
Long-term Brand Growth
Nielsen's research revealed that while upper-funnel marketing may be less effective in showing immediate ROI, it still contributes to short-term sales while fostering a pipeline of future ones.
A 2021 Nielsen Brand Resonance Report found that increasing awareness and consideration by just one percentage point via upper-funnel marketing drives a 1% increase in future sales. Additionally, it can decrease short-term cost per acquisition by the same amount.
Lead Quality and Conversion
At Cognism, it was observed that it took 25 inbound versus 500 content marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to close a deal. Inbounds comprised 85% of their closed-won revenue, while content leads comprised only 15%
InsideSales reports that following up with web leads within 5 minutes increases the likelihood of conversion ninefold.
Marketing Strategy Prioritisation
According to Smith.ai, 68% of businesses prioritise top-of-funnel activities, recognising its critical role in building brand awareness and capturing a wider audience.
Content marketing, a key TOFU strategy, is used by 86% of B2C marketers and 91% of B2B marketers to reach their audience, according to Smart Insights
Channel Effectiveness
54% of social media users use these platforms to research products, making social media a crucial channel for TOFU efforts.
Webinars are considered the most effective top-of-the-funnel demand generation tactic by 45% of B2B marketing practitioners.
A Need for Long-Term Thinking
One of the primary roadblocks is the deeply ingrained belief in the effectiveness of traditional lead-generation tactics, mainly email marketing. As Karin aptly stated,
I think it's a difficult ship to turn around because people in charge need to be convinced first and often enough people to convince them.
Getting caught up in the pursuit of immediate results is easy and understandable. However, shifting focus from short-term gains to a long-term strategy to build a lasting event brand presence and meaningful audience relationships. The old "transactional marketing" is not only dead but increasingly expensive.
You need to really over a long period of time, make sure that the right people see you and, see the content you post and see what you sell, not just the 12 weeks out of an event… It’s stuff you can't measure and you have to trust the process.
Building domain authority is crucial for a modern business looking to establish a strong presence in a market, especially on platforms like LinkedIn. Regularity, authentically and with helpful content to build trust and gain a loyal following.
Layer on top of this, the final understanding that not every marketing effort will yield immediate, short-term, measurable results is crucial in adopting this long-term perspective.
The impact of building brand awareness and creating a loyal audience is not always quantifiable in the short term, but these activities will yield significant and measurable benefits over time.
You need to be prepared to play the long game and not be focused on the 'quick wins'. This strategic approach is essential for sustained success and maintaining relevance within an evolving market.
Brand Awareness is Crucial: Focusing only on the weeks leading up to an event or campaign is insufficient. Long-term brand building is essential.
Domain Authority: Building domain authority on platforms like LinkedIn takes time. A regular, authentic cadence is needed.
Connecting the Dots: The brand awareness effort in the months beforehand can directly impact your conversion rates. Data point integration is crucial for effective audience marketing.
Trust the Process: You cannot measure everything, but the impact of consistent engagement on audience awareness and trust will increase acquisition conversions.
Redefining The Value of Your Audience
Many trade shows have a "free to attend" model, which can skew the view of your audience acquisition. Free to attend does not mean no value has been exchanged; time is a precious commodity, especially for B2B professionals.
Because of this, we end up with binary success measures: registered/didn't register, attended/didn't attend.
But what would change if we assigned each participant a time-based value scorecard, with extra points for Commercially Valuable Interactions (CVIs) articulated in dollars and cents? Now, your visitors have a direct, measurable monetary value like your exhibitors and sponsors.

If you work out. What the earning power is of the B2B people, and you take out four hours of their day, that is how much they're paying you.
Doing this would discourage the “spray and pray” approach, where campaigns are designed to maximise scale at the cost of value. Viewing your audience as a financial asset is an effective way to focus attention on the need to engage with them meaningfully.
This could also help solve the problem in many trade show businesses, where there is a lack of a clear owner of the audience—the visitors and delegates, who are often heavily invested in exhibitors but not in the audience itself.
Are so many events businesses where there's not a clear owner of the audience… There's often so much lack of insight, ownership, intel on market size when it comes to visitors... a big lack of insight and intelligence.
Prepare for an AI-enabled Future
No podcast these days is complete without addressing the impact of AI, which was unsurprisingly a theme for this season. Technology and audience behaviour are changing fast. Here are some tips which will help:
Be Curious: About emerging tech, like AI. Don't panic, but understand the basics and explore use cases.
Continuous Learning: Podcasts, blogs, and domain experts from outside the industry.
Adapt: Create an environment where it's okay to fail in a controlled way. This will allow you to adapt quickly and explore use cases.
As Karin advised
Just have curiosity of what's out there… And you have to understand the basics, and you have to know how it roughly works, and you have to know what could be your potential use cases… If you're not curious, you will lose out. It will take your job
This speaks to the importance of being open to new ideas and technologies, particularly emerging trends such as AI, and being willing to experiment and learn. You must embrace the need to try things and, when they fail, learn from them and try something else.
Those with a fear of failure will be at a considerable disadvantage. Being curious should be a core principle of any marketing and audience acquisition strategy.