Is your B2B event marketing ready for a laugh?
Let me be upfront: this blog might not be for you. If your brand is strictly formal or your organisation is just not in the zone of taking calculated creative risks - you might not be ready to add humour to your event marketing.
However...
…if you've ever looked at your social media engagement and the continual ‘tumbleweed’ frustrates you - listen up.
(we created this meme in Canva using a Canva photo)
Team MPG’s event marketers use humour (carefully) where we can - based on the audience and client appetite.
For two recent events where humour has played a part in a multi-channel campaign, the audiences are very different, and the events were in different stages of their lifecycles - one is a brand-new launch; one has been running for years.
Yet in both cases, introducing humour into the social media posts resulted in a high level of engagement, including full conversations in the comments - reinforcing the genuine sense of community around the event.
Is your event marketing approach ‘humour-ready’?
Before you go anywhere near a meme generator, answer these 3 questions honestly:
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Do you know your audience well enough to understand what will land well with them, and what won’t?
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Do you have the right event marketing setup in place to execute well?
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Are all your stakeholders on board?
If the answer to any of these questions is a resounding ‘no’ or ‘not yet’ - your starting point is making sure you get these ducks in a row.
If these ducks are already well lined up, we think you should go for it!
And maybe before you do, some guidance from what we’ve learned so far…
6 things to bear in mind when using humour in B2B event marketing
#1 Know your audience and consult those who know them best
This sounds obvious because it is obvious. Yet this is often missing in the approach event organisers take to their marketing.
I'm in my 20s. My sense of humour and what I find funny is not necessarily what an audience made up of 40- and 50-something senior executives will find funny. So when I'm developing humorous content for a client, I'm not asking myself "would I laugh at this?" I'm asking: "Would my parents/uncles/aunts find this funny? Would my boss get it? Would most of the delegates I met at last year’s event appreciate it?”. I’ll try and put myself in their shoes to imagine how they would react…
Get your whole team involved coming up with ideas and running your ideas past them! I find that getting input from event directors, content people, ops people and sales people on humour-orientated marketing is always a good shout - especially as they’re so close to the customers and like to be involved in this kind of creative marketing. Here are some of the questions I ask them early on to come up with good ideas:
- “What do our customers complain about when it comes to their day to day work?”
- “What do they roll their eyes at?”
- “What seems to be a shared frustration in the industry right now - or always?”
- “That shared frustration is the starting point for your humour brief.
#2 Hit a nerve - but the right kind
The humour that's worked best for us in event marketing isn't random. It's empathetic.
It’s the kind of thing that makes the customer immediately think "They get me!”. That moment of connection and recognition is incredibly powerful - where your target customer feels seen and understood rather than sold to.
It does something purely functional too: it gets your post seen by more people.
Engagement drives reach. If people are commenting, their connections are more likely to see, pay attention to and comment on the post too = organic, scalable community building! The amplification effect is what we’re after, and we should never underestimate how valuable this kind of earned media can be.
#3 Stick with it - one funny post does not a strategy make
This is probably the most important practical point.
When we recently introduced humorous content in event marketing campaigns for a new client, we received a huge amount of positive engagement and amplification, and one complaint. This outlier did not create any panic and was handled by the team very well. It didn't surface any serious concerns about how further uses of humour in marketing would cause issues.
If you post one funny thing and then immediately retreat to "three reasons to attend," it just looks like you made a mistake with trying to use humour in the first place. Humour only works within your event marcomms when it's consistent enough to feel intentional.
A general formula we follow when a client is open to deploying humour in social posts - is roughly one humorous post every two to three weeks in the main part of the campaign. That's enough to be a recognisable part of the content mix without crowding out the event benefits and key features such as speakers and networking opportunities - all important product information that pushes relevant and valuable traffic to the website to convert into leads and sales. Humour complements those posts. It doesn't replace them.
#4 Have a repeatable and scalable process for ideation
‘Being funny’ isn’t something that just happens when you want it to. You need to be systematic in your approach - as with all elements of event marketing!
My approach includes building a bank of blank meme templates. I mainly use Know Your Meme for this - allowing me to create numerous memes in a short space of time. I try to match these to real pain points that surface when I do the quick brainstorming sessions with the wider team (see point #1 above).
Here are some of the kinds of questions I then ask myself…
- “Which meme format fits ‘making the same mistake repeatedly'?”
- “Which one can I use for ‘having to choose between two bad options’?”
- “Which one fits ‘being asked to do the impossible’?”
The meme format does a lot of the heavy lifting once you've made that match. You're not trying to be an original comedian - you're using a shared cultural reference point and making it relevant to your audience.
You can also experiment with short AI-generated videos using Google Gemini. It's not the smoothest process at the moment, but for producing short, realistic video content at low cost, it gets you quite far quite quickly. It’s important to keep the videos short - this keeps things simple and gets more engagement.
TOP TIP: always consider age and cultural context. Some meme formats are well understood across generations. Others are very much for a specific group. The ones that work best for B2B event marketing tend to be those your whole audience will immediately recognise - not the ones that will leave half of them just confused or Googling "what does this mean?"
#5 Be aware of culture, not just content
Beyond age, there are other cultural considerations to take into account. An obvious example is location. In the UK, self-deprecating humour usually lands very well. It's built into the culture. A slightly dry, understated joke at your own industry's expense tends to please a mainly British professional audience. But the same joke might fall flat with a US audience who aren't quite tuned into British humour.
International events or multi-territory campaigns need to be carefully considered. What's playful and fun in one market can feel offensive or disrespectful in another.
This is another reason why getting your team’s input is important as they'll often understand these nuances well based on their knowledge of the market and the customer, preventing a failed attempt at humour.
#6 Be serious about being funny. It’s a strategy not a tactic to be dreamt up by an intern
Social media is not an ‘entry-level’ job anymore. It hasn't been for years. The idea that you can hand your highly visible social channels to the most junior person in the team and expect things to go well is simply an outdated way of thinking.
Effective social content - funny or otherwise - requires good, practiced judgment, strategic thinking, and a solid understanding of how the whole marketing campaign fits together. At MPG, the people responsible for our clients' social content are the same people who determine the segmentation plan, devise their messaging strategy, create the strategic marcomms plan, closely oversee all other marketing across all channels - email, paid media, advocacy, etc. and measure and analyse performance across all. Everything has to be integrated, data-driven, and strategy-led.
As with all of the above, humour in your event marketing requires someone strategic, experienced and skilled enough to include all relevant stakeholders, get the tone, copy and images right, and take responsibility for what goes out.
And important always to bear in mind…
What you should absolutely always avoid
Without getting too laboured about it: treat using humour in your marketing like a harmonious family dinner. Don’t talk about sex, politics, or religion. Avoid anything that could be read as discriminatory - not just because it's bad for your brand (and just plain bad), but because there are genuine legal risks involved.
If you've approached things systematically, with a good level of stakeholder involvement and an experienced person overseeing it, you've already dramatically reduced your risk to a negligible level.
The test we use informally is: would this be safe to show to any member of your audience, regardless of their background? If the answer is "most of them", that's not good enough. It needs to be all of them.
One more thing
We can't name the clients or share specific results in detail - the work we do for our clients is commercially sensitive, and frankly, it's their IP, not ours to share. But we can say that the campaigns where we've introduced humour have seen better year-on-year social engagement and a measurable uplift in registrations from social.
The tumbleweed in the comments section is blown away.
And that, for anyone who's managed an event social account, is genuinely exciting.
A note on confidentiality: MPG works very closely with its clients' in-house marketing teams. The insights in this blog come from real campaign experience, but we never share client-specific data or name clients without their explicit permission. If you'd like to know more about how we approach social media strategy for our client’s events, please get in touch.
