2026 has started with real momentum. The world’s leading conferences and tradeshows are entering a year that presents great opportunities for those that carefully curate their audiences and create valuable and memorable connections amongst trusted peers within a meaningful community.

It was no surprise to Team MPG that at our recent Event Marketing Leaders Roundtable, advocacy and paid media were mentioned as the two most important marketing channels for market-leading events. 

Email is still a key channel in the mix - with best practices now essential for strong deliverability. AI-led search also came up in discussion as a top priority for event marketers in 2026. 

As we press ahead with the promotion of 2026 events, at MPG we firmly believe - as we always have - that an integrated multi-channel, brand-led and data-centric approach is the winning formula.

 

Will 2026 be the year events take ‘brand’ more seriously?

The conversation at our recent Roundtable was framed by the MPG Insights piece written by one of MPG’s senior strategists - Celia Coules: “From great events to global event super brands: why brand building is the hidden engine of long-term growth.” Read Celia’s article.

The key point is that ‘the visible 10%’ of value - ticket sales, short-term ROI, sponsorship income - is only the tip of the iceberg. 

What drives long-term, sustainable success is what sits below the waterline, applying to what we deliver all-year round in our marcomms, and of course how customers are served at the event itself. This critical 90% that often does not get enough attention includes:

• Trust and credibility built through a consistently great customer experience.
• Emotional loyalty where people connect with the community, not just the content.
• Pricing power that comes from brand strength.
• Expansion potential that makes entering new markets and launching new products more successful. 

Food for thought.

 

AI in event marketing in 2026

How are event marketing teams already embracing and productively deploying AI for content creation, targeting and analysis? How will this change in the next 12 months? The truth is, no one really knows!

What we do know is that AI is now very much part of MPG’s workflow. And one of the most exciting areas where AI is having an impact is PPC/Paid Media campaigns. Here is some essential reading on this important topic:

• Why AI in PPC for events will be game-changing in 2026. Read article
• For CEOs & CFOs: important questions to ask your event marketer before spending more money on PPC. Read article

 

EVENT MARKETING STRATEGIES

4 Key Takeaways from MPG’s Recent Event Marketing Leaders Roundtable:

 

#1 Short-term revenue goals often shape marketing priorities

The trade-off means few (or no) resources going into building a market-leading brand and community for long-term success. This means ignoring the 90% of critical value that sits below the waterline.

 

#2  Content marketing is more important than ever in an AI-driven world

AI-led search seeks highly relevant and contextual content. If you don’t have valuable, well structured resources for your audience on your event website all year-round, you’ll lose out to competitors who do. 

Here are 4 AI tools being used by roundtable participants for content creation:

Plaud.ai was suggested by a roundtable participant for recording, transcribing and summarising conversations to create searchable notes. 
Google’s Gemini for video creation, as well as analysing and searching video content for editing that is easy and produces great ‘snippets’.
Lorefully - captures natural-language insights from live environments and turns them into structured, searchable knowledge.
Voxo - Conversational AI platform that analyses voice and text interactions to provide real-time customer insights and summaries.

 

#3 The need for sales and marketing alignment is stronger than ever

One of the best ways to unlock stronger marketing performance is to get sales and marketing working well together. This is a critically important part of any spex strategy, and marketers need to own this. 

In MPG’s experience, salespeople love qualified & warm marketing leads, they love the data that shows them how these were generated, and they love helping marketing when they know it will drive commercial results. So we also love the salespeople we work with!

 

#4 Event audiences want intimacy and relevance

Our customers want to meet people who matter to them at our events. This is not new. Curated roundtables at conferences and small ‘between show’ gatherings are now a key part of many winning portfolios. 

And it is highly targeted, data-driven marketing that is needed to get the right people around these tables. That’s why we have specialists in Team MPG who know exactly how to get this targeting right. 

 

MPG DIARY

Upcoming MPG hosted gatherings - by invitation only.

Online Expert Briefings:

• Winning visibility in an AI-DRIVEN SEARCH world: what every B2B event marketer should know about AI optimisation, data and search 18 February
• Effective PPC for B2B events: getting the right CREATIVE into your ads 18 March

London Roundtables (for senior executives only):

• AI in event marketing: use cases & our favourite tools: Summer - date TBC

Request your invitation here

 

Upcoming Industry Events 

• AEO Marketing Forum – 30 January, London. Helen Coetzee, Founder & CEO of MPG will join a panel led by Sam O'Connell of Easyfairs to discuss: What Marketing KPIs really mean & the story they tell.
• Why PPC and Paid Media Are a Strategic Necessity... And What Actually Makes Them Perform. Helen Coetzee will join John Monk, ASP to explore why optimizing tracking, data, and the customer journey drives better PPC results than simply increasing budget.
• Renewd Europe Leaders Roundtable on Events & Revenue Quality: How to Achieve Strong Retention KPIs & Predictable Revenue - 25 February, London A panel of events business CEO’s - facilitated by Helen Coetzee.
• International Confex – 25 & 26 February, London
• Monetising B2B in 2026 - 13 May 2026, London

 

LATEST MPG INSIGHTS

CEOs: Four important questions to ask your event marketer before spending more money on PPC

Are you wasting money on PPC campaigns that aren't delivering? 

If your event marketers can't confidently answer four crucial questions about conversion tracking, algorithm training, messaging alignment, and website optimisation, you could be hemorrhaging budget without realising it. 

Our latest edition of the CEO's Marketing Blog Series reveals why most events businesses aren't proving real ROI from their PPC spend - and what you need to fix immediately to stop the waste and start driving actual registrations and revenue.

Read the full blog here

EVENTS CEOs' MARKETING SERIES 

Here are 4 more articles for CEOs and leaders of events businesses:

• Essential questions to ask about your investment in marketing
• Measuring your marketing to unlock growth 
• How best to manage your attendee booking patterns & make final numbers more predictable 
• The email marketing performance problem - and what to do about it

 

MPG’s AI-BOOSTED EVENT MARKETING PERFORMANCE ESSENTIALS

We’ve been hard at work refining our services that deliver MPG’s unique capabilities in highly focused, highly impactful projects. Get in touch to find out more about:

PPC/Paid Media Campaign Management for Conferences & Tradeshows
Email and SEO alone can no longer reliably deliver the volume or quality of registrations, ticket sales, and leads required for event growth - while targeted, well-trained paid media is essential to proactively reach in-market buyers and drive measurable ROI.
Request a Quote

Audits of PPC/Paid Media for Events
Without an expert, event-specific audit of your paid media, you risk wasting budget, misjudging ROI, and repeating the same performance issues for future events without clear insight into what to fix or scale.
Find out how this works

LinkedIn Ads Training for your Inhouse Marketers
Without practical, event-specific LinkedIn Ads training, generalist in-house marketers risk wasting budget and missing high-quality attendees. Having the right skills will enable them to run efficient campaigns, improve ROI, and become self-sufficient.
Get more information to train your team

Attribution & Tracking
Without accurate, event-specific attribution and conversion tracking, you cannot credibly measure marketing performance, prove ROI, or make confident investment decisions - leading to wasted budget and reduced influence with senior stakeholders.
Ask MPG for help - our Analysts can do this for you!

Website Performance & Discoverability 
Your event website is the primary conversion and discovery engine. If it is not optimised for CRO, SEO, AI-led search and compliance, every other marketing channel underperforms and commercial growth is constrained.
Request a Quote

AI-Ready Event Marketing Playbooks
Sustainable event growth in an increasingly competitive market requires a clear, event-specific marketing playbook that defines what to do, when to do it, and how to execute consistently. This makes performance scalable, repeatable, and AI-ready rather than ad-hoc and inconsistent.
Our event marketing strategists can create this for you - ask us how

 

And that’s a wrap for January. If you’d like to talk about how you can get more out of your investment in event marketing, please drop me a line.

Kind regards,

Helen Coetzee
Founder & CEO
MPG