Participation in exhibitions and conferences is the most effective B2B marketing channel. After all, you’re not going to find business clients on TikTok 😉 However, with more than 160,000 B2B events held globally, it can be overwhelming to choose the right ones. Therefore, this startup created a platform that advises companies on which events are worth participating in and why. Both companies and event organizers have started paying for its services.
Project Essence
Vendelux is a platform for visitors, sponsors, advertisers, and organizers of B2B events: exhibitions, conferences, and other gatherings.
Every year, more than 160 thousand B2B events take place worldwide, attended by over 10 million people. With such an abundance, it’s tough for companies to choose an event worth sending their employees to or spending money on for sponsorship or advertising.
Vendelux analyzes 185 thousand sources of information about conferences and their attendees. Using this data, the AI engine of the platform suggests the most suitable events for companies to participate in to maximize their business impact.
Once an event is chosen, companies can contact its organizers in one click to discuss participation, speaking opportunities, or sponsorship terms.
The primary criterion for choosing an event is who among potential or existing clients and competitors will participate. Vendelux helps to understand this based on historical data found online and current information obtained directly from the organizers.
Using the platform, companies can compile a list of people to meet at the event and schedule meetings with them in advance.
The platform saves companies 95% of the time in searching and selecting events for participation and sponsorship, allowing them to schedule 40–70% more meetings during the events. Integrating Vendelux with CRM automatically uploads all contacts made during the events, allowing companies to measure the impact of each event in concrete financial terms.
Vendelux gathers information about events from open sources and aggregates it using AI. Nevertheless, the startup offers event organizers a verified status by starting to transmit information about their event and its attendees directly to the Vendelux platform.
This provides the startup with more accurate information and a new data source for training its AI engine, and the event organizers with an additional level of trust in their statements about the significance and reach of their events.
Event organizers can use Vendelux to send convincing invitations to speakers, attendees, and advertisers, telling them about clients and competitors who usually attend or have already confirmed participation in the next event. Vendelux helps identify who is a client or competitor.
Similarly, organizers can analyze participants and advertisers of competing events to understand who does not participate in their events and also send them invitations.
In the same way, organizers can suggest to participants whom they should meet at the event if their companies do not use Vendelux. This helps increase the impact of participation tenfold, giving organizers ten times more chances that representatives of these companies will participate in the next event.
Vendelux was founded two years ago. It raised its first $2.4 million in investments last January. Over the last year, the number of its platform’s clients doubled, and its revenue tripled. Against such growth, the startup has now raised new investments of $14 million.
What’s Interesting
According to the founder of the investment fund FirstMark, which led the current investment round: “Events are the most expensive lines in the budget of any B2B company. And the most opaque, as decisions about participation in an event are based on incomplete data.” Marketers usually choose events based on their feelings and impressions and cannot accurately assess the impact of participation.
It might seem that offline events are a thing of the past, that everything has moved online. But that’s not the case. Indeed, the market took a sharp downturn during the pandemic – from $15.6 billion in 2019 to $5.6 billion in 2020 (excluding sponsorship and advertising revenue). But now it’s starting to recover again, with growth expected to reach $14.5 billion by 2024.
Moreover, people are tired of sitting online and are willingly participating in offline gatherings, especially if they bring money to them and their companies.
Interestingly, if B2B events do eventually move online, I see no reason why Vendelux cannot be used to analyze online events just as effectively as offline ones. Even with greater accuracy, since online event statistics are even easier to collect.
In general, events are also a good channel for B2C marketing. I wrote about the startup Recess, which created a platform allowing B2C companies to conduct marketing activities at local offline events.
From the startup’s presentation, I was surprised to learn that the size of the event-based B2C marketing market is $187 billion. $87 billion is spent on distributing product samples and discount coupons, $42 billion on other methods of customer activation, and $58 billion on advertising and sponsorship.
Where to Run
If you think about it, events are the only real working B2B marketing channel. How else can you find business clients? Not through advertising on social networks, YouTube, or TikTok 😉 Hence the first logical conclusion for B2B startup founders – participate in B2B events more often and thoughtfully.
And the second less obvious one – if there are not enough such events in your field, create them yourself. But not for outright advertising of your product, but to discuss the pressing problems and solutions of your market – to gather the most correct audience with which you can establish the first personal contact. And then you can sell to them personally or even later, because B2B sales are always a long process anyway.
Returning to the topic of the review, we can conclude that events in general are a big market, which still operates in the old-fashioned way.
This means it’s a good opportunity to enter with new digital platforms, which could be the direction of possible movement. And it’s even clear who to copy these platforms from – Vendelux in the B2B sphere and Recess in the B2C sphere 😉
About the Company
Vendelux
Website: vendelux.com
Latest round: $14M, November 21, 2023
Total investments: $17.1M, rounds: 3