We sponsored a B2B Marketing virtual conference by MarketingProfs last week, and I wanted to give my impressions of how this may become a new, important marketing trend. And our friends at MarketingProfs provided the data to support this.

First of all, 4,000 people *attended* the virtual conference. They expect 350 people to attend their ‘live’ conference in Chicago. I starred the ‘attended’ because being virtual, people were in and out of it. But still, to get 10x more attendees has got to be significant. And it showed in the number of clicks to our ActiveConversion website, and of the whitepaper that we posted. With 10 times more people, you get a lot more interest, period.

Besides being convenient for attendees, I think it was good for the speakers because they didn’t have to take time to travel. This made for a good number of speakers, with a wide range of topics. To top it off, these webinars, and in fact the web pages supporting this conference remain in place for a year, so you can go see them weeks afterwards if you missed them or want to see them again.

Of course, nothing replaces face to face (and the freebies and parties that go with them) but convenience has its place. Not everybody has the time or the budget to go to conferences they should go to, and the advent of the virtual conference has changed that.

And it turns out that executives prefer webinars, according to a study by MarketingSherpa. They attend an average of 1 per week. Probably because decision-makers have less time, they prefer the convenience of learning this way. They even went on to say that it allows them to read email etc. while they are listening and watching. So don’t think that virtual means geek. Virtual attracts people who are going to make the final decision in many cases.

Trade shows aren’t going away anytime soon, but expect them to change, just like Tivo (PVRs) has changed network TV.