KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE AEO MARKETING FORUM 2025

By Chloe Monina, Professional Beauty Group. 

'Collaborate to innovate' was the theme for the 2025 AEO Forums and thanks to a fantastic line-up of speakers this is how the marketing stream was formed.

As the chair of the AEO marketing working group, I was inspired by conversations and challenges discussed during our meetings and shaped the programme around finding solutions and innovations to help my fellow marketeers.  

To kick-start the marketing stream, we had two of the AEO's 2024 Excellence Awards winners share their insights into how to build an award-winning campaign strategy. 

Ali Atkinson, of QD Events, presented The IRN-BRU Carnival campaign, which won Marketing Campaign of the Year - Consumer Show. 

Ali shared how they really focused on learning from past insights, fostering creative brainstorming, planning execution early, and engaging the community. Success comes from bold ideas, strong partnerships, and ethical choices while balancing impact and cost-effectiveness.

Kieran Murphy, of Total Telecom presented the Connected Britain campaign, which won Marketing Campaign of the Year – UK Trade Show for Connected Britain 2023. The campaign aimed to grow attendance, sponsorship, and floorspace while establishing market leadership. A multi-channel marketing strategy used data-driven messaging, digital ads, social media, and partnerships to boost engagement. Expanding into new sectors and leveraging innovation—such as free ticket programs, referrals, and government collaboration—drove record leads and exhibitor numbers. With 62.5% attendee growth, the campaign highlighted the power of clear goals, adaptability, and strategic collaboration.

It was great to have both B2B and B2C perspectives and it certainly gave me lots of ideas to consider. I'm now wondering what we can have as our Professional Beauty mascot and where we could hide them…. 

Next up we had an interactive session focused on leveraging MarTech and AI to solve key marketing challenges, and it was led by two of the industry's tech savvy gurus Adam Parry from Event Industry Live and Felicia Asiedu from Cvent.

Using tech to start the session, they identified the biggest marketing challenges attendees are facing via a poll on Mentimeter, which analysed the results using AI and guided the direction of the discussions. 

The top 3 challenges were finding and acquiring new data, nurturing existing audiences and maximising the use of existing technologies. 

It was a great opportunity for attendees to network, discuss their ideas and see the power of AI live in action!

After lunch, we continued the stream with a focus on data centricity and getting to the heart of your target audience. When asked 'Who loves data?', I had a very small show of hands as expected. When asked again 'Who feels data is integral to their marketing campaigns?', there was a 90% hands up rate.

I've worked with AJ Rajeswaran, Founder and CEO of CX Data, over the past 2 years and he has helped us implement processes and software to achieve our data objectives. He's also fantastic at bringing data insight to life. 

AJ's strategy focused on having a clean and complete contact database, understanding your contacts (personas) with insights & dashboards, segmenting your customers using various properties (e.g. RFM or new/repeat), activating targeted campaigns and measuring campaign effectiveness with KPIs.

Next up we had a fantastic duo, (who I think will now be booked as an industry double act!), Tom Fisher from Clarion Events and Alexi Khajavi from Questex who had an incredibly engaging and informative discussion on marketing's contribution to sales and how we are generating more than just leads. 

They addressed that there needs to be synergy and communication between the two departments to maximise success, simply having a process in place is not enough. You need to understand the funnel, assess the quality of leads and ensure that your acquisitions are being followed up on. Regular meetings with the team to identify challenges their clients are facing and new opportunities in order to adapt the tone of voice accordingly is KEY. (They also definitely brought light-hearted humour to the stage!)

Keeping the energy high was Suzanne Mulligan from IMEX Events, who showed us how to maximise engagement on our video campaigns. IMEX's goal is to create really great content to maintain their inclusive and informative account and grow their followers by focusing on new markets and emerging trends. They aim to create JOMO not FOMO capturing the excitement of their events. The team has such fun creating the content that there is huge demand to have an appearance!

How do you wrap up a session on video content with a room full of marketers? With a Tiktok video of course! Check out @AEOnews on instagram to see it in action.

Finally we ended the day with 3 senior marketing leaders. Jessica Hockman Informa Markets, Ashley Cox Raccoon Media Group and Adrien Burnand British Marine delved into the challenges they faced in 2024 and how as event marketers they adapted and thrived. 

Ashley advised how they adapted the tone of voice and frequency of communication taking into consideration the state of the country's economic challenges, and how as a result their open rates shot up and demand for advertising increased. Ashley also shared her 'all hands-on deck' approach when ticket sales are not where they want them to be and how they utilise the entire teams support to get back on track. 

Jessica shared struggles with data opt-ins due to changes within the Middle-East' policies and how collaborative meetings between departments and countries were an integral part of implementing a new plan of action. 

Adrien shared how British Marine adapted the features and focus to reach a new audience and keep delivering their 100k audience year on year, as well as collaborating with partners and exhibitors to research which direction they should be taking. They focused on attracting a new audience into the watersports industry, laying foundations for buyers of the future. 

I'd like to say a huge thank you to all our speakers, for giving up their time on the day but also their input and their support into making each session so fantastic.

I really hope all the attendees enjoyed the day and are feeling inspired and motivated for a successful year ahead.