How to Turn Speakers Into Event Promoters

Events bring people together to learn, create, collaborate, and celebrate. And most of the time, promoting one doesn’t take a lot of resources. It just takes turning your speakers into event promoters before the the start.

There are many ways to turn your speakers into event promoters. In this article, we’ll show you how to turn them into an active, engaged promotional force, with outreach templates, co-marketing assets, and incentives you can put to use today.

Why speaker event promotion is critical

If you want your event speakers to become loyal fans of your brand (and maybe even come back next year), then it’s important that they feel like they are gaining value during their experience. 

This is the value all stakeholders get by promoting an event:

For speakers, promoting the event they’re speaking at builds their personal brand. It positions them as an industry expert with a stage and an audience, and gives them content to share that makes them look good to their own network — a win they’re usually happy to take.

For sponsors and partners, a speaker talking about the event authentically reaches a warm, relevant audience in a way a banner ad never will. That’s the foundation of good partner collaboration: everyone promotes because everyone benefits, not because they were asked to as a favor.

For event organizers like yourself, incorporating content creation as a form of promotion into every stage will help ensure that there’s enough proof while giving attendees and speakers something tangible they can take away — photos showing how much fun was had by all involved! 

The power of activating speakers as event promoters

Speaker marketing is a powerful tool for event planners, and turning speakers into promoters of an event is one of the best ways to engage them (and to make your life easier!).

The first thing you should know about speaker marketing is that it’s not just a way to distribute information. It’s also a great way to build community, which helps speakers and attendees feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. This can lead them to become ambassadors of your brand — especially if you give them a chance to share their thoughts with others online (more on this later).

At its core, though, speaker marketing is about building buzz around an idea or product to attract new customers while providing value over time through consistent updates on social media platforms like X, Instagram, LinkedIn and even TikTok. Content that generates excitement will make potential attendees want more information about what you have going on at events like these!

How to turn speakers into event promoters

Speaking at an event is a great opportunity to teach new things, meet people who share your interests, and connect with the community.

But how can you use speakers’ experiences to make your next event more engaging? By turning them into promoters who share social proof of the event. This sounds easier said than done, so here are a few actionable steps you can take to encourage speakers to create event content. 

1. Integrate Echo

With Walls.io Echo, your speakers (and attendees) help promote your event through branded social media cards that can be shared to their networks in just a few clicks. 

• Give attendees, speakers, and sponsors one link to share branded posts across every major platform.
• Share to LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Telegram, Email, and SMS.
• Measure the impact of shares with custom UTM parameters and the Analytics Dashboard

For the Festival of Eventing conference, creating pre-event excitement wasn’t left to chance. They knew attendee engagement had to start well before people walked through the venue doors. To make that happen, they turned to Walls.io Echo, which helped them get:

• 159 pageviews generated from Echo campaigns
• 49 shares—showing strong willingness to amplify content
• 522 clicks on shared posts (high engagement-to-view ratio)
• 10.7x viral boost, meaning speaker and attendee content reached more than 10 times beyond its initial audience

2. Create an event hashtag + an event social wall

Choose a suitable hashtag or two and promote the heck out of them! On your social media channels, your newsletter, posters at the venue, and all your event materials. Make sure your speakers know about the hashtag and encourage them to use it when posting about and from your event. Learn everything you need to know about event hashtags from our hashtag campaign guide.

An event hashtag will help you monitor what everyone says about the event. For example, are there any wifi or bathroom issues? Was a keynote especially delightful? Certainly, someone will post about it on social media using your hashtag.  

You can add your event hashtag to an event social wall and have all desired event content go directly to a screen or event platform embedded. Other attendees will feel inspired to post about your event once they see others contributing on the social wall! 

3. Equip speakers with ready-to-share co-marketing assets

The main reason speakers don’t become event promoters is friction. If sharing requires them to design a graphic or write a caption from scratch, most people simply won’t do it. If you get rid of that friction, a lot more people will participate.

Make a small “speaker promo kit” and send it out at least three to four weeks before the event. It should include:

• Social graphics sized for each platform (LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Instagram Stories) with the speaker’s name, headshot, and session title pre-filled
• A LinkedIn banner or profile frame speakers can add to show they’re speaking at your event
• An email signature banner for speakers who want to promote to their own mailing list or team
• A short “why I’m speaking” video prompt or quote card template that partners and sponsors can co-brand with their own logo alongside yours
• A unique tracked registration link or discount code per speaker, so both they and you can see the promotion translating into actual sign-ups

Co-marketing assets like these do two things: they make it easy for speakers to promote, and they make your event look more professional on everyone else’s feed.

4. Reach out with a clear, low-effort promotional outreach template

Speakers are busy. The message “feel free to share” is often in the bottom of an email about logistics, but people rarely do it. Good promotional outreach is clear and makes it easy to know what to do next.

Template: initial ask (email or LinkedIn message):

Subject: Your speaker promo kit for [Event Name] is ready!

Hi [First Name],

We’re excited to have you speak on [Session Title] at [Event Name] on [Date]. To help you tell your friends about it, we’ve created an event promotion kit for you. It includes graphics, sample captions, and a link to your registration page with a [X]% discount for your followers. [link]

If you can, please share once before the event and once during the event week. This will help us fill the room and make you more visible as an expert in [topic]. It should take less than five minutes.

Thanks again for being part of [Event Name] — we can’t wait to see you perform.

[Your name]

Template: friendly reminder (one week out):

Subject: One week to go; here’s your speaker toolkit again

Dear [First Name],

[Event Name] is one week away! Here’s a quick reminder that your promo kit and personal registration link are available: [link]. If you use the #[EventHashtag] on your LinkedIn post this week, it will make a big impact. We will also feature speaker posts on our live event wall during the event.

I’ll see you again soon, [Your Name].

Template: partner/sponsor co-promotion ask:

Subject: Let’s work together to promote [Event Name].

Hi [First Name],

We’d love to promote [Event Name] together and get more people from our audiences to sign up. I’ve attached a social graphic that we can both use and a link to register for the event. This will help us track results for both of us. Would your team be open to having one shared post and one newsletter mention before [date]?

I’d be happy to return the favor by mentioning your brand/product on my channels too.

Best, [Your name]

Keep every message short and sweet. Make your ask clear, and be sure to offer them something good in return. That’s the most important part of promotional outreach that actually results in sales.

5. Incentivize speaker and partners to become event promoters

A little friendly competition and recognition goes a long way. Here are some things to think about::

• A leaderboard or shout-out for the speakers who drove the most registrations via their tracked link, shared during the event or in a post-event recap
• Early access to the recording or slide deck for speakers who post before the event
• A featured “Speaker Spotlight” post or newsletter mention from the event’s own channels in exchange for a share
• Small perks — swag, an upgraded seat, a dinner invite, or a discount on next year’s ticket — for speakers who complete their promo checklist
• Co-branded quote cards or short video clips pulled from their session, produced and sent to them afterward, that they’ll want to share regardless of any ask
• Affiliate-style tracked links that let sponsors and partners see real registration numbers attributed to their own promotion, making the case for renewing the partnership next year

None of these need a big budget. What matters is that speakers and partners feel their promotion is seen, tracked, and appreciated — not just expected.

What event promotion looks like in practice

Imagine a medium-sized industry conference with 20 speakers and five sponsors. Three weeks before the event, each speaker will receive an event promotion kit with a link to their personal page and a social media graphic that can be shared with just one click. A social wall with the event hashtag will appear on the event website. This will show potential attendees that people are already excited about the event, even before they buy their tickets.

During the event week, the organizing team sends the one-week reminder template. Some speakers use pre-written captions, while others make their own. Both of them are featured on the live wall. Sponsors, seeing that their brand is getting a lot of attention, ask about a bigger promotional package for next year’s event. This is because, for the first time, they can actually see the number of registrations that their promotion has brought in.

This didn’t require a larger advertising budget. It was important to give people who already cared about the event’s success the tools and reasons to talk about it.

The three principles to remember for event promoters

1. Make your partners and speakers the stars of the show, not just your brand. People share content that makes them look good. Design your assets and outreach around that.
2. Make promoting your business easy. The easier you make it to share, the more people will actually do it. Pre-made assets are better than vague requests.
3. Track and reward the results. Using a tracked link or discount code for each speaker makes it possible to measure the success of your event marketing strategy. This gives you the data you need to prove that it is worth investing in promoting speakers and partners.

Speaker-driven promotion isn’t a replacement for paid event advertising. It makes every other channel work harder. If you want more people to sign up to speak at your event, you should get people to register early. Make it easy for them to register.

Book a demo with Walls.io to see how it works for your next event.