Insight
Low lift, high return
Ian Davis, vice-president marketing, Snöball, highlights the economics of peer advocacy in events
vent marketing budgets
E have not kept pace with what is being asked of them. Marketing budgets overall have plateaued at 7.8 % of company revenue in 2026, according to Gartner ' s latest CMO Spend Survey, 18 % lower than the average share of four years ago, and 56 % of CMOs say their organisation lacks the budget required to deliver on this year ' s strategy.( 1)
Production costs, meanwhile, keep rising. Against that backdrop, event marketers are looking harder at channels that don ' t require a bigger budget to move the needle. Peer advocacy is one of the few that qualifies.
The premise is simple. Every event already has people connected to it before a single ad is bought: speakers who have an audience of their own, exhibitors with existing customer lists, sponsors with a brand to protect, and past attendees who enjoyed themselves enough to mention it. Peer advocacy asks these groups to do what many of them would do anyway, share that they’ re involved, and gives them an easy, trackable way to do it. It is not a new audience to build. It is an existing one to activate.
That is the‘ low lift’ half of the equation. The‘ high return’ half is where the case gets interesting.
Peer-driven shares convert into registrations at an average of 31.9 %, according to the 2026 Peer-to-Peer Event Marketing Benchmark Report. On average, 6.9 % of a given event’ s total attendance is directly attributable to peer referrals.( 2) And it comes from relationships that already exist.
Peer-to-peer sharing happens across a mix of public and private channels, from LinkedIn and other social networks to email, WhatsApp, Slack, SMS, and direct messages. The latter are often described as‘ dark social’ because the sharing happens privately and can be difficult for traditional analytics to attribute.
That’ s simply another way peerto-peer works: people don ' t always broadcast a recommendation publicly; they often send it directly to someone
Above: Ian Davis
they think will find it relevant. With the right tracking infrastructure, organisers can now connect these shares to downstream actions such as registration, giving them a clearer view of the role peer-to-peer activity plays in event growth.
Personalising outreach for every speaker, exhibitor, and attendee segment used to mean building a separate campaign for each one; that overhead is a large part of why most organisations default to generic messaging even when they know personalised asks perform better. What has changed is that this level of personalisation, by role, by language, by the specific offer someone is entitled to, can now be set up once per campaign rather than rebuilt for every segment.
Two other shifts are worth watching. Static, on-brand graphics still have a place, but short video content is increasingly what gets attention in a crowded feed, and organisers are starting to treat existing footage, sizzle reels, session clips, as material that can be shared directly rather than repackaged. And where advocacy programmes used to sit entirely on the organiser ' s own budget, some are now structured so a sponsor can fund the costs behind the campaign in exchange for visibility on what ' s already being shared.
None of this suggests peer advocacy replaces paid or owned channels. It works alongside them. But for event marketers being asked to hit growth targets without growth in budget, it is one of the few levers available that doesn ' t require more spend to move, only a better use of the audience already in the room. EW
References:
( 1) https:// www. gartner. com / en / newsroom / press-releases / 2026-05-11-gartner- 2026-cmo-sp end-survey-findscmos-allocate-15-point-3-percent-ofmarketing-budgets-to-ai-but-only-3 0-percent-are-ready-to-scale-ai-capabilities
( 2) https:// snoball. events / resources / reports / www. exhibitionworld. co. uk Issue 5 2026 19