Epic Events Podcast with
Beezar Sirini

Event Monetization: How to Turn Attendee Data Into Exhibitor Revenue

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  • Beezar Sirini

    Beezar Sirini is the Co-Founder and CRO of Boost Express, where he helps event organizers turn their audience data and brand into year-round revenue. He has spent more than a decade in event technology and enterprise SaaS, starting at DoubleDutch in 2014. He has worked with leading organizers, associations, and exhibitors around the world, and he wants the industry to rethink how events create value beyond the show floor.

About the Episode

What if the relationship with your exhibitors didn’t end on the afternoon of the last show day?

In this episode, Muhammad Younas sits down with Beezar Sirini to talk about one of the most underused assets in the events industry: the organizer’s own audience data and brand. Organizers sit on deep first-party data about their community. Most of it goes unused because protecting that data has always mattered more than monetizing it.

Beezar explains how co-branded LinkedIn campaigns change that. Exhibitors pick an audience segment, the ads run from the event’s own LinkedIn account, and the organizer approves everything. Exhibitors never see a single email address. Because the ads come from a brand attendees already trust, these campaigns consistently outperform the ones exhibitors run on their own.

The conversation also covers the pushback organizers raise, from data privacy to cannibalizing sponsorship upsells, and why timing and budget source answer both. Beezar also shares what he’s hearing from hundreds of exhibitors: they’re attending fewer events, spending the same, and expecting far more in return. If your revenue still depends mostly on square meters, this episode offers a new way to think about growth.

Key Takeaways:

  • Treat your full community as an asset, not just the people on the show floor. An event with 3,000 attendees may have 25,000 people in its wider database who are still relevant to exhibitors.
  •  Let exhibitors borrow your brand’s reach and trust. Ads that run from the event’s LinkedIn account perform two to three times better on every metric than exhibitors’ own campaigns.
  • Keep data in the organizer’s hands. Exhibitors choose a segment by title, department, or company size and never get access to contact details.
  • Run two campaign layers: a year-round campaign aimed at the exhibitor’s ideal customers, plus a pre-event push to registered attendees to drive booth traffic and meetings.
  • Launch campaigns about three months before the event, when 90 to 95 percent of sponsorship revenue is already locked in, so new offers don’t compete with existing upsells.
  • Sell to the people who own the LinkedIn budget, not just the booth contact. Digital and demand gen teams often spend $5,000 to $10,000 a month on LinkedIn and already value first-party data.
  • Give exhibitors a live dashboard so they can compare results side by side with their own campaigns and decide for themselves whether to keep spending.
  • Explain complex offers with concrete “what if” scenarios. A 14-minute story turned skeptical organizers into booked meetings.
  • Plan for exhibitors who attend fewer events but expect more from each one, including smaller formats like pre-event dinners, lunch and learns, and hotel lobby meetups.
  • Expect organizers to demand more from tech partners. Selling software and leaving clients to figure out the rest no longer works.