How to Get Speakers to Promote Your Event

To get speakers to promote your event, hand each one a finished promo kit plus a personal tracked link and code, then report back what their link sold. In the worked example below, 20 speakers on mid-band assumptions sell about 16 tickets; lifting the share rate from 50% to 80% adds about 10 more.

• The metric: tickets per speaker = sharing speakers x reach per speaker x click rate x purchase rate, divided by speakers on the line-up.
• The asset: a worked model with low, mid and high assumption bands, a lever table, and a per-speaker attribution report.
• The checklist: the Ready-to-Post Speaker Kit, eight items every speaker gets before you ask them to post.
• The tools: Eventbrite-style tracking links, UTM-tagged URLs for your analytics, and personal discount codes.

Rules of thumb

• On mid-band assumptions, each speaker who posts adds about 1.6 tickets (16 tickets from 10 sharing speakers); the speakers who never post add none.
• A 30-point lift in share rate (50% to 80%) adds 60% more speaker tickets, more than any single lift in click or purchase rate in the lever table.
• When you add tracking parameters to a speaker’s URL, include utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, which Google Analytics help says you should always use.
• In the illustrative per-speaker report, the top two speakers sold 8 of 16 tickets: report by speaker, not as a total.
• If you pay a speaker per ticket or give them something of value to promote, the US FTC expects that connection disclosed clearly and conspicuously.

How do I get speakers to promote my event?

Speakers promote an event when sharing takes them under five minutes, the post makes them look good, and they can see what their share sold.

Asking speakers to “share the event” with a logo fails twice: the speaker has to write the copy, and a speaker who posts once and hears nothing has no reason to post again. The fix has three parts:

1. Remove the effort. Send the Ready-to-Post Speaker Kit.
2. Make it measurable. Give every speaker a personal tracked link and code so each sale has a name on it.
3. Close the loop. Report what their link drove, then ask for the next post.

How speakers fit beside past attendees, sponsors and paid media is in our conference marketing guide.

Frequently asked questions

Why don’t speakers share my event?

Most speakers do not share because the request costs them effort and gives them nothing back. A written post, a speaker card and a personal link remove the effort; a report of what their link sold gives them the reason to post again.

How many tickets should each speaker sell?

No credible public benchmark exists for tickets per speaker. In this page’s worked model, a 20-speaker line-up sells 0.06, 0.8 or 4.3 tickets per speaker across the low, mid and high assumption bands. Measure your own with per-speaker links and codes, then use last year’s figure as the baseline.

Should each speaker get a discount code or just a tracked link?

Give both. A tracked link records clicks and, on platforms such as Eventbrite, tickets per link; a code records buyers who type the URL. Count each ticket once, crediting the code first.

Can I pay speakers commission on ticket sales?

You can, but in the US the FTC says paid endorsers generally need to disclose the connection clearly and conspicuously, and its endorsement guidance suggests wording such as “I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post”. Check your own country’s rules first; this is general information, not legal advice.

When should I send speakers their promo kit?

Send the kit as soon as the speaker’s session is confirmed and the event page is live, with posting dates set against your own registration curve rather than one burst in the final week.

20 speakers, 16 tickets: the worked speaker-promotion model

A 20-speaker line-up sells about 16 tickets through speaker shares on mid-band assumptions, and anywhere from 1 to 86 across the bands below.

No credible public benchmark exists for speaker share rates, reach per speaker or tickets per speaker; ticketing vendors do not publish one on a stated denominator. Every rate below is a labelled assumption to replace with your own. Reach per speaker means people who see that speaker’s posts or email across the campaign, not follower count.

At an assumed $500 ticket, the mid band is $8,000 of revenue from a channel that costs no media spend. The rest of this page is about moving a line-up from the left column towards the right one.

Raising the speaker share rate from 50% to 80% adds about 10 tickets

The speaker share rate is the strongest lever in the model: moving it from 50% to 80% takes mid-band sales from 16 to 25.6 tickets, about 10 more.

Share rate wins because it is the lever you control most directly: it depends on whether you made posting easy, which the kit below is built to do. Purchase rate is worth checking too: if speaker traffic lands and does not buy, the problem is the page or the price, covered in what to do when event ticket sales are slow.

The Ready-to-Post Speaker Kit checklist

The Ready-to-Post Speaker Kit is a single email or shared folder that lets a speaker post about your event in under five minutes without writing anything.

1. Personal tracked link to the event page, already shortened, with the speaker’s name in the tracking label.
2. Personal discount code (for example SPEAKERNAME15), so sales are credited even when buyers type the URL.
3. Three written posts in the speaker’s voice: the announcement, a mid-campaign post about their session’s takeaway, and a last-call post.
4. A forwardable email of about 100 words the speaker can send to their own list or clients, with the link in it.
5. A speaker card: their approved headshot, name, session title and date, sized for LinkedIn and Instagram.
6. A short video prompt: one question to answer on camera in 30 seconds (“What will people leave your session able to do?”).
7. Posting dates set relative to the event, matched to when your buyers register (see the registration curve in how to increase conference attendance).
8. The report promise: one line saying you will send them what their link sold, and when.

Item 3 does most of the work. Write the posts about the speaker’s session, not your event: “I’m speaking on X” gets shared, “Come to our conference” often does not.

How to track tickets per speaker with links and codes

Tickets per speaker are tracked by giving each speaker a unique link and a unique code, because each method catches buyers the other misses.

Use the link and the code together and count a ticket once: credit the code if one was used, otherwise the link. Below is what the resulting report looks like for the mid band. The figures are illustrative, built to match the model, not measured.

Send each speaker their own row, not the whole table: “your link drove 90 visits and 5 tickets” is a reason to post again.

A 15% speaker discount code costs $1,200 on 16 tickets

A 15% speaker discount code on an assumed $500 ticket costs $75 a sale, so the 16 mid-band tickets give away $1,200 and net $6,800.

That is the price of attribution and of a reason to buy now, worth paying only if those buyers would not have paid full price anyway; a smaller code (10%) or a bonus such as a session recording costs less. Keep speaker codes separate from your early-bird pricing so you can see each one; how to set the early-bird step itself is covered in early bird ticket pricing.

Paying speakers per ticket sold is the stronger incentive and needs more care. In the US, the FTC’s endorsement guidance says an endorser who has been paid or given something of value to promote a product generally needs to disclose that connection clearly and conspicuously, and suggests wording such as “I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post” (FTC). Other countries have their own rules; check your regulator before offering commission. This is general information, not legal advice.

Running speaker promotion for 20 speakers takes about 16 hours

Running speaker promotion in-house for a 20-speaker event takes about 16 hours of organiser time, on the time estimates in the table below.

The tools are often already in hand (tracking links, a URL shortener, a design template); the skill is writing posts a speaker would put their name to. What speaker promotion will not do is follow up the people who clicked and did not buy, or call the companies that might send a group. That is a sales job; see how to sell high-ticket event tickets and, for outside help, the event marketing agency guide.

Sources

1. Eventbrite, How to Increase Ticket Sales by Using Eventbrite’s Unique Tracking Links
2. Google Analytics Help, URL builders: collect campaign data with custom URLs
3. US Federal Trade Commission, FTC’s Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking