Beyond the Ballroom: Modern Event Marketing and Community Building with Jonathan Kazarian

Topics discussed in this episode with time stamps

00:00 – 00:15 “There’s a thousand things you can do around retargeting ads and your email sequences and card abandonment. All of that stuff makes sense and is necessary but it’s all secondary to identifying the audience that you want there.” — Jonathan Kazarian

00:16 – 00:34 Welcome to Peppershock Media’s Marketing Expedition Podcast

00:35 – 01:39 Jonathan’s Background

01:40 – 09:27 Marketing Essentials Moment: The Repurposing Ladder

09:28 – 11:18 Welcome to the show, Jonathan!

11:19 – 14:49 Event Marketing Best Practices

14:50 – 16:59 Getting the Right Audience to Events

17:00 – 21:10 Creating Community Through Events

21:11 – 23:52 Successful Event Case Study

23:53 – 24:28 Poderific, baby! Whether you’re looking for a podcast studio to rent or need help with the entire production and distribution of your podcast, we gotcha covered.

24:29 – 27:16 Ideal Client Profile

27:17 – 29:08 Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

29:09 – 31:07 Integration with Other Tools and CRMs

31:08 – 32:22 Staying Updated on Marketing Trends

32:23 – 33:58 Final Words of Wisdom for Event Planning

33:59 – 34:32 Reach out to Jonathan

34:33 – 34:48 Thank you so much, Jonathan! Share this podcast, give us a review, and enjoy your marketing journey!

34:49 – 35:35 Join the Marketing Expedition Community today!

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Meet with Rhea Allen

Full Transcript

Episode 264 — Beyond the Ballroom: Modern Event Marketing and Community Building

Jonathan Kazarian: There are a thousand things you can do with retargeting ads, email sequences, and cart abandonment. All of that matters, but it’s secondary to identifying the audience you want in the room.

Intro: Welcome to the Marketing Expedition podcast—an auditory journey through the latest in marketing, branding, and advertising. I’m your Marketing Expedition guide, Rhea Allen.

Rhea Allen: On this episode, I’m speaking with Jonathan Kazarian, CEO and founder of Accel Events—an event management platform recently recognized by Inc. 5000 as one of the top 100 fastest-growing private companies in America. Jonathan’s leadership and innovative approach have helped propel Accel Events to the forefront of event technology.

Rhea Allen: Jonathan is an industry thought leader who shares insights on the events landscape and speaks at industry events like EventMB, Event Tech Innovation Summit, BizBash Live, and INBOUND. Today we’re talking about event marketing—how to get the right people to your events and keep them coming back.

Marketing Essentials Moment: The Repurposing Ladder

Rhea Allen: Today I want to dive into what we’re calling the repurposing ladder. You can take one core piece of content—one episode, one video, one live stream—and turn it into 10 different assets.

Rhea Allen: Repurposing with intention helps your best ideas show up everywhere your audience pays attention, across multiple platforms and formats.

Rhea Allen: Start with your pillar content: a podcast episode, a recorded video, a webinar, or a training. From that, pull three to five key takeaways you can reuse.

Rhea Allen: Next, create your “magic clips” or “hero clips.” Take long-form content and cut it into 30–90 second reels. Use them as Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, TikTok clips, or audiograms. These can tease the full episode or stand alone as valuable content.

Rhea Allen: Create quote posts—one sticky line or sentence that sounds like something you’d say. Quote graphics still work because people stop to read them.

Rhea Allen: Build carousel posts—swipable mini-decks, usually six to ten slides depending on the platform. Use quotable moments, stats, or step-by-step insights. Carousels drive engagement because people swipe, and that interaction helps performance.

Rhea Allen: Add a call to action at the end: a form fill, a download, or a link to the full episode.

Rhea Allen: You can also turn the content into a newsletter or email. LinkedIn supports articles and newsletters, too. Share three bullet points, link to the full episode, and include a clear CTA.

Rhea Allen: Another option is to transcribe the audio, edit it, and turn it into a blog post for SEO—and now GEO, generative engine optimization. You want your content to show up in AI-driven searches, especially for longer, question-based queries.

Rhea Allen: If you answer questions in your blog posts and add pieces to your FAQ section, it supports both SEO and GEO.

Rhea Allen: You can also tailor posts for specific audiences—nonprofits, home services, marketing teams, or clients you want to retain. Add a new intro and share the most relevant segment.

Rhea Allen: Create one-pagers or talk tracks. Send someone a 30–90 second clip and say, “I thought this would be useful.” If they want more, they can watch the full episode.

Rhea Allen: Use prompts: share a quote and add a discussion question. This works especially well on LinkedIn.

Rhea Allen: Always add subtitles. Many people watch without sound—during meetings, while multitasking, or in public.

Rhea Allen: Finally, build an evergreen library. Compile clips into a downloadable lead magnet—like “Top 10 Ways to Repurpose Content.” Collect contact info and turn it into a simple funnel.

Rhea Allen: Repurposing creates consistency. Consistent posting builds engagement and pipeline over time more reliably than chasing a single viral moment.

Rhea Allen: If you need help with any of this, let us know. We do this for clients all the time. Visit Peppershock.com.

Interview

Rhea Allen: Welcome back to the Marketing Expedition podcast. I’m Rhea Allen, president and CEO of Peppershock Media and founder of the Marketing Expedition Community. Today’s guest is Jonathan Kazarian. Welcome to the show, Jonathan.

Jonathan Kazarian: Thanks for having me on.

Rhea Allen: Tell us a bit about you—where you’re from and what brought you to where you are now.

Jonathan Kazarian: I’m from Boston. About 11 years ago, I was working at a hedge fund. My cousin got sick when she was 17, and I decided to host a fundraiser for her. I ended up throwing a 1,000-person event.

Jonathan Kazarian: While planning it, I tried to find tech to run different parts of the event. Everything out there was either extremely expensive, poorly supported, or outdated. I had a tech background, teamed up with a friend, and we built our own solution.

Jonathan Kazarian: Today we run an end-to-end event management platform that serves the full range of event organizers—mid-market and enterprise corporate, large associations, and more.

Rhea Allen: I love that origin story. A purpose and a real need often lead people into entrepreneurship.

Rhea Allen: Tell me more about the people you serve, the tech behind it, and how things have evolved over the last 11 years.

Jonathan Kazarian: We moved from fundraising into corporate and association events between 2015 and 2020. Then 2020 flipped everything. We pivoted to virtual events, and we hit a product-market fit that most companies dream of.

Jonathan Kazarian: We doubled revenue month over month and doubled ARR. That lasted about 18 months, then ended abruptly. But it brought us back to our roots—what we love most: in-person events. Today, 90–95% of the events we service are in person.

Rhea Allen: Let’s talk event marketing best practices. What have you seen work well to get tickets sold and people in seats?

Jonathan Kazarian: First, it depends on whether an organization is even running events. If you’re not, a great entry point is webinars, or hosting smaller dinners.

Jonathan Kazarian: We do dinners extensively. This month alone we have three: New York, DC, and London. We co-host with a partner, which helps split cost and effort. We invite 25–30 event marketers—usually more senior professionals.

Jonathan Kazarian: The goal is community. If you sell to people who don’t have a counterpart inside their organization, their “counterpart” is someone doing the same role elsewhere. If you’re the brand facilitating that community, you get remembered.

Jonathan Kazarian: Once you’ve built that reputation, you can move into larger owned events—flagship events, product launches, and more.

Jonathan Kazarian: The other angle is third-party events: trade shows and industry conferences. It’s about how you bring community together, how you follow up, and how memorable you make the experience.

Rhea Allen: A big challenge is putting on the event—and then making sure people actually show up. What tactics help you reach the right audience and drive attendance?

Jonathan Kazarian: It starts with knowing who the right audience is. That’s an ICP problem, not just an events problem. It needs to be company-wide: sales, marketing, and product aligned.

Jonathan Kazarian: The events team shouldn’t be solely responsible for filling seats. They should coach the organization on how to do it.

Jonathan Kazarian: For our dinners, most attendance is driven by our sales team. We’re giving them an asset—an offer that isn’t an “ask.” It’s not, “Sit through a demo.” It’s, “Join us for dinner at a great restaurant with your peers.”

Jonathan Kazarian: We don’t pitch. No screens. We don’t even do a 30-second “who we are.” If someone gives up dinner with their kids to come, they’ve likely checked our website and have baseline awareness.

Jonathan Kazarian: The event itself is 90% about creating value for the customer. If you do that, you build trust and people come back.

Jonathan Kazarian: Retargeting ads, email sequences, and cart abandonment matter—but they’re secondary to identifying the audience you want there.

Rhea Allen: When you host these dinners, what actually happens? Is it mostly relationship-building?

Jonathan Kazarian: It’s relationship-building and industry discussion. We talk about the industry and event technology, but we don’t pitch ourselves.

Jonathan Kazarian: We print slips of paper with questions for everyone—questions like the ones you’re asking: How are you getting people in seats? How are you driving traffic? How are you managing follow-up?

Jonathan Kazarian: Because we’re intentional about who’s in the room, every question resonates. Everyone is expected to speak. Once someone speaks once, it’s easier for them to jump in again, and the dialogue builds.

Jonathan Kazarian: We return to the same cities multiple times a year. In New York, a third of the attendees often come back because they want to.

Rhea Allen: So the side effect is that people eventually use your tool.

Jonathan Kazarian: That’s the end goal, but we don’t look at it through short-term attribution. Only about 3% of people are in-market at any given time.

Jonathan Kazarian: Even if someone doesn’t book a demo right away, eight months later—when they’re ready—we’re the first brand they think of. That kind of impression lasts longer than a quick ad on LinkedIn.

Rhea Allen: How do you compare to something like Eventbrite?

Jonathan Kazarian: We don’t really compete with Eventbrite. That’s more consumer-oriented—like yoga classes. Our customers are primarily B2B and associations.

Jonathan Kazarian: Our average event size is around 75 attendees, but customers choose us because we can scale to their largest events—30,000+ attendees.

Jonathan Kazarian: We cover registration, agenda management, speakers, sessions, floor plans, email comms, exhibitors, badge printing, check-in, and the mobile app—one holistic solution.

Rhea Allen: Can you share an example of an event that went really well using your platform?

Jonathan Kazarian: We’re the software provider, so we’re not always in the weeds of every detail. But one event I’m personally involved with is the All-In Podcast event.

Jonathan Kazarian: Tickets are $7,500, and it’s a high-profile event with 3,000–5,000 attendees. We manage the pre-event experience, attendee communications, and getting people into the mobile app.

Jonathan Kazarian: For that event, we use RFID badges. If you’re wearing your badge and I have the app, I can tap your badge to connect and exchange information. Exhibitors can do the same.

Jonathan Kazarian: Technology is the first experience someone has with your event. It impacts pre-event, onsite, and post-event follow-up. Historically, tech hasn’t been treated as strategically as it should be.

Rhea Allen: I’ve experienced that as a speaker. It’s convenient—no forms, no business cards, no manual entry.

Jonathan Kazarian: That’s the goal: make everything easy.

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Rhea Allen: Back to the interview. Who is your ideal client?

Jonathan Kazarian: It’s not based on company size or location. We want to work with companies that believe in events—where the CMO, CEO, and even CFO support events.

Jonathan Kazarian: Those companies push the needle on experience. They care about the details, and they challenge us to get better.

Jonathan Kazarian: It spans associations, tech companies, media businesses, and manufacturing. Often it’s 500+ employees because that’s where budgets can support flagship events. Many of those organizations also run hundreds of smaller events throughout the year.

Rhea Allen: Where do you want the company to be in one year and five years?

Jonathan Kazarian: We want to be the household-name brand for professional event technology—B2B and association events—and keep pushing what technology can do for attendee and organizer experience.

Rhea Allen: Any advice for students or early-career professionals who want a similar path?

Jonathan Kazarian: Try things. Don’t overthink it. I didn’t build the first version of Accel Events to start a company. I built it to solve a problem.

Jonathan Kazarian: The demand validated the product. Today, distribution matters more than building the product—at least early on. It’s easy to build something; it’s harder to get it in front of the right people.

Rhea Allen: What’s your biggest challenge right now?

Jonathan Kazarian: Distribution. We have a robust product that can serve almost every use case. We need to keep building brand awareness.

Rhea Allen: So, more dinners.

Jonathan Kazarian: Trust comes from a lot of things: showing up onsite, attending third-party events, hosting our own, and servicing customers well.

Jonathan Kazarian: We’re huge on customer support. We offer 24/7 support with real people—no AI bots. Our median response time is 16 seconds. That builds trust.

Jonathan Kazarian: I got an email today from a customer we onboarded three months ago—a large publicly traded company—saying it’s the best support they’ve had in any software they’ve ever used, and they’ve told friends in the industry.

Rhea Allen: Does your platform integrate with CRMs? Any tools you recommend?

Jonathan Kazarian: On the corporate side, it’s about 60/40 Salesforce and HubSpot. We have deep integrations with both.

Jonathan Kazarian: On the marketing automation side, Marketo is the biggest, then Pardot and Eloqua. HubSpot is in that mix too.

Jonathan Kazarian: On the association side, there are many AMS options. We built a universal connector so we can integrate with different AMS platforms without charging professional services fees.

Rhea Allen: Do you work with nonprofits?

Jonathan Kazarian: That’s where we started. We still have fundraising tools like auctions and text-to-give, but it’s less of our focus today.

Rhea Allen: Where do you get your marketing information? Podcasts, newsletters, blogs?

Jonathan Kazarian: A mix. I’m active on LinkedIn, and I listen to podcasts more than music now.

Rhea Allen: Any podcast recommendations?

Jonathan Kazarian: Jason Wendelson is excellent. Marketing Millennial with Daniel Murray. HubSpot has a couple good ones. Jay’s podcast, Do This, Not That. I also listen to a lot of product podcasts.

Rhea Allen: As we wrap up, what are a few ideas listeners can implement for their next event?

Jonathan Kazarian: If it’s an owned event and you haven’t tried co-hosting with a partner, do it. You split cost and effort.

Jonathan Kazarian: We sometimes co-host with three or four partners. You can host more events with the same budget, and partners help fill the room. Their trust transfers to you.

Jonathan Kazarian: LinkedIn DMs are a great way to invite people personally. Be intentional about who you invite.

Jonathan Kazarian: For our dinners, we post the agenda on our website and use our platform for registration, but everyone is approved. We set up an approval workflow so we can vet each attendee.

Jonathan Kazarian: We also don’t allow spouses, because it shifts the conversation away from industry discussion. There’s a time for personal conversation, but that’s not what these dinners are for.

Rhea Allen: That makes sense.

Rhea Allen: If people want to connect with you, what’s the best way?

Jonathan Kazarian: LinkedIn is best—Jonathan Kazarian, CEO of Accel Events. You can also message us through our website chat and put us to the test. See if we respond in 16 seconds.

Rhea Allen: I love that. Thanks, Jonathan.

Jonathan Kazarian: Thanks for having me on.

Rhea Allen: If you found this valuable, the best thing you can do for Jonathan and me is share this episode with someone who needs it. Until next time, enjoy your marketing journey.

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