May 5-7, 2026
1,365
Social shares
3,866
Referral CTAs
2,671
Registrations added
Industry: Hospitality Design
CASE STUDY
2,671 hospitality design professionals added through peer-to-peer marketing at a 30.63% click-to-sign-up rate, with 78% verified attendees
May 5-7, 2026
Event Overview
HD Expo is hospitality design’s largest annual gathering, presented by Hospitality Design magazine and produced by Emerald, now part of Forge.
The 2026 edition was held from May 5-7, 2026 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It attracted more than 10,000 hospitality design professionals and featured 550+ exhibitors from 16 countries.
Designers, architects, owners, operators and manufacturers came together for product launches, educational sessions and networking.
HD Expo entered its 2026 edition with a new brand identity, introduced in April, alongside several additions to its event program. These included industry-led education developed with The Curators, a hosted buyer program expanded to 200 key decision-makers, and new formats such as micro-gatherings and guided expo hall tours.
To support its event marketing efforts, HD Expo partnered with Snöball to activate its audience through peer-to-peer marketing. Attendees, exhibitors, and speakers were equipped with personalized promotional assets and sharing tools, turning them into event advocates who promoted the event across their professional networks.
How we
did it
Snöball ran a 9-week peer-to-peer marketing campaign starting February 18, 2026, activating attendees, exhibitors, and speakers in parallel with audience-specific messaging, personalized promotional assets, and unique trackable referral links.
Attendees were encouraged to promote their participation, exhibitors their booths, and speakers their sessions, with a dedicated campaign track supporting the hosted buyer program.
Deployed a booster email sequence across the pre-event window, from registration opening through the final run-up to the show - hitting a 61.1% open rate and 16.9% click rate.
Created personalized, one-click share cards for advocates across the attendee, exhibitor, and speaker segments, each pre-populated with relevant details such as name, role, photo, logo, session, or booth.
Created personalized landing pages for speakers and exhibitors, giving each advocate a tailored destination for referral traffic and enabling registration activity to be attributed back to individual advocates.
Synced speaker data through a two-way Sessionboard API integration, automatically pulling speaker information into Snöball to generate personalized promotional assets and unique trackable share links. Those share links were then pushed back into Sessionboard, giving speakers another place to access and promote their sessions.
Enabled sharing across 17 social and messaging channels.
Ran a dedicated hosted buyer campaign track, supporting HD Expo's 200-buyer hosted program.
Tracked shares, referral traffic, and conversions by advocate and channel in real time through Snöball's campaign dashboard.
Snöball's peer-to-peer marketing team managed the campaign end to end, from audience activation and campaign deployment through optimization and performance tracking.
Mobilizing Participants
6,290
attendees mobilized with a 10.2% share rate
Meet John, a hospitality design professional!
He has just signed up to attend HD Expo.
John is instantly shown a personalized share page to invite peers and drive more registrations to the show.
Mobilizing
industry speakers
112
Speakers mobilized with a 66.3% share rate
Meet Cori, an industry speaker!
She is set to speak at HD Expo. Cori receives a custom landing page from Snöball that she can personalize and invite her network to attend her session.
Mobilizing
Exhibitors
1,652
Exhibitors mobilized with a 9.9% share rate
Meet Megan, a hospitality design exhibitor!
She’s set to exhibit for Society6 at HD Expo 2026.
Megan gets a custom promo kit from Snöball with trackable links, helping invite prospects to visit her booth.
Tech Stack
Snöball integrated with Cvent to activate attendees, speakers, and exhibitors as personalized advocates, with referral attribution syncing back to Cvent’s registrant data.
An A2Z integration pulled exhibitor booths and company details into personalized share cards and landing pages. A two-way Sessionboard API integration pulled speaker data into Snöball to generate personalized promotional assets and unique trackable share links, then pushed those links back into Sessionboard so speakers could access and promote their sessions directly from their speaker workflow.
Peer-to-peer marketing campaign performance
- Across all channels, advocates generated 1,365 social shares and 3,866 referral CTA clicks, driving 2,671 additional registrations at a 30.63% click-to-sign-up rate.
- Exhibitors drove 2,536 additional registrations, attendees drove 75 new sign-ups while speaker referrals added 60 registrations
- LinkedIn and Email were the top-performing channels for generating referral conversions among attendees and speakers; Email led among exhibitors. Across the full campaign, LinkedIn was the most-used channel overall among the 17 available social and messaging channels, followed by Email, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and SMS.
- Snöball sent 20,435 emails on behalf of HD Expo, helping mobilize attendees, speakers, and exhibitors with a 61.1% open rate (12,478 opens) and 16.9% click rate (3,462 clicks).
- The top-performing advocate drove 208 referral sign-ups (conversions).
30.63%
Click-to-sign-up rate
78%
Verified attendees
108,211
Landing page views
20,435
Emails sent with 61.1% open rate and 16.9% click rate
