This tutorial will walk you through the entire setup of an exhibitor campaign, from initial creation and customisation to uploading data and generating shareable links for your stakeholders.
Things to consider before setup
Customising your campaign: landing page URL
Customising your campaign: channels & suggested post
Customising your campaign: metadata
Customising your campaign: theme
Customising your campaign: template design
Running campaign: generating share tool links
Customising campaign: splash screen
Customising campaign: share images screen
Running your campaign: conversion tracking
Running your campaign: insights
Overview
As an event marketer, you know that getting exhibitors to promote their participation is key to expanding your event’s reach. The more they share, the more visibility your event gains, leading to more exhibitors, more attendees, and more impact.
In this practical, step-by-step course, you’ll learn how to:
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Set up and manage exhibitor campaigns aligned with your event goals
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Customise social sharing for your target audience
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Design branded image templates that elevate your campaign’s visual appeal
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Upload exhibitor and stakeholder data quickly and efficiently
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Generate shareable links that make it easy for exhibitors to spread the word
By the end of this course, you’ll have the tools and confidence to launch exhibitor campaigns that drive attendance, generate buzz, and make your partners proud to be part of your event.
Things to consider before setting up
Gleanin exhibitor campaigns allow you to create personalised share links for each of your exhibitors, making it easy for them to promote their participation to their own networks. This is the primary and most effective use of exhibitor campaigns on our platform.
Keep in mind that exhibitor data is linked to the event itself. When creating a new campaign, avoid deleting existing exhibitor data, as this will remove it from all campaigns tied to the event. Instead, you can simply assign previously uploaded exhibitors to your new campaign.
If you prefer a simpler, one-link-for-all approach and don’t plan to include individual exhibitor details, such as logos or company names, you can repurpose an attendee campaign for this purpose. However, we still recommend familiarising yourself with the standard exhibitor campaign setup, as providing tailored templates remains best practice.
Creating your campaign
Campaigns are created within an event, and there is no limit on how many you can create.
If you're managing multiple campaigns, such as sponsors, ambassadors or campaigns in different languages, be sure to label each one clearly for easier identification.
You can assign your exhibitors to a specific campaign using Groups or manually from the selection screen.
Follow these simple steps to create your exhibitor campaign:
- In the left-hand menu, click Campaigns.
- Click Create my first campaign or the blue plus (+) icon.
- On the next screen, select Exhibitors as your campaign type.
- On the theme customisation screen, you can upload your branded design assets and edit the colour scheme as well as hide elements from the template. Don’t worry if you don’t have your final design yet; you can update it later via the Theme section of the campaign dashboard.
- Fill in the required campaign details (these can also be edited later from the dashboard):
- Landing Page URL: The landing page for your event
- Suggested post: Pre-written copy for your stakeholders to share
- Social share metadata: Text that appears when the link is shared
- Campaign language: Choose the display language (note: this does not translate the admin interface or product)
- Click Finish to complete the setup.
Once your campaign is created, you can fine-tune it directly from your dashboard.
Customising your campaign: landing page URL
Your campaign landing page URL is the link you want your exhibitors to share. It should clearly communicate your event’s value and drive action, whether that’s learning more or registering. Choose a page that’s relevant, engaging, and designed to convert visitors into participants.
Before we dive into the next step, let’s take a moment as well to talk about UTM parameters. These small but powerful URL tags help you track where your campaign traffic is coming from and how it’s performing. They’re especially useful for measuring the impact of exhibitor-driven promotion. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with them; our UTM builder provides recommended settings you can easily accept and use.
If you need to make any changes to the landing page URL provided during the campaign setup, you can edit your Landing Page URL directly from the landing page section. Please ensure that the updated link works and does not contain any typos.
To apply UTM parameters, simply click Accept recommendations in the URL Health Check to use our suggested UTM settings. If you have your own parameters or need more fields, just click on Add additional custom UTM code.
Customising your campaign: channels & suggested post
As part of your campaign setup, you'll be asked to provide a suggested post, a message your exhibitors can share to promote your event. This post can be shared across a variety of social and communication channels, including LinkedIn, Facebook, email, BlueSky and many more.
Once your campaign is set up, you can customise the message for each specific channel - the suggested post.
You can easily control which sharing channels your exhibitors use by toggling them on or off, and rearrange their order on the image sharing screen.
Each channel can have its own customised message, just click the pencil icon to edit the text. For channels that include in the copy, make sure not to remove it, as it's required for the post to include the campaign link.
Due to LinkedIn updates, there are now a few additional steps to set up, and you can explore these options in more detail here, but sticking with the default auto-post setting is a safe choice.
To enable Instagram Story templates, please see here.
Customising your campaign: metadata
Metadata for social share images refers to the information embedded in a webpage's content that helps control how the page is displayed when shared on social media platforms. This includes the image, title, description, and other details that help platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., generate rich previews of the content being shared.
For example, when someone shares your event on Facebook, the title and description of the image that appear in the post are pulled from the metadata. It’s important to edit these elements to ensure they are on-brand and tailored specifically to your event.
You can customise your metadata text in the Metadata section of the dashboard.
Here are some best practices to keep in mind:
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Title: Use this space to share the key message you want your exhibitors to promote, e.g. “I’m exhibiting at [Event Title] – join me!”. Keep it concise - there’s a 65-character limit.
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Description: Include a clear call to action for the audience, such as “Register now” or “Sign up today”. The character limit here is 155.
Note: The product preview on the right is for illustration only. If you choose LinkedIn curated sharing, metadata may not appear.
Alt text is optional. Use it carefully, as incorrect or irrelevant alt text can reduce accessibility rather than improve it. More guidance and information on the alt text can be found here.
Customising your campaign: theme
Gleanin themes make it easy to create branded image templates for your campaign. A theme defines the overall look and feel, such as colours, fonts, and design elements, giving you full control to align visuals with your event branding.
When you create a new theme, Gleanin automatically generates a set of templates. These are the individual image variations based on that theme. Templates come in different formats (landscape and square) and layouts (logos, without logos, etc.), ready for your exhibitors to share.
You can have multiple themes within a single campaign, allowing you to offer a variety of styles to suit different audiences. Each template set within a theme can be customised, downloaded or hidden, giving you full flexibility over what’s available for sharing.
Editing theme
As mentioned in the introduction, any changes made at the theme level will apply to all templates created under that theme.
You can add as many themes as you like to your campaign to give your exhibitors a broader choice of visuals.
If you’d like to design a theme from scratch, note that there is no reset option. Instead, simply create a new theme from the dashboard and delete the one you no longer need. At least one theme must be active at all times.
More information on managing themes can be found here.
To help you with designing your custom backgrounds, we’ve created Figma templates, which include default Gleanin element placement, available here. For best practices on designing exhibitor campaign backgrounds, please refer to the guidelines here.
A few things to remember about Instagram:
- Portrait templates will only appear when Instagram is selected as the sharing platform.
- You will need to enable Instagram Stories templates through the channels section, as these are not created by default.
- The content positioning within the portrait templates is adjusted to ensure it displays correctly in Instagram's 3:4 preview format, avoiding any cut-off.
Customising your campaign: template design
While this introduction may sound repetitive, it's important to clearly distinguish between themes (previous section) and templates.
Themes define the overall visual identity of your campaign, which includes colours, fonts, and design elements, allowing you to align all visuals with your event branding. They serve as the foundation for creating consistent, on-brand imagery.
When you create a theme in Gleanin, a corresponding set of templates is automatically generated. These templates are the specific image variations derived from the theme. They come in multiple formats (e.g., landscape, square) and layouts (e.g., logos, no-logos) and are designed to be easily shared by your stakeholders.
You can customise each template by adjusting the size and positioning of existing elements. However, adding new elements is not supported.
Editing templates
Editing templates
Within the template editor, you can:
- Change the shape of the logo image
- Resize and reposition elements
- Align multiple elements as a group
More information and guidance on using the template editor can be found here.
Managing individual templates
Since you have control over each individual template, you can choose which ones from a theme will be available to your exhibitors. For example, if all exhibitors have company logos, you may want to hide templates that don’t include images to avoid duplication. This streamlines the experience by removing unnecessary options.
Since we do not support adding extra elements to the template, we cannot add an extra image for the headshot of the person from the exhibitors' company.
Running campaign: data
To run your campaign and generate share tool links for exhibitors, you’ll first need to upload their data into the platform.
Upload Options
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Basic Subscription:
You can add stakeholders either manually or by uploading a spreadsheet. -
Pro Subscription:
In addition to manual and spreadsheet uploads, you can also set up an API integration for one-click sync (view available integrations here).
Required Data Fields
Your speaker data spreadsheet must include the following columns:
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Exhibitor name
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Stand number
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Logo (image file or URL)
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Email Address
We’ve created upload templates to help you format your data correctly. They can be found under the Data Preparation section here.
It is important to remember that our upload process relies on matching both the format of the data and the order of the columns. This means the system expects specific columns in a specific sequence and looks for particular formats within each column. For example, the Email Address column must contain properly formatted addresses like name@domain.com for the system to recognise them.
Even if you don’t yet have certain data, such as URLs for the logos, if you're planning to bulk upload files from your device later, you must still include the corresponding column in your spreadsheet. Just leave the cells blank. For instance, if the Logo column is removed, all the data to the right (e.g., email addresses) will shift left, causing the upload to fail because the format no longer matches what the system expects.
To add data to your account, go to the Exhibitor section, click the plus (+) icon, and choose your preferred upload method.
Once your data is prepared in the spreadsheet, copy it without the column headers and paste it into the grey data box.
During the upload process, you will need to review exhibitor data and check if all looks correct before approving and finalising the upload.
If there are any issues during the upload, you’ll see a red "X" next to the record with the error.
For most standard uploads, you won’t need to adjust any settings. However, if you plan to use Groups, or (on a Pro plan) Destination URLs, make sure to toggle those options before uploading and include the relevant columns in your spreadsheet. More information is available in this article.
Running campaign: generating share tool links
Once your data is uploaded and the campaign is customised, you can generate share tool links for your stakeholders to start sharing their attendance and promoting your event.
These links must be shared with your stakeholders by downloading the merged mail file and using your CRM. Direct sharing from Gleanin is not supported.
You can view and export stakeholder links by clicking the Run Campaign button at the top of your dashboard, then downloading the merge mail file in .csv or .xlsx format.
To see exactly what your stakeholders will experience, simply open their link. Reporting only begins when they click the Open Social Media button, so previewing their links won’t affect the analytics.
More details on link exports can be found here.
In the next two modules, we’ll return to campaign customisation for the splash and share image screens, now that you’ve seen where they appear and how they function.
Customising campaign: splash screen
The share tool links generated for your exhibitors consist of two screens:
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Splash Screen: This is where you can add your branding and encourage stakeholders to take action.
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Share Images Screen: Here, they can select an image and choose which social channel to share it on.
Splash screen
You can customise your splash screen directly from the dashboard.
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Change the wording to better encourage your exhibitors to share.
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Choose the background colour to align with your brand.
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Add a splash image that includes your event details.
The preview in this section is for illustration purposes only. To see how your exhibitors will view the changes, you can preview one of their links.
More information and best practices on using the splash screen can be found here.
If you don’t find a use for the splash screen, you have an option to share links that will take your exhibitors directly to the share images screen. However, we recommend customising the copy and images instead of leaving them as the default.
Customising campaign: share images screen
The share tool links generated for your exhibitors consist of two screens:
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Splash Screen: This is where you can add your branding and encourage stakeholders to take action.
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Share Images Screen: Here, they can select an image and choose which social channel to share it on.
Share images screen
In the Share Image tab, you can edit the text that exhibitors will see before sharing their images with their networks. This screen has two versions: one for multiple images and one for a single image. It’s important to edit both versions, as the default text ("Here is your image to share") may not look great with multiple options.
The preview in this section is for illustration purposes only. To see how your exhibitors will view the changes, you can preview one of their links.
Running your campaign: conversion tracking
In addition to adding UTM parameters to your landing page, you can track conversions in Gleanin by adding our conversion tracking script to your desired conversion or landing page URL. The most common page to track is the registration confirmation page, but you can choose any page where you want to monitor conversions.
Conversion tracking code needs to be generated for both your event marketing pages and the confirmation page. These will be two separate code snippets, which you can generate in your Gleanin account.
The Web Tracking Code is for your event marketing and registration pages. This snippet should be added to all of those pages.
The Confirmation Page Code is specifically for the confirmation page and needs to be added by your registration provider.
In the example, we’ve demonstrated the code generation process for the standard HTML setup. For more customised setups and provider-specific instructions, please refer to this article.
You can check if conversion tracking is set up and functioning correctly by looking at the indicator on your campaign dashboard.
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Red: The code hasn’t been detected on your pages.
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Amber: The code is present, but no conversions have been recorded.
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Green: Conversions are being tracked for this campaign.
Running your campaign: insights
Gleanin's insights pages are specifically designed to help you pinpoint the key factors that contribute to your success. By identifying these drivers, you can enhance your performance by increasing the number of shares, clicks, and ultimately, attendees.
The campaign insights page has three main categories:
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Engagement: Easily generate a list of those who haven’t engaged yet, allowing you to reach out and encourage further participation.
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Activity: Track engagement levels from your exhibitors, including how often they’ve shared content and on which channels.
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Impact: Identify your most influential advocates by tracking who receives the highest number of clicks. This also helps you determine which templates are driving the most clicks, so you can refine your creative strategies for future campaigns.
To learn more about these categories and how to act on the results, please refer to the article here.