Event Promotion: Playmakers 2026

Promoting the Bay Area’s First-ever Sports Marketing Summit

Campaign Details

The Starting Point

Many of AMA SF’s previous events were minimally promoted on their social channels – one or two posts the week before the event and one post the day of. The event immediately before Playmakers – a Career Accelerator seminar – had a more robust promotion schedule, with individual posts promoting each speaker and multiple reminders leading up to the event, but the campaign still only started 9 days before launch. My goal for Playmakers 2026 was twofold: start early and post often.

Putting Together the Campaign

I decided on a mix of three types of posts for the Playmakers campaign: event details, speaker spotlights, and general reminders. The event planners had already come up with a distinct brand identity for the event – logos, graphics, icons, colors, and fonts – that I wanted to stick to as close as possible throughout the campaign. As a general rule, I used the same font pack, logos, and graphic style (casual, sporty, and modern) for all of the social posts. However, there were some graphics – such as the Speaker Spotlight series, which promoted all ten speakers and moderators — where I chose to be more adventurous with the colors and design to prevent the posts from blending together.

AMA SF’s primary social platforms are LinkedIn and Instagram. While I made a point to double-post everything on both platforms (with adjusted copy to fit each one), the LinkedIn page was more of a priority, with more followers and a higher engagement rate.  

The Execution

The posting pattern for Playmakers 2026 looked something like this:

Our highest-performing posts were the human-centric spotlights for speakers that had large online followings. Our first speaker spotlight, featuring Edreece Arghandiwal (see below), quickly became one of AMA SF’s most-liked posts on LinkedIn due to the speaker’s popularity both on LinkedIn and throughout the Bay Area community. Basic reminders and posts with event details performed less well, but even the lower-engagement posts garnered a few reposts and enthusiastic comments.

To avoid the trap of making the social feed monotonous with an endless daily slog of identical promotional posts, I took care to break up the Playmakers campaign with other AMA SF marketing promos, such as the Misadventures in Marketing podcast and posts on the AMA blog.

By the Numbers

Over a six-week period (five weeks leading up to the event and one week after), our promotional campaign increased analytics for the AMA SF LinkedIn page in every category. These key metrics included:

Reposts, impressions, and new followers were the highest-performing metrics, and the ones I’m most proud of. Breaking through the noise of a crowded social feed and getting people to engage with content is one of the hardest (and most mystifying) challenges for a social media marketer, so I was thrilled to see such a dramatic uptick in engagement compared to the six weeks before the Playmakers campaign. 

And it wasn’t just online! The event sold more than 120 tickets, with standing room offered to plus-ones and other attendees, making it one of the highest-attended AMA SF events in the past year. Many of the attendees were posting photos and positive reviews on LinkedIn in the days after, which we reposted, and several people asked our team about a possible Playmakers 2027.

A sold-out show, enthusiastic response, and high social engagement in every metric category – who could ask for more? I’m thrilled with the promotional campaign for Playmakers 2026, particularly since it was my first effort since taking the lead on AMA SF’s social presence. It’s a great demonstration of my three foremost passions — writing, design, and strategy — and I got the opportunity to collaborate with so many wonderful members of the AMA SF community, from fellow marketers to event promoters to photographers and videographers. Bring on Playmakers 2027!

Select Content Gallery

Below is a selection of my 8 favorite LinkedIn and Instagram posts from the Playmakers 2026 campaign. The posts are in chronological order, starting with the first Speaker Spotlight (which became one of our most-liked photos!) and ending with the speaker quote carousel. Click on each photo to see a larger view, and hover over the larger image for the caption that accompanied it on AMA SF’s social platforms.