Turning a biennial maritime trade show into a lead-generation engine that delivered 17 times the planned leads.

A maritime trade-show organizer trying to grow buyer, exhibitor and industry audience interest.

As a biennial event, the maritime trade show's social presence sits dormant for most of the two-year cycle, then needs to build community, buzz and a real pipeline of qualified visitor and exhibitor leads in the weeks before the show floor opens.

A seven-week content and paid media push in the run-up to the event: daily organic content across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn (exhibitor welcomes, speaker and jury announcements, testimonials, event countdowns and live show-floor coverage), paired with a paid lead-generation campaign on Meta, a brand-awareness push across Google Search, YouTube and Display, and page-growth boosts on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Instagram followers grew 274% during the campaign window — entirely through organic content, since the paid Instagram follower push was never even drawn on. Facebook's community grew 62%, helped along by an efficient page-growth campaign, while LinkedIn added a smaller 29%. The standout number was on the lead-generation side: the Meta campaign delivered 17 times the planned number of leads, at a cost per lead roughly 15 times lower than estimated — all while using only a fraction of the allocated media budget. A dormant, once-in-two-years account turned into one of the strongest lead-generation results in D&B's event-marketing portfolio.