Nottingham DM: Expanding Our Marketing Meetup to a New City!
Our marketing meetup Sheffield DM has hit some major milestones over the past couple of years: our first all-day, in-person event in Summer 2022, our fifth birthday meetup last November - and now we’ve got another very exciting update to share!
We’re expanding our events to a new city, partnering with Victress Digital to launch Nottingham DM at the end of March. Following our Summer ‘23 event, our biggest yet, we received a number of approaches from companies and individuals about collaborating on events in other cities.
We found the team at Victress had exactly the same values in running an event: line-up and speaking opportunities diversity; free-to-attend meetups that are accessible to everyone, regardless of experience; and a casual, relaxed atmosphere that facilitates making genuine connections with like-minded marketers, rather than stuffy and forced networking.
The first Nottingham DM will be held on Thursday 28th March at city centre pub Barley Twist, just around the corner from Nottingham train station, and will feature expert Digital PR and Paid Social talks from freelance marketer Lau Miguez and Abi Bellion-Carey, Head of Paid Social at Overdrive Digital.
“We’re so excited to be launching this event and teaming up with Sheffield DM,” says Victress founder Emma Glover. “Nottingham is my home city and where I’ve built my agency - there’s so much digital marketing talent here so it’s the perfect place to host a regular event of this kind where we can build a real marketing community.”
“Having seen the style of Sheffield DM events, I felt that was something we were missing here.”
Organised by our marketing team, Sheffield DM began in November 2018 to build a marketing community in the city and provide a forum for marketers to learn and advance their careers.
Designed to be an antidote to stuffy networking events with the same line-ups (a Mario Kart competition has been a mainstay), organisers also put a focus on providing opportunities for first-time speakers and underrepresented groups.
In the five years since, over 1,000 different attendees have passed through the doors to watch talks and panels starring 91 different speakers. 58% of them have been female and non-binary, with first-time speakers making up around 20% of all line-ups.
Our meetups have remained free, attracting sponsorship from Sitebulb, LensGo Visual Media, Purely.Website and unLTD Magazine, and we’ve also incorporated an annual all-day, paid-for event each summer into its programme.
The Summer ‘23 event attracted over 230 marketers from all over the UK to Sheffield and won the backing of a clutch of new sponsors including Trustpilot. The Summer 2024 event will be held at The Wave, the University of Sheffield’s state-of-the-art new venue, on Thursday 18th July - Early Bird tickets out now!
Nottingham DM’s colour scheme evokes the city’s Sherwood Forest links, a deliberate nod to local identity. It’s only right that a marketing event has strong local branding - after all, legend has it our own orange colour scheme was informed by Henderson’s Relish, the pride of Sheffield.
“We’re thrilled to have partnered with Victress to expand our events beyond Sheffield,” says Senior SEO Executive Nicky Furness, a lead organiser of Sheffield DM.
“After last summer’s event we had a number of approaches from companies interested in joining forces on similar events in their cities, which was hugely flattering.
“While many of those conversations are ongoing, we found our values aligned perfectly with the team at Victress and we agreed Nottingham is a brilliant environment for this kind of event - so it made sense to make this the first location to roll out ‘DM Network’ events.”
“This is just the beginning of the vision we have for expanding our events, which is hugely exciting!”
To discuss speaker and sponsorship opportunities for Nottingham DM, get in touch with hello@sheffielddm.co.uk.
Reserve your free ticket for the first Nottingham DM event here.
And you can also join the mailing list to hear about future Nottingham DM events!
As our Digital Marketing Manager, Dan spreads the word about the excellent work being delivered by our team, drawing on his background in journalism and SEO.
Having founded an SEO agency for start-up businesses in his previous role, Dan relished the opportunity to join the set-up at Evoluted and help grow an already thriving agency. He was named one of The Drum's Future 50 Emerging Marketers Worldwide for 2023 and was a finalist for Prolific North's 2022 Marketer of the Year.
