Taking Flight #7: Cory Fausz of Exponation

Cory Fausz is Communications Manager at Exponation.

Welcome to the seventh issue of Taking Flight, a newsletter of inspiration and insights from Feathr customers who have earned their wings as association and event industry leaders. Featured in this issue is Cory Fausz, Communications Manager at Exponation.

In this issue of Taking Flight, Cory talks about how she successfully markets the events in her portfolio at Exponation.

Tell me about your career background and how you ended up in your role at Exponation.

I started out on the journalism side of consumer print publishing, then moved to the marketing side of that. Made a career jump to B2B publishing when I joined Bill Communications (which quickly became VNU, and eventually Nielsen Business Media), and my tenure there offered me the opportunity to segue into marketing conferences and trade shows. In 2007, I decided to go out on my own and set up a B2B marketing consultancy. Exponation was one of my first clients, and I became their full-time Communications Manager in 2012.

What has been a surprising success in your career in marketing and communications?

Most recently, for Digital Signage Expo 2018, I had an idea of creating a series of live webinars that would involve our media partners and our advisory board on forward-thinking digital signage topics of particular interest to the vertical market that each media partner serves. With the great help of people on my team and our partners, we developed and promoted a program of nine weekly webinars between January and March that were very well attended and received. It ended up being a win-win-win because it helped position DSE and our media partners as thought leaders in the digital signage space, provided content for our news portal, DigitalSignageConnection.com, and helped us gain nearly 800 new leads. Sometimes the little ideas are surprising successes!

If you had every attendee, exhibitor, and sponsor's attention for five minutes, what would you want to know from them?

The candid answer to this question: “What one business issue keeps you up at night, and how could we help solve that for you with our event(s)?”

What is a lesson you've had to learn the hard way during your career?

This is not something that I “learned the hard way,” but it’s a piece of advice a carpenter gave me a long time ago, that applies almost every day: “Measure twice; cut once.”

What has been your favorite moment of any Exponation event?

My favorite moment of any show is set up. The day before an event starts, it seems impossible that everything could come together in 24 hours – but it does! I have always experienced a sense of awe over the human effort and teamwork that’s required to build a trade show floor. The raw energy of it is exhilarating.