ORLANDO — Coffee Fest Orlando 2025, which was held Oct. 24–25 at the Orange County Convention Center, saw a huge influx of new attendees — 65% were first-timers — thanks to its emphasis on marketing through collaborative social media posts, as well as paid advertising.
The organic social focused on highlighting the people and experiences behind Coffee Fest, including content featuring behind-the-scenes moments, product previews, speaker highlights and personal stories about why the event mattered to them.
And, according to Samantha Grimaldi, Group Marketing Director at Clarion Events North America, these kinds of posts garnered the most engagement.
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“We found the best performing posts were those that were people focused. Onsite, we even did a ‘fit check’ video to highlight what people were wearing,” she said. “While these types of posts had been the goal before, we really doubled down on them over the last few months and were excited to see that in the last 60 days, our Instagram impressions grew by 46%.”
To further boost the show’s impact, Coffee Fest used a paid digital advertising strategy executed by Tag Digital.
“Midway through 2025, we pivoted to a year-round campaign that continuously drove traffic to our website and engagement,” said Grimaldi. “When we approached each show, we were able to geo-target our audience for that event more specifically. This strategy helped us significantly increase conversions year over year.”
These tactics not only led to a boost in new attendees to the Orlando show: Across all of the 2025 Coffee Fest events — which were also held in New York City, Los Angeles and Portland — there was an average of 55% new attendees.
New Features and Learning
First-time and continuing Coffee Fest attendees alike were able to enjoy several new features that were introduced to all of the events this year. Since the strength of their exhibitor and speaker community has been a huge driver for overall event attendance, the show introduced guided coffee tastings, an expresso machine maintenance tech lab and distributor pavilions that brought in top brands to the show that may not have been exhibiting on their own.
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Also, Coffee Fest attendees are drawn to the show’s robust learning opportunities, so Grimaldi says the conference director made enhancements to the education content in response to people’s feedback — particularly the desire to participate in hands-on experiences, receive actionable business insights and engage with industry leaders.
“We have hands-on training sessions covering everything from latte art foundations to alternative milk art steaming science. These sessions are designed in small group formats that allow for personalized instruction and real-time Q&A,” Grimaldi said. “Across our entire education program, our conference director has really focused on increasing the number of local speakers and aims for a significant percentage of our speaking faculty to represent diverse backgrounds. This helps to ensure our content is not only expert-led, but also reflective of the broader coffee community.”
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