How to Turn FleurEx into a Marketing Opportunity for Your Floristry Business
You’ve booked the ticket. You’ve blocked out the weekend. You’re probably already thinking about who you want to see, what you want to learn and how much floral loveliness you can physically take in before your brain gives up.
But FleurEx can give you far more than a lovely weekend away from the shop or studio.
From a marketing point of view, it’s an absolute gift.
You’ve got new ideas, new people, new products, new skills, fresh content and plenty of opportunities to show your customers just how much you care about what you do.
So if you’re heading to FleurEx on 3rd–4th October at the East Midlands Conference Centre, here are a few ways we’d make sure you get as much marketing value from it as possible.
1. Take your customers with you
Not literally, obviously. But do let them see what you’re up to.
Sharing snippets from the weekend gives your customers a glimpse behind the scenes of your business and helps them see the time, care and curiosity that sits behind what you do. Your customers don’t need a blow-by-blow account of your weekend, but there’s real value in letting them see you investing time in your craft.
Share the stand that caught your eye, the demo you loved, the colour palette you can’t stop thinking about or a product you think your customers might be interested in. That all says something about your business.
And don’t just broadcast. Get them involved with questions and polls:
Which colour palette would you choose?
Would you like to see this in the shop?
Should we try something like this for Christmas?
Suddenly FleurEx isn’t something happening miles away. Your customers are part of it too.
2. Give yourself a content mission before you go
You know what will happen otherwise.
You’ll get home with 237 photos of beautiful flowers, four accidental videos of the floor and absolutely no idea what to do with any of them. Grabbing visual content is one of the simplest things you can do to make the weekend work harder for your marketing.
So before FleurEx, decide what you’d like to come home with.
Maybe you want enough material for a Reel on the trends that caught your eye, a carousel on your favourite finds, a blog about what you learned, or a newsletter sharing a few ideas you’re bringing back into the business.
It doesn’t need to be beautifully filmed on the day. Capture the raw material while you’re there and worry about turning it into content afterwards.
You could even make yourself a little shot list: three short video clips, five photos, one customer poll, one quote or takeaway from a session, and one idea you want to talk about afterwards.
And if filming yourself still feels a bit awkward, come and have a play at The Glow Up photo booth while you’re there. It gives you a chance to try out a Reel or photo, experiment a little, and get some feedback from Queen Bee while you’re doing it. Much less scary than staring at your phone three days later wondering whether you should have filmed it vertically.
3. Use FleurEx to challenge your marketing thinking
Some of the best marketing ideas come when you get out of your usual routine and start looking at your business differently.
That’s one of the reasons we’re excited to be involved in this year’s The Glow Up. This fun and interactive game is designed to get you thinking about the choices you make in your business and the potential impact those choices can have on growth and profitability.
From our side, that means looking at your marketing decisions too. Take a look at our recent blog with all the details. The marketing opportunity is in what you take away from it. We’re confident the game will get you to rethink who you’re marketing to, how you’re communicating and where you might invest a little more time, so make a note of that and turn it into something practical when you get home.
4. Treat the business sessions as marketing fuel
It’s very easy at a floristry event to focus on the flowers and skirt around the business content. But some of the most useful marketing ideas can come from the business sessions, because they give you something new to talk about with your customers.
Our Business Drop-In session with Oasis® on Talking Eco might become a newsletter explaining a change you’re making in the business. A social platform ‘how-to’ might give you the confidence to introduce something new and talk about it properly. A conversation around pricing, systems or customer experience might make you rethink the way you explain your service on your website.
Instead of leaving with a notebook full of interesting points, ask yourself:
What did I learn that my customers would care about?
How could this improve my social/emails/website?
What 3 actions do I need to prioritise to make things happen?
That’s where learning starts to become marketing. And because the Business Drop-ins are included with general admission, they’re an easy way to add a bit of CPD to the weekend and come away with ideas you can actually use.
5. Think about every new connection as a possible marketing connection
FleurEx is full of people who understand your industry, which makes it a brilliant place to build relationships that could lead to future marketing opportunities.
That might be something simple, such as following each other and introducing your audiences to one another. It might become a giveaway, a collaborative post, a styled shoot, a workshop or a seasonal promotion.
You might meet a supplier whose product would be a great fit for your customers and later feature it in your content. In return, they might spotlight you as one of the florists using it. You might meet another florist who works in a different area and become useful referral partners. You might find an educator, photographer, venue or wholesaler who opens up a completely new collaboration idea.
6. Get involved in the FleurEx conversation
Don’t just post your own content and disappear. Spend a little time engaging with what everyone else is sharing too. Not only is it good manners, it also makes your content work harder too.
Tag the people and brands you feature in your Stories, like and comment on other people’s FleurEx posts, and have a look at who’s joining the conversation on the British Florist Association’s content. You might spot florists, suppliers or industry names you’d like to know more about, and it gives you a natural way to start engaging with them.
Follow them while you’re there. Send the DM. Connect on LinkedIn. Swap details via a quick QR code as the modern equivalent of a business card.
As well as being good for building relationships, engaging in this way also draws more of the right eyes back to your own profile and content.
And if you had a genuinely useful conversation, follow it up afterwards. A quick coffee, message or introduction can sometimes lead somewhere much more interesting than you expected.
7. Plan the follow-up before FleurEx is even over
Speaking of following up. The danger with any event is that you come home buzzing with ideas, then Monday arrives and normal life swallows them whole. So build the follow-up into your plan.
If you know you want to send a newsletter after FleurEx, create the draft beforehand with a working title and a few prompts ready to fill in. If you want to create a Reel, note down the clips you need before you go. If you’re planning a blog, sketch out the sections ahead of the weekend you know the points you want to capture and cover.
That little bit of preparation makes it much more likely that the content will actually happen.
Make FleurEx part of your marketing, not just your diary
There’s something powerful about showing customers that you are actively involved in your industry. When they see you learning, experimenting, meeting people, discovering new products and challenging the way you run your business, it builds confidence in you as a florist. It shows passion, but it also shows professionalism.
And from a marketing point of view, that means FleurEx can give you far more than a weekend of inspiration. It can give you stories to tell, content to create, people to collaborate with and new ideas to bring back to your customers.
So enjoy the flowers, absolutely. Just make sure you bring the marketing opportunities home with you too.
FleurEx 2026
3rd–4th October
East Midlands Conference Centre
The Glow Up and Business Drop-ins are included with general admission.