New Nottingham Meet-Up Ignites Support for Local Creatives in Marketing

A new marketing meetup aiming to establish a thriving marketing community in Nottingham has been started.

Nottingham DM, a free-to-attend meetup held on a Thursday evening every other month, is the product of a partnership between local social media agency Victress Digital and Sheffield agency Evoluted.

The first event was held on Thursday, March 28 at city centre pub Barley Twist and featured expert talks on Digital PR and Paid Social marketing. Future events will span a wide range of marketing topics from PPC to SEO and Content Marketing to strategy.

Victress founder, Emma Glover said: “We’re so excited to be launching this event and teaming up with Sheffield DM.

“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.

“Whether you’re a seasoned agency marketer, you work in-house for a brand, you’re a freelancer, or a student interested in marketing – everyone is welcome and these events will have something for marketers of all backgrounds. We’ve had a number of ticket registrations already before we’ve officially launched which is brilliant to see!”

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
Dan Rawley

She added: “Nottingham DM will be somewhere people can come to share knowledge but also make genuine connections which lead to career opportunities. Having seen the style of Sheffield DM events, I felt that informal atmosphere to do those things was something we were missing here.”

Nottingham has been chosen as the first location to roll out Sheffield DM events after organisers received approaches from several companies about collaborating on marketing events elsewhere.

Dan Rawley, Marketing Manager at Evoluted and a lead organiser of Sheffield DM said: “We’re thrilled to have partnered with Victress to expand our events beyond Sheffield.

“After last summer’s event we had lots 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.”

Sheffield DM launched 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 it launched, 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.

Sheffield DM’s meetups have remained free, attracting sponsorship from Sitebulb, LensGo Visual Media, Purely.Website and unLTD Magazine, and organisers have also incorporated an annual all-day, paid-for event each summer into its programme. The 2023 event attracted over 230 marketers from all over the UK to Sheffield and won the backing of a clutch of new sponsors including Trustpilot.

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