Anush Alexander started 2025 with a brand-new gig as chief marketing officer (CMO) of Australia-based talent management platform PageUp. She came equipped with nearly three years’ worth of experience after serving as the CMO of event tech giant Stova which, inherently, leaned heavily on events in its marketing efforts.
“In previous marketing leadership positions, we developed developed our own hosted, annual client conference that not only helped us advance our revenue goals, [but also] helped us build stronger relationships with our clients. It helped us facilitate a community for our clients, and it became the cornerstone of why clients chose us and stayed with us,”
Alexander explained. It was also known to attend a plethora of major event industry trade shows, including IMEX. Back in 2022, it even used IMEX to debut its rebrand after event-tech suppliers MeetingPlay, Aventri, and eventcore merged earlier in the year.
But in the spirit of “new year, new beginnings,” Alexander is now at PageUp, which doesn’t specialize in events, but rather talent management. With Alexander at the helm, however, the company can anticipate events being an important part of the marketing mix, she told Vendelux.
“In my experience, events have driven the highest ROI, particularly for enterprise accounts,” Alexander said. “But more importantly, events allow us to connect with our clients and prospects. It helps us foster relationships, deliver thought leadership and build our client community.”
As a result, Alexander and her marketing team of 20—10 of whom are focused on marketing, and the other 10 of whom serve as sales development representatives (SDRs)—are prioritizing “a mix of sponsored, industry events as well our own hosted events.” After all, “I can’t think of an event that hurt our marketing objectives,” Alexander said when thinking back on her time not only at Stova, but also in the decade-plus prior to that, when she held leadership marketing at various companies in her home base, the San Francisco Bay Area.
So far this year, PageUp has already had boots on the ground at Talent Acquisition Week’s trade show in San Diego. Alexander didn’t divulge what other industry events are in the pipeline for PageUp, though it already teased on social media the return of its annual internal hackathon event, RevUp.
RevUp is proof that even before Alexander’s tenure as CMO, PageUp wasn’t lost on events’ impact. For years, the firm has publicized RevUp, a three-day competition among employees designed to foster “creativity, collaboration and rapid prototyping,” according to PageUp’s LinkedIn post on the latest hackathon. It will be interesting to see how an events-minded CMO like Alexander will have a positive impact on company happenings like RevUp, which will take place again roughly one year into Alexander’s time as PageUp’s CMO.
Until then, Alexander shared the top five marketing objectives that she plans to operate under:
- Brand Positioning & Awareness
- Demand Generation
- Customer Retention & Advocacy
- Thought Leadership
- Revenue Growth
These objectives emulate how “marketing is about much more than just guiding prospects through the sales funnel—it’s about building meaningful connections, driving brand awareness and fostering long-term customer relationships,”
Alexander said. It also ensures that, particularly at PageUp, marketing “is built around data-driven, multi-channel engagement designed to attract, convert and retain customers.” The addition of thought leadership ensures that while accomplishing engagement and sales objectives, PageUp is “establishing authority in our industry through content, events and strategic partnerships,” Alexander said.
Want to learn more? Check out how other CMOs—like RCX Sports’ Jaclyn Thomas and Uncle Nearest’s Brielle Caruso—are leveraging events as part of their marketing strategy in our new series on Vendelux, “A CMO’s View on Events.”
