Stephanie Davis Smith hasn’t always been a marketer. She started her career at Condé Nast, working on the media giant’s Self and GQ magazines before heading up local Atlanta magazine Skirt!, Modern Luxury’s The Atlantan and Connect Meetings, all as editor in chief. Now, she’s the chief marketing officer (CMO) at The N2 Company—fitting, given the Texas-based publisher oversees 850-plus hyper-localized luxury magazines.
In her role, Davis Smith specifically oversees brand content for The N2 Company’s flagship media brand, Stroll, and subsidiaries Greet, Real Producers and BeLocal—with her sights set on emerging magazines Uniquely You, dedicated for helping individuals with disabilities, and Salute, for active military and veterans.
The N2 Company invests heavily in live experiences, allocating up to 40% of its marketing budget to events alone, Davis Smith shared with Vendelux. It’s clear that events are a strategic priority for the publisher, as reflected in its spending breakdown…
- Two annual national conferences: its start-of-the-year Kick-Off Conference each January, and forward-looking Fall Conference in September
Most recently, The N2 Company’s 2025 Kick-Off Conference took on a “MAG” theme–short for multiply, achieve and grow—when it took place in Phoenix in January. Representatives from more than 800 of company’s publications were in attendance. To accommodate so many attendees, Davis Smith said that a “huge portion” of her event budget goes towards “hotel rooms, conference space and F&B for those events,” which is handled by a dedicated event team of five that works within the marketing department. (In all, Davis Smith oversees 11 staffers.)
Davis Smith is responsible for event design, including branding, event decor and entertainment at these national conferences which, interestingly enough, only takes up one-sixth of the marketing budget. To further assist in optimizing costs, Davis Smith noted that The N2 Company is known for tapping an outside Destination Management Company (DMC) or third-party event planner “for design ideas on the ground in whatever market we’re in.”
- About 20 regional spring events each year
These smaller, regional meetings put an emphasis on “recruiting new franchisees (a.k.a. publishers)” as well as increasing brand awareness and online reputation, “and providing franchisees with scalable tools to run their business,” Davis Smith said, noting that The N2 Company operates a suite of marketing materials in Canva Enterprise that more than 500 of its brands already utilize. (For reference, The N2 Company currently boasts more than 25,000 clients that draw 2 million-plus monthly readers across over 850 hyper-local magazines.)
Among the buzziest of The N2’s Company’s annual regional events: Derby Day, where the company leverages the over-the-top style, mint julep sipping and other festivities that take place at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., to highlight Louisville Real Producers, which caters to top-performing real estate agents in the area.
“Face-to-face learning and networking strengthens knowledge and relationships that then pay off in real life over and over again,” Davis Smith said of why The N2 Company prioritizes live events. As a result, the firm ensures that its franchisees and publishers are equipped “with materials to host local events in their area,” Davis Smith explained—noting that The N2 Company is open to hosting “everything from charity fundraisers to big fancy realtor awards to new mover get togethers to mahjong nights for an affluent neighborhood.”
From there, Davis Smith’s marketing team assists in creating on-brand templates, plus relevant flyers, invites, social media, merchandise and more.
The result is in the return on investment (ROI): “We see huge bumps in sales after each national conference and moderate bumps after regional impact meetings,” Davis Smith said.
- Staff summits and meetings
As if a slate of 20 regional events weren’t enough, The N2 Company is also known to host as many as three staff summits and meetings at destinations across the country each year—which Davis Smith said “helps with employee retention on sales leadership as well as franchisee retention.”
One of those events includes “a big incentive trip for franchisees.” This year, that so-called “Founders’ Club Trip” brought “top Area Directors” on an all-expenses-paid getaway to Playa del Caramen, Mexico, at the end of February. “Here’s to celebrating success, camaraderie and the amazing people who make N2 thrive,” the company wrote in a Facebook recap of the incentive trip.
- External events
Though it occurs less frequently than internal events, The N2 Company will “send our C-suite, exec level and directors to conferences to learn more and bring back great ideas and tech advances for the team,” per Davis Smith who, most recently, attended the National Association of Realtors (NAR) Conference, known as NAR NXT, late last year. At NAR NXT, The N2 Company “had an incredible boost of recognition and interaction with realtors for our Real Producers brand,” she said.
“It brought in franchise recruits, increased brand awareness [and] got us a ton of social media and website content,” Davis Smith continued. “The spend to be there was well worth it for our company attendees who gained valuable insights and also made important connections.”
Ultimately, there’s few—if any—instances where an event can hurt objectives, Davis Smith said…except maybe “when franchisees share off-brand ideas or detrimental ideas from stage off the cuff and all of us in leadership are like, ‘Wait, wait, wait! We didn’t sign off on that.’”
See how events are also playing a major role for other CMOs of major companies in Vendelux’s latest series, “A CMO’s View on Events:”
