One of the things I like about Emacs is its versatility. Do you think the people you're talking to might be curious about some examples of how people have used Emacs? I think it's awesome that people who are blind or have low-vision have Emacspeak, that people use Org Mode to work around the limitations of their brain, that people use Emacs for all sorts of non-coding things... I started trying to organize some links at https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsDiversity to give a sense of the breadth of different things people use Emacs for. It's totally not comprehensive, but I hope you can add more resources as you come across them.
One of the most fun ways to grow Emacs' appeal outside the user/developer base is to use Emacs for your other interests and talk about how. I've seen lots of posts related to Org and cooking, exercising, and so on. I had fun using Emacs Lisp to help me figure out a quilt pattern.
As for making it easier for other people to get into Emacs, some people find it effective to make a customized interface for the workflows people need, especially if they can tweak it to fit people's preferences.
Gotta run (kiddo's woken up), but hope that helps!