How to Integrate Influencer Marketing Into Your Event Strategy
What are the Advantages of Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is one of the best ways of promoting your event without appearing to be overly promotional. When information about your event comes from a trusted third-party source, recipients will tend to trust it more than when it comes directly from you.
An influencer’s audience would normally already have developed a strong bond with them and this will help influence their perception of your event.
For instance, Instagram influencers would likely know exactly what sort of content resonates with their audiences and can help increase your reach too.
Steps to Integrate Influencer Marketing Into Your Event Strategy
Here are the major steps that you need to take to integrate influencer marketing into your event strategy.
1. Define Your Goals
The most important thing that you need to do before you start integrating influencer marketing into your event strategy is to decide the ultimate goals of your campaign.
What is it that you want out of influencer marketing campaigns for your event?
You could choose from the below:
- Brand Awareness: Do you want to publicize the event so that more people know about it?
- Engagement: Do you want to drive online interactions around your event?
- Footfall: Do you want to get people to visit your event?
- Ticket Sales: Do you want to drive up revenue by generating sales?
Based on these or other goals important to you, you can decide how you should integrate influencer marketing with your event strategy.
2. Find the Right Influencers
Once you’ve set a goal for influencer marketing, the next logical step in integrating your influencer campaigns into your event strategy is to find suitable influencers.
Without the right set of influencers to promote your event, you’ll not get the desired results.
This step is a critical one as you need to find effective influencers who also fit your marketing budget. Additionally, it’s important to identify genuine influencers from fake ones to ensure the best utilization of your resources.
There are four main types of influencers you can partner with:
Nano-influencers: These are influencers who have less than 10K followers, but they have access to an important niche audience for your event. They are low cost and might work in exchange for freebies like free VIP passes.
Micro-influencers: These influencers have between 10K-100K followers and may charge a small fee for collaborations.
Macro-influencers: They have 100K-500K followers and may charge a heavy fee.
Mega-influencers: They have 500K+ followers and charge accordingly. You might need an increased marketing budget in order to partner with them.
You can start finding influencers using an influencer discovery tool or through manual search on social platforms.
You need to vet each influencer to figure out if they’ve a good engagement rate and a loyal following. Their followers also need to have interests similar to your event’s target audience.
If your event is a local one, you’d need to be even more specific when choosing influencers by restricting your search geographically too.
To help simplify this search, you could hire an agency to do the heavy lifting for you.
3. Reach Out to Influencers
After finding candidate influencers, you need to reach out to them and convince them to partner with you to promote your event.
Obviously, you can reach out to them on their social media platforms of influence or through email, but there are also tools you can use to facilitate this.
Start by connecting with them and complimenting their content. You can then gradually introduce your plans for an influencer campaign in ensuing conversations.
When you introduce your campaign, make sure that you clearly explain what your event is all about and how the influencer and their audience can benefit from it.
You should also decide on the incentives that you’ll offer the influencer in exchange for the content that they create to promote your event.
Some of the incentives that you could provide are:
- Free event passes and transportation
- Shoutouts in return for promotion
- VIP entry to the event
- Discount vouchers
- Discounted or free booths at your event
- Monetary compensation
4. Host an Event that Influencers Like — and hashtag it
Your goal should be to host an event that your influencers can create content about that is beneficial to their audience.
Create a simple custom hashtag for your event and always use it in material and correspondence about the event. For instance, note how Maris Rodriguez, an influencer, has posted content related to the NYC Marathon with its hashtag and promoted it.
Image via Instagram
Final Thoughts
Influencer marketing is a great way of promoting your event without coming across as being overly self-promotional.
To ensure that you get maximum benefit from this strategy, you need to integrate it well with your event marketing strategy.
To do so, start by identifying the goal of your influencer campaign and then look for genuine influencers. You should then build a relationship with them and pitch your collaboration idea.
Finally, make sure that you host an event that can attract the attention of influencers’ audiences. This will help maximize the reach of your event and drive even greater sales and footfalls.
Do you have any questions about the steps mentioned above? Ask in the comments.
This was originally posted on SpeakerHub Skillcamp.