How to Leverage Influencer Marketing To Boost Your Event Promotion
Events are easily one of the most effective marketing channels. They engage the audience and create lasting impressions through memorable experiences.
But perfectly planning an event is not enough. The key to a successful event lies in how you promote it. This is where influencer marketing can help you. Reports note that 41% of marketers consider event marketing a high-priority channel. Another report projected the influencer marketing space to reach $21.1 Billion in 2023.
Leveraging this popularity in promoting lets you use the influencer’s existing loyal following. Partnering with the right influencers will spread the word to a broader audience. It also gives your initiative needed credibility where regular ads may fall short.
In today’s article, we will show you the right strategies to use influencer buzz and boost your event promotion.
Understanding Influencer Marketing
Influencer impact on the modern audience is undeniable and can do wonders for your event promotion. With the right approach, influencer marketing can help spread the word about your initiative.
Social media users trust influencers. So partnering with influencers gives your event a boost of credibility. A chance to meet and interact with their favorite creator is enough to turn them into event attendees.
Be it an online or in-person event; their presence can create hype and make your event more memorable for your attendees. It can also boost your social media engagement, making your event a larger success.
Source: PR Newswire
For example, ABSOLUT used influencer marketing to promote the “Planet Earth’s Favorite Vodka” campaign. The brand partnered with influencers passionate about environmental sustainability. They also collaborated with LGBTQIA+ activists and allies to give the campaign a diverse perspective.
According to reports, this campaign:
- Lasted for 8 months
- Roped in 95 influencers who collectively shared 612 posts
- Garnered 8.6 million engagements across social media channels
- Won the Best Food and Drink Campaign in the 2020 edition of the Influencer Marketing Awards
Ways to Leverage Influencer Marketing To Boost Your Event Promotion
- Plan Your Influencer Marketing Strategy
Start by defining the objectives of your event. It keeps your priorities straight and helps you choose the right influencers to partner with. Some common event goals include:
- Better networking
- Drive audience engagement
- Raising brand awareness
- Solidifying brand positioning
- Enhance lead generation
- Boost conversion
Once you know what you want to achieve through the event, identify the target audience for your event. It makes your event planning more striking and lets you shortlist influencers your target audience resonates with.
Conduct thorough research on potential influencers. The three aspects to consider are:
- Relevance
- Reach
- Resonance
Use social listening to identify creators with the most engagement from your ideal audience. See which influencers your competitors are partnering with and evaluate their success. Besides audience reaches, select influencers with successful portfolios of event promotion. You can also search for relevant hashtags and location tags and examine the profiles that come up.
Set up relevant KPIs to measure the success of your event later. This helps detect flaws and areas of improvement and lets you do better at your next event.
After spending months and valuable resources on planning an event, the last thing you want is to go over budget. So, audit your finances and set a realistic monetary threshold for hiring an influencer.
- Build Relationships with Influencers
After shortlisting potential influencers, it’s time to build a lasting bond with them. While sponsorship is the primary drive behind influencer partnerships, a solely monetary collaboration won’t suffice in engaging them.
Neal Taparia from Backgammon Online suggests a long-term approach to building influencer relationships. “We start commenting and engaging socially with influencers six months beforehand. This way, when we reach out to them for a partnership, they recognize us and interact with us as if we were one of their fans.”
Approach your chosen influencer with a personalized email or value-driven message. Include event details, the activities you planned, and the audience demographic you are targeting.
If you have experience in the event planning space, share your past successful initiatives. Remember to include your expected commitments. The goal is to show them how the deal can be mutually beneficial.
An exclusively monetary collaboration will not bring the expected authenticity to your campaigns. You want your chosen creator to believe in your event’s potential. Consider including them in your event planning. Ask for their input on creative influencer strategies and invite them to the event venue preparations. This will make them feel valued and can make your collaboration authentic.
To avoid any future conflicts or disagreements with your partner influencer, draw up a detailed and conclusive contract, mentioning your expectations and the duration of the partnership. The contract should include simple terms and conditions, including the payment.
Finally, be professional and thorough while collaborating with influencers. Stay true to your commitments, fulfill your promises, and make timely payments. Remember, you can make your future events a winner with long-term influencer partnerships.
- Craft Engaging and Authentic Influencer Campaigns
It’s best to avoid micromanaging the influencer’s creative process. However, it’s better to collaborate while creating content for the event to align your visions.
Give clear direction on the content tone and format you are aiming for. You can ask them to post sneak peeks of the event preparations to create a buzz among their followers. Influencers can also update their Instagram bio with a hook line of your event and a link to your event’s landing page.
Reels are the most popular content format on social media. So, ensure the partner influencer posts reels of your event and shares them to their ‘story’.
Remember, audiences follow an influencer for their unique storytelling and creativity. While you must keep the influencer promotions on-brand with your event, try to leverage their existing image. Strike a perfect balance between your branding and the influencer’s identity with clear communication and creative freedom.
Starting a relevant hashtag is the best way to drive conversations around your event. Create relevant hashtags and ask your partner creators to use them while posting content.
For example, TBEX is a travel blogging conference aiming to redefine the travel industry. They invite global travel influencers like @ytravelblog to their event and use the creator’s popularity to drive interest among the audience.
Ask your partner influencer to add a strong CTA on the post captions. It can be a link to your event’s custom landing page or the exclusive social media page you have created. If you sell tickets, direct them to mention that and add the relevant link.
- Amplify Your Event Promotion
Before you promote your event through influencer content, market your collaboration with them. Cross-promote their content across your social media channels. This draws their followers to your page and compels them to check your content. Leverage the power of mobile messaging apps to amplify your collaboration with influencers and expand your reach to their followers, ensuring your captivating content reaches a wider audience.
The primary objective behind using influencers for event promotion is leveraging their follower count. So, while posting the influencer’s content, tag them. It brings their audience to your post, increases engagement, and raises awareness around your business event protection.
Encourage your influencers to take part in the pre-event activities. You can ask them to go live to talk about your upcoming event and answer questions about it. They can also post polls to pique audience interest.
Promote the influencer’s content across all your social media channels to maximize reach. Post their reels on your stories. Create a separate highlight section for your event and add the relevant creator stories.
During the event, ensure your influencers are ready to live-tweet or live-stream some event activities on social media. This will keep current attendees engaged, attract more people to your event, and create more brand advocates. If your event is virtual, ask your influencers to share clippings and quotes from the event in real time.
- Measure and Analyze Campaign Performance
To ensure higher event ROI, measure the campaign’s performance and how your influencer contributed to its success. Examine the engagement on the content and compare it with the number of attendees. You can also benchmark this year’s attendance with previous events to see how influencer collaboration amplified your initiative.
Measure clickthrough rates and traffic to your event’s landing page from influencer posts. You can assign UTM parameters to calculate the visitors a creator directs to your event profile.
If there are event tickets, consider giving your influencers exclusive discount codes. It attracts more attendees and helps you calculate the influencer’s impact tangibly. Use the collected data to improve ROI for future events. Also, you can create a timeline to analyze and monitor the progress of your campaign effectively.
- Maintain Post-Event Engagement
To create lasting impressions on the attendees, post-event engagement is crucial. Ask your partner creator to post polls asking followers how they enjoyed the event. They can also ask the audience to post user-generated or interactive content using your event’s hashtag. This will keep the conversation flowing and keep people engaged with your brand.
Share highlights of influencer content and thank them publicly for showing appreciation. Explore the possibilities for future collaboration with continuous interactions and updates.
Conclusion
Influencers are the pulse of social media and are here to stay.
Promoting your event through influencers can make their thriving social media presence drip down over your initiative.
Audiences find your event worthwhile because their favorite creator is promoting it. They are more likely to buy tickets, post UGC, and further drive your event’s promotions.
Creating Influencer events are a good employee egagement idea to increase brand awareness
So get onboard with influencer marketing to spread the word about your event and make it a vibrant and successful experience for your attendees.
About the Author / Ana Almeida
