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How can I implement an influencer marketing campaign for my event?

Marketing is an ever-changing entity, responding to trends and market influence like a fickle tween hungry for popularity and attention.
Marketing is an ever-changing entity.

Marketing responds to trends like a fickle tween.

Despite its capricious nature, marketing has been driven by one consistent influencing factor: the power of word-of-mouth.

Though iterations of word-of-mouth marketing may have changed, marketers know that there is a certain ✨ magic ✨ that happens when Uncle Bob, your yoga instructor Sally, or event delegate Steve makes a recommendation for your product or service.

2018 is seeing word-of-mouth marketing take form through Influencer Marketing. People aren’t paying attention to advertising and promotion anymore. Instead, they are tribe-ing up around people who represent a cause, philosophy, or lifestyle that they subscribe to. And they are looking to these trend-setting tribe leaders to help inform their decision-making process. This is where event Influencer marketing comes in.

Event Influencer marketing builds tribes.

How can I cater to different tribes using event Influencer marketing?

Marketing your event is always best achieved by understanding your audience and knowing where their attention is being focused. If Influencers are driving decision making and trend-setting, how can you access and implement a fruitful event Influencer marketing campaign that will boost buy-in for your event?

92% of people trust word-of-mouth! (click to tweet) Here are a few tips on how to get an event Influencer marketing campaign started.

Read about Harnessing the Power of Individual Influencers in Event Marketing in the PCMA newsletter, featuring our very own snöballer-in-chief.

Event Influencer Marketing: Start with Understanding your Audience

How effective do you think a car mechanic would be in promoting Spanx? What about slimmer giving shout-outs for a urology event?

One of the critical factors for an effective event Influencer marketing campaign is ensuring that you are connecting the right tribes. You need to know that a potential Influencer is conveying your message to audiences that have the potential to convert, something that is unrelated to and more valuable than their sheer number of followers. Understanding your target audience will help you be highly successful when connecting with Influencers.

Start by doing a bit of audience persona mapping to identify the type of Influencer your audience is most likely to resonate with. Pay attention to demographic information such as age, as well as what platforms they’re engaging on. From here, you can start to identify the best Influencers for your target audience.

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook

In his seminal book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie noted that “a barber lathers a man before he shaves him.” Keep this concept in mind when considering your outreach to Influencers. Don’t expect to just slide into their DMs asking them to promote your event. You need to build a relationship first.

Consider this almost as if it were market research. Start building a relationship and getting to know them intimately. Comment on their blog or YouTube channel, share their content with your community or comment on their social channels. Not only will you potentially grab the Influencer’s attention, you are also demonstrating a willingness to build a two-way relationship that will be mutually beneficial.

“You’re like tourists in Oslo who haven’t bothered to study a word of Norwegian. How can you expect anyone to care what you have to say?” – Gary Vaynerchuk, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy World

If You Love Something, Set It Free

Consider how your Influencers can best promote your event, based on your understanding of your audience, then reverse engineer an execution strategy.

Make sure you set out expectations clearly from the outset: how many social media posts, blogs, or videos do you expect? What channels will they be targeting? What other assets and deliverables are expected? Establishing this critical information will ensure a healthy, communicative, long-lasting relationship with your Influencer.

Once you’ve established the parameters of your relationship, consider giving up the reigns to your Influencer and allowing them some creative license on how they want to promote your event. Give up control? Oh, the horror! We know it’s scary. However, the payoff is more authentic material that will resonate with their audience.

Load up your Influencer Toolkit

  • BuzzSumo is one of the best tools for identifying social users with serious clout.
  • ContentMarketer.io is a suite of products that help with Influencer outreach.
  • BuzzStream is an Influencer/marketing CRM for prospecting which allows you to import your own lists from spreadsheets, URLs, or Google search results.
  • GroupHigh is a marketing platform that finds bloggers and Influencers and helps you manage relationships and measure the value of your content.
  • Mention provides Influencer dashboards and monitoring features that help build relationships and reach out to a list of Influencers.
  • snöball, our very own event Influencer marketing platform, is tailored to the event industry. Realize the potential of exhibitors, speakers, and delegates as event Influencers.

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Article by Justin Mulfati

Justin Mulfati

Justin is passionate about bridging the gap between art and business, and is constantly on the lookout for great event marketing content to share with the sensov/ community.

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