This week, Oslo Business Region gathered Oslo Innovation Week 2018 event organizers, partners, and friends to network and listen to talks on storytelling. We were invited to share how influencer marketing could be used to promote events. In this blog post, we’re highlighting our best tips and tricks!
Cover Photo PC: Gorm K. Gaare / Oslo Innovation Week
People have always looked to their peers for recommendations when it comes to making purchasing decisions. In the past, before the internet first came into use, it was common for people to ask their neighbors what lawnmower to get, ask their co-workers what car to buy, or ask locals for restaurant recommendations to visit while traveling. Today, we’re still receiving peer recommendations, only it’s happening on the internet and over social media through influencers.
Influencers are experts in a niche, and they’ve gained credibility by posting engaging content on social media. At inzpire.me, we define influencers as people who have followers beyond their group of friends, meaning they are able to influence people who don’t necessarily know them personally.
And it works!
A study from McKinsey shows that influencer marketing in social media generates 2x the sales of paid advertising. However, to do influencer marketing well, you have to do it right. And whether you’re organizing an event, promoting a cause, selling a product, or marketing a service, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind.
Here are our tips on how to use influencers to promote an event. These tips can also be used when promoting products, services, and causes!
Table of Contents
But first, why influencer marketing?
There are several reasons why you should utilize influencers to promote your events. Here are a few of them:
- Influencers provide distribution. By creating impactful content, they’ve been able to attract a substantial number of followers, and they don’t take this for granted. Most influencers will focus on building relationships with their audience, rather than persuading them to buy products, attend events, support causes, or sign up to services. However, if an influencer agrees to endorse your event, you will be able to put your brand in front of an untapped audience. Social media and events go hand in hand; people look for events on Facebook, they discuss them on Twitter, they share their experiences using Instagram stories and Snapchat, and they talk about events they’ve attended on YouTube and blogs. By using influencers to promote your event, from start to finish, you will be able to have a really broad coverage of it.
- You get content created by real people. Most brands plan to do more content marketing, but find it hard to create enough content. Sound familiar? As an events organizer, you can’t be everywhere, but by working with influencers, you’ll have talented people capturing moments, sharing their experiences, and creating content that you can repurpose later for ads, blog posts, or social media posts. And the cool part is that the content has already been tested by an audience, so you can choose to reuse the content that has created the most buzz. Use our guide to learn how to repurpose content effectively.
- Influencers have credibility. Consumers may not trust your advertisements blindly, but they trust the influencers they’ve chosen to follow. When working with influencers, you’re borrowing their credibility, and when events come recommended by someone people trust, the likelihood that they’ll want to attend your event will increase.
How To Use Influencer Marketing To Promote Your Event
It can be tricky to know where to start with influencer marketing, so we’ve gathered 5 questions to get the ball rolling and outlined some tips for your next event promotion.
1) Who should I pick?
A great place to start is your own social media channels. Monitor your audience on social media to analyze who your audience is and what types of posts they’re engaging with the most. This way, you can collaborate with influencers who post content similar to the types of posts your audience likes.
2) What should I offer?
Think about what you can offer in exchange for a collaboration. Most influencers will demand a monetary compensation, but if you’re confident your event will be attractive to them, you can lower the budget you offer and provide them tickets and/or gifts from sponsors. Sometimes, this can be done in lieu of payment.
3) How do I make my campaign stand out?
Make your event promotion visually appealing. Think about what you can create that would make great props for visuals, whether it’s giant logo letters, a creative photo wall, branded hashtags, or a custom Snapchat filter.
4) Should I give influencers creative freedom in the collaboration?
Definitely! Influencers are content experts, so give them the freedom to be creative.
For example, in a campaign for Coca-Cola and FIFA, influencers were given creative freedom to create videos to promote FIFA tournaments around the country. The results were amazing! Here’s one of our favorite collaborations from the campaign:
Think about what you want influencers to focus on. One suggestion is to share your guest list or speaker line up with them and ask them to talk about people they’re most excited to meet. Stand out names will attract more eyes!
Does your event have any activities? If your event is about food, you could ask the influencers to participate in a tasting session. If it’s a music festival, you could ask the influencers to cover their favorite artists.
You can also ask influencers to continue sharing more content about your event after it occurs. This will help boost awareness around your event and brand, which will be really helpful if your event recurs periodically throughout the year. The more people hear about your event, the more they’ll want to attend!
And as always, we’re here to help — just send us a wink — we’d love to get you started. Happy event planning! We hope to see you at Oslo Innovation Week in September.
inzpire.me
inzpire.me is an influencer marketing platform that connects brands with influencers across the globe. Ready to launch a campaign? Schedule a call today!
1: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/getting-a-sharper-picture-of-social-medias-influence
