Events are a powerful marketing tool. They give you the opportunity to bring your network together and inspire conversations that help create ideal buying conditions. The key to a successful event is a full room of interested attendees and engaging speakers. Here is a simple breakdown of how you can leverage influencer marketing for your next event.
Step 1: Take a close look at the event content, track themes and speaker expertise. Use this content to define your core topics.
Step 2: Use those topics to search for people who are involved in the relevant online conversations. When looking for influencers, it’s important to identify people who are:
- relevant to your topic areas,
- have a good reach; and
- inspire messages that resonate.
These are the influencers who can help spread the word about your event and perhaps be speakers, moderators or guest bloggers at your event.
Tip: Use geo-targeting to find influencers who are near the event or who live in important markets for you.
Step 3: Engage with your influencers by reaching out with a compelling and relevant invitation or call-to-action. Don’t just send out a blanket email; I guarantee it’ll fall on deaf ears. Try to understand what motivates your influencers so you can convey the real value of attending. I’ve found that many people welcome the opportunity to network with other thought-leaders in the space, get the opportunity to cover an event or interview a fellow influencer.
Tip: If you have a long list of influencers, it’s ok to send a template email sometimes. In fact there are many good strategies for influencer engagement. Here are three we wrote about earlier.
Step 4: Events are very dynamic, but we tend to focus most of our efforts on the actual day of. Use the time before, during and after the event to create relationships with you influencers. From excitement generating pieces to liveblogging to post-event lessons learned there are countless opportunities to work with your influencers to create content that will help you drive registrations and extend your event virtually.
Tip: Monitor mentions before, during and after the event to measure how effective your engagement efforts have been.
These are just a few ideas for promoting your next event with influencer marketing. Have you tried other techniques?
Liane Blanchette is Director of Customer Success at Traackr, an influencer marketing platform. She also contributed to their Guide to Influencer Marketing, which provides additional resources and use cases.
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3. Be consistent: Like any social network you need to be consistent with your publishing, and with Twitter it’s has to be more frequent. It will be hard to gain new followers if they look at your feed and you haven’t tweeted in 2 months.
