At one time, influencer marketing may have been limited to celebrities a decade ago, but that has since changed, and social media influencers are rising. If you are looking into influencer marketing for the first time, you may find conflicting information about getting influencers for events or brand promotion. While there are cases where getting an influencer may be harmful, this is only when you choose the wrong person to promote for you. That’s why we’ve created a comprehensive guide on the secrets to influencer marketing for your event below.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influence marketing is considered a type of social media marketing. Here, endorsements and promotions of products, brands, and events are made by influencers, which are the people who have a dedicated social media following. Also, they are viewed as experts in their niche.
This type of marketing works because social influencers have built up trust within their following, and their recommendations are seen as a form of social proof. As a result, influencer marketing ROI is also 89% better than other marketing channels.
How To Find The Right Influencers To Promote Your Event
Like all types of marketing, you need the right strategy with influencer marketing. So the first step is to find the right influencer.
You’ll firstly need to choose a platform, although you can expand to other platforms later. Find the platform that your audience spends their most time on, and you can select your influencer there. Or, you can also choose a platform depending on your strategy, such as Instagram or Youtube for events with visual attributes, or Facebook if you want to promote to a larger audience.
Then, you’ll need to do some research to find suitable candidates. And one of the most important things you need NOT do is to look solely at the number of followers. What you need to consider, instead, is if the influencer’s target audience and your target event attendees coincide with yours.
There are different tiers of influencers:
Mega-Influencers or Celebrities (1M+ followers)
Mid-Tier Influencers (50k to 1 M followers)
Micro-Influencers (10k to 50k followers)
Nano-Influencers (1k to 10k followers)
Micro-influencers are also as effective as macro-influencers. This is because their engagement rate with their followers can be higher. So, are you interested in someone with less than 2000 followers or around the 5,000 to 10,000 range? Remember that this decision will also determine your budget.
It will be challenging to find the right influencer. So, the help of an influencer agency will be helpful. However, some platforms have made it easier for brands to find and reach out to influencers such as Grin, CreatorIQ, Influence.co and others. Check out Influence.co: https://influence.co/go/rates for possible rates.
How To Have Influencers To Grow Event Attendance
If you’ve finally found the right influencer, here are your next steps to have them promote your event and grow your event attendance.
1. Plan An Influencer Strategy
This step will usually require a contract that clearly states what you need from the influencer as ROI (return on investment). Contracts will also be a good point to discuss any disagreements or objections.
Make sure not to overwhelm them with information and requirements, and be as flexible as possible. Influencers have their ways of doing things to stay true to their image and values. So, as long as you are clear on the deliverables, the changes in the contract will likely be minimal and your partnership more productive.
2. Be Authentic and Clearly Outline Compensation
During your exchange, be sure to be clear about the nature of your arrangement, including both your target audience. Be authentic with your approach to the influencer and provide fair compensation. Generally, influencer agencies have their own set of rates for their talents.
However, suppose you have chosen a micro-influencer not affiliated with any agencies but has the right target audience, which you think can help you grow your event attendance. In that case, coming up with a mutually agreeable compensation will be helpful. For instance, some are amenable to free products or services other than project-based payments. In this case, you can give them free VIP event passes.
3. Determine How You Can Measure The Results
You need tools to measure their results to track your influencer marketing strategy. There are three ways you can choose from:
Reach or the number of people who see information about your event
Engagement or the number of likes, shares, comments and replies
Conversion or the number of people who take action, such as registering for your event
Set your campaign objective – in this case, growing your event attendance. Then you can analyse the results from the marketing campaigns through referral traffic, unique coupon codes, affiliate links, and social media engagement. You can take account of the latter by checking the number of likes, comments, mentions, and shares of the influencer’s post about your event. You can save all this data into a spreadsheet or automate the process with software such as Bit.ly that tracks clicks and the course of those clicks. Find out more here: Top Influencer Marketing Tools in 2020.
4. Ask Them To Promote Pre-Event Hype
You’ll want promotion before your event begins to get people to start talking about it. This is called pre-event hype, where you raise awareness and generate high engagement with your audience. The best and fastest way to do this is to ask your chosen influencer to help you reach your target audience and start promoting pre-event hype.
5. Host A Small Pre-Event Show With Your Influencers
In addition to having influencers create pre-event posts, you may also invite them to participate in a pre-event show on your social media accounts. They can ask their audience and followers to head over to your social media accounts because they’ll be there. A good example is a live event hosted by your brand’s/event’s Instagram account with influencers as the guests.
6. Don’t Forget To Request a Post-Event Post
This step helps increase event attendance during your subsequent events. Having influencers post about your event and their experience will also serve as a credibility booster for other big names and influencers to attend your future events and likely promote your next event. You can further utilise influencers to ensure you have post-event engagement with your audience by posting content to enjoy the event.
Don’t forget to thank influencers for supporting your event. Influencer marketing is effective, but influencers end up more like a partner since you’ll be dealing with people instead of the usual digital marketing tools. So, to establish a connection with them, you both need to have the same values when it comes to providing what your shared target audience needs.
When it comes to trends, latest news and updates, Twitter is the place to go. So, if you want your event to be up there in the list of trendy hashtags and topics, you need to work on your event promotion on Twitter. But, if you’ve tried and you only get occasional mentions, then it’s time to up your game. To help you out, we have listed the top expert ways event planners can improve and grow their event promotion on Twitter.
1. Determine Your Event Tweeter For The Day
First off, assign a person in your team to be an event tweeter. This would be someone whose only job is to tweet the 5Ws (what, when, where, why, and who) and H (how) of the event. You can use your event or brand account to pull someone you trust to handle the tweeting. Next, list down what they need to tweet about to give as much exposure to your event as possible.
Since tweets have character counts, make sure that each tweet posted contains a link or hashtag that directs them to a page with all the information they need about your event.
2. It’s All About Hashtags
Hashtags are essential for social media users. A hashtag will want to make people interact. In a study, Dan Zarella from Hubspot shares how tweets with hashtags get more retweets than can be up to 40% than those without hashtags. But, how do you create compelling hashtags? They must have the following qualities listed below:
Either six characters long or not, over three or four words.
They should be relevant to your event.
Make it unique to both you and your event.
Make it fun and easy to remember.
3. Get Everyone Involved
Every tweet helps. So, before your event starts (or even during prep), make sure that everyone already there knows to interact with your tweets and create their own with the hashtag. These people can be your crew, guests, hosts, and others. You may also encourage affiliated entities such as the event location owner to promote your event on their page, etc. With everyone tweeting about your event and using the right hashtags, your event will garner the attention it needs.
4. Be An Informer Tweeter
There are two types of users in social media – meformers and informers:
Meformers – only post pictures about their lives
Informers – post tweets that add value and provide information to their readers
Since you’d like to inform your audience about your event, ensure that your tweets provide them with all the information they need. Here, you can make good use of images and links as a solution to the limited character count settings of Twitter.
5. Evoke Important Emotions Through Tweets
A Harvard Business Review article revealed that five critical emotions make email marketing campaigns go viral. With that, choose at least one emotion from the list below and incorporate them into every tweet about your event:
Amazement
Admiration
Astonishment
Interest
Serenity
6. Respond As Much As Possible
If your event has garnered a lot of attention, this will be a challenging task. However, it will be manageable if you’re still starting your promotions. Nevertheless, responding to as many tweets as possible will be helpful in your promotions. Also, make sure to respond within an hour. Otherwise, your audience may choose to disengage with you. Responding will encourage them to mention you and your events more. More tweets and the use of your hashtags mean more exposure.
You don’t have to reply to each comment; people will understand that you are busy a simple like will do.
7. Utilize Visual Content
Show people what they can expect (during your pre-event tweets) and what they are missing during the event proper. A study by Stone Temple Consulting showed that visual tweets (or tweets with images) get more than double retweets and likes.
The usual event photos are usually those of stage preparations, backstage sneak peeks, speakers and hosts getting ready, guests having a blast, and more. All in all, images that will leave them wanting for more.
8. Include Your Location
We’ll end this list with an underrated feature on Twitter that is perfect for events – location tagging. These are tweets of updates, photos, and videos with the event’s location. This creates a buzz in said location and more knowledge in the locality.
These are just some of the best ways to go about your event promotion on Twitter. We hope that these simple steps will help your event become a trending success.
Event promotion has never been more convenient than through social media. Event planners have been utilising social media over the years to promote their events, but, like all reasonable promotional efforts, you need to have a strategy through practical steps. In this blog, we’ll be looking at a few practical ways to improve and grow your event promotion on Facebook. With these simple steps, you can increase the number of attendees and encourage them to attend more of your upcoming events.
1. Create countdown posts
Creating a countdown is one of the best ways to develop a sense of urgency and curiosity in your audience. You can begin with a first post announcing your event in a few weeks and follow on with countdown posts which will remind your audience and encourage them to sign up.
2. Create a Facebook event page
A Facebook event page is a great tool that you can use to promote your event on the platform. You can include all the event details, such as the time and place. There’s also a discussion area where you can post announcements and answer frequently asked questions by interested attendees.
3. Post teasers
Besides countdown posts, it’s a great promotional idea to create teaser posts with updates and insights into what will happen on the day of the event. They are practical tools to build up the hype while giving your audience helpful information about the event, such as guests, hosts, special workshops to look forward to, and the like.
A good example is to post videos of your interviews with guests one-by-one in the weeks leading up to your event.
4. Create a branded hashtag
Having a branded hashtag on Facebook is the best way for attendees to find all content related to your event. The hashtag should be unique and short, and easy to spell, so they are not lost beneath irrelevant and unrelated content. Also, other than being unique, they should be short and easy to spell. When creating a hashtag, one thing to remember is if a person can type it easily when said aloud. Put it in every post you have related to the event.
Another helpful suggestion is to put the hashtags on promotional printed materials. It can be something that catches a reader’s attention and directs them to search the hashtag online to find your event.
5. Give a sneak peek
One of the best promotional tricks in the book is giving attendees a sneak peek of the event since people love to see what’s behind the curtain. Giving a sneak peek can reveal bits of information to your attendees to showcase what they can look forward to during your event. It can be behind the scene photos and videos of your venue, guests and speakers practising, and a look at the program of the day. You can also show the shenanigans of your staff as they set up equipment and decor arrivals.
6. Facebook tools you can use for event promotion
As the biggest social media platform globally, Facebook is not remiss on how brands are using it to promote various things. It can be products, services, events, and even the brand itself. Below are the most common tools that you can utilise to promote your event on Facebook.
Facebook ads through Facebook business manager
You can specifically market to your target audience through Facebook ads. The Facebook Business Manager is a one-stop-shop of tools to help you manage your business on the platform. For example, you can use it to ensure that your paid Facebook posts (ads) get to the right audience and get ample traffic.
Facebook groups
When it comes to engagement, Facebook Groups have great potential. If you don’t have a unique space already made for potential event-goers, then you can find existing groups all over the platform. All you have to do is find groups that would be interested in your event, join if it’s not public, and promote/share your event.
Facebook chatbot
A few participants may have questions about your event. To not lose their interest in your event, make sure to be very responsive. For this, you can use the Facebook chatbot or Facebook Messenger bot. They can provide an automated response to your customer’s FAQs and inform them of your availability if they want a live chat.
We hope that these tricks will help you run effective event promotion on Facebook for your event. It might be a good idea to explore other social media platforms to get the most digital promotions for your event.
The second part of the blogging series is about guest blogging, where you will be publishing your entries to other websites that are not your own. But how exactly does this help you increase your online community, especially if your audience does not find your well-made content on your blog page?
In the first part of this series, we talked about how to use blogging to increase your online community. There, we shared three helpful tips. One, blog about a single idea and a topic that you are passionate about. For instance, if you are an event planner, blog about topics related to event planning such as party ideas, venue tips, etc. Two is to use approachable language in your blog entries. Three, encourage your audience to engage with you through comments or connecting with you directly via your socials or email.
What is guest blogging?
Also known as guest posting, guest blogging is when you write for another website. Generally, you’ll be guest posting on websites that are related to your industry. It is an act that offers benefits to the blogger and the website that is hosting the content. If a website hosts you for a guest blog most of the time, you must do the same in return.
Why is guest blogging an excellent strategy to increase your online community?
So, why is guest blogging important? There are many benefits to this digital marketing strategy. For one, it builds brand awareness to a new audience, which provides a significant impact on your online community. There is a chance of new subscribers when readers of the host website find your blog and visit your website as a result and build trust in readers. Suppose your guest blog is posted on an authoritative and trusted website. In that case, the audience will have complete confidence that you are also an expert with an excellent reputation in your industry.
How to use guest blogging in increasing your online community
Now that you have an idea about what guest blogging is and its benefits let’s talk about how you can use it the right way to increase your online community.
Find the right site to contribute to
The goal is to increase your online community, so you need to find a trusted and authoritative website that you know has a significant amount of audience. You’ll usually find these numbers shared on their websites, such as their email subscribers and social media followers.
But how do you find these websites that are open for guest blogging? One of the easiest ways is going straight to Google and typing out the following search keywords:
[topic keyword phrase] + “guest article”
[topic keyword phrase] + “write for us”
[topic keyword phrase] + “become a contributor”
For instance, you can type out the keyword: “event planning” + “guest article” and see this search result list below for event planners.
Start your research on each site you see and check their domain authority to see whether guest posting there is worth it. There are many online tools that you can use for this, such as Moz Link Explorer.
Connect with the site owner
Now that you have chosen the right site, time to connect with the site owner. This part is not as easy as asking them if they can publish your guest post. Instead, you need to pitch your ideas and share your high-quality content. To do this, you need to understand their website and the type of content they publish. Follow them on social media, take a few weeks or longer to notice how they make their content and connect with their audience. Doing this will give you the right idea of how and what to pitch to the site owner.
We also highly recommend becoming a part of their online community. Comment consistently on their blog posts, sign up for their newsletter, respond to emails, and tag them when sharing their content with your thoughts. Form a genuine relationship with the site owner, find the right topic, and form your pitch.
Write great content
With a winning topic in hand, it’s time to create winning content. Here, you’ll need to create a great headline that will attract an audience. Of course, avoid clickbait headlines since they are an example of poor content writing practice. Next, be sure to research the right keywords, so your audience will find you easily when they search for the specific topic you are writing about. Third, be sure to add the correct links, either towards your website, the host website, or external links from other trusted sources. Finally, do not forget to format the post correctly, making good use of formats, capitalizations, bold texts, and images.
Use your bio effectively
The bio is where the authors are introduced to the community. It’s here that you can fill it with the right amount of details about you, your brand, and how they can connect with you. You can share your socials here, a link to your website, or a helpful resource that the audience can continue reading related to the guest post published. Here’s an excellent example from plannerslounge.com:
We hope that these tips will help you reach your goal of gaining more website’s audiences and increasing your online community through guest blogging. If you missed the first part of this series, click here.
In recent years, going online has become a must for all businesses, in response to the rise of online shopping and people going straight to the internet when looking for a service. Setting up a website is not enough. You must establish your presence and create an online community helping to ensure you have loyal customers while attracting new ones. One of the best ways to establish and build your online community is through blogging, and you can find out how here.
What is blogging?
A blog is self-published content online. While it started as diary-entry style content, many businesses now utilize it to bring traffic to their websites. Blog entries often allow readers to comment and interact with the writer and others, leading to the creation of their community. Blogs have marketing potential to businesses; that’s why blogging has become popular, producing countless bloggers and improving a website’s traffic.
How To Use Blogging To Increase Your Community
Now that we understand the basics of blogging and how it is beneficial to businesses, let’s find out how you can improve your online presence and increase your online community.
Blog about a single idea
If your business is about event planning, then blog about topics that centre around event planning. Generally, blogs are focused on a specific topic. There are two benefits to this. First, you can write about things that you are passionate about. Second, your audience, who has the same passion as you, can connect with all of your blog posts. It won’t do to talk about event planning on your first blog, then post a second blog about sports, which is an entirely different topic.
Blogging consistently about a topic that you are passionate about will connect you to the right audience. This connection will help you build and increase your online community.
For instance, Event Birdie. It’s a website dedicated to helping people plan an event like a pro. Inside its blog page, you’ll find countless entries dedicated only to event planning.
Create approachable and personal blogs
To connect with your audience, you must create a personal and approachable blog, so they will feel comfortable interacting through comments. They must feel comfortable enough to support blog entries that follow. Otherwise, your blog page will just die out or will not do well in improving your online community.
Create blog post entries that address your audience directly. Use words such as we, you, and me to include them in the narrative. Another way to do this is to encourage your subscribers or audience to reach out to you whenever they want, making them feel heard. You can encourage this action by giving them your email or socials to connect with you directly.
Take a look at this recent blog by Eventbrite, for example. It has a personal touch with words such as you and us. It relates to employees tasked to host a festive virtual office Christmas party, which is challenging.
Make your audience feel included
We already mentioned this in the previous section, but other than a set of words, there are also different ways that you can make your audience feel included in your blog posts. First, you can encourage them to leave a comment. For instance, if the blog is about Christmas party ideas, you can ask them to comment on their ideas to add to the blog. People love it when they become a source of inspiration or knowledge. Commenting on their ideas is an excellent chance to do it.
Quizzing your audience is also another way to get them hooked to your blog and encourage others to join the community. Quiz content is also more likely to be shared to your audience’s socials and, therefore, increase your website traffic.
The most well-known quick content today is the Buzzfeed Quizzes, with celebrities even taking the quiz during their interviews. Buzzfeed Quizzes also easily circulate online with how popular and trending they make the content to be.
Blogging is more than just word content. Instead, it can be a video, photos, or even quizzes, as we’ve highlighted above. It is an effective tool in gaining traffic and building your online community. Blogging about your passion is the best way to create a connection with your audience. Stick to one powerful topic and create content with approachable and personal language. Ensuring that your audience is comfortable interacting with you through the comments, sending you an email, or sharing your blog on their socials.
This blog is just part one of our’ blogging to increase online community series. Keep an eye out for Part 2.
Nowadays, social media might feel like a cutthroat atmosphere with little room for newbies. And, if not appropriately handled, gaining organic reach might be difficult.
The continuous adjustments to social media algorithms have made getting good results from organic marketing much more difficult. Organic campaigns on Facebook reach just 5.5 percent, which means that most of a brand’s followers will never see an organic post. While this is discouraging, it does not rule out the possibility of significant growth through organic social media techniques.
Here are three simple steps to help grow your social media following and community organically — at low or even no cost at all!
Step 1: Interactive and Unique Content Brand Posts
One of the fundamental laws of social media marketing — or any digital marketing — is to produce material that adds value to the lives of your target audience. The contents could be in the form of:
Educational content (e-books, blog posts, how-to videos)
Entertaining content (trendy memes or GIFs, video stories or clips, behind the scenes)
Shareable content (emotional videos, social or community awareness)
For audiences to notice and interact with a piece of content on social media, it must be significant in some manner. This step has a cascading effect that can lead to organic growth of 71% of customers with great social media experience who are inclined to refer the business to relatives and friends.
Begin by monitoring consumer interactions on social media in the appropriate niche and rival social media accounts. What types of material piques the interest of the target audience? What can it do to help consumers with their problems? Of course, it’s not simple to create value-added content that distinguishes a business as an expert or a friend. Still, it’s critical for gaining the shares and interactions that lead to organic growth.
Step 2: Use the Right Hashtags
Hashtags are the most effective strategy for increasing organic reach. They allow customers to find and identify exciting or relevant items. In addition, by establishing positive associations or developing momentum around an event, hashtags may help enhance a brand’s image and promote social sharing.
A great recent example of this is the infamous #AdultSwim trend that blew up on TikTok. As a result, many content creators jump to the bandwagon, resulting in higher views, likes, and comments. With trending hashtags, your brand can quickly get the awareness you aim to reach.
Of course, various social media analytics tools are available to assist marketers, some even free. Because social media is so dynamic, trends on hashtags should be tracked and regularly evaluated so that companies can stay on top of things and remain relevant.
It’s tough to determine the best times to publish on social media. They’re constantly evolving, and they’re entirely dependent on your target audience. Existing data, on the other hand, might be an excellent place to start. Here are the optimal times to post on each network, according to Sprout Social’s data:
LinkedIn:
Best times: Tuesday through Thursday 9 a.m.–noon
Best days: Tuesday and Wednesday
Worst day: Sunday
Facebook:
Best times: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday 9 a.m.–1 p.m.
Best days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday
Worst day: Saturday
Twitter:
Best times: Wednesday 9 a.m.– 3 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday 9–11 a.m.
Best day: Wednesday
Worst day: Saturday
Instagram:
Best times: Tuesday 11 a.m.–2 p.m., Monday through Friday 11 a.m.
Best day: Tuesday
Worst day: Sunday
It is also good to research the active times of your target audiences (in case you are an industry-specific brand). For this, you can use social media tools that provide traffic analytics from your social media engagements to pinpoint a particular time.
What You Can Further Do
1. Run Live Events
Events have always been an essential part of marketing. Live events, according to 80 percent of marketers, are crucial to their company’s success. Moreover, running live events on social media is a powerful method to enhance organic reach and engagement in a more digital world. Especially during COVID-19, when live events are more challenging, if not impossible.
Live streaming is a popular way to interact with followers on social media in real-time. Almost 80% of Facebook users prefer live video to sponsored video on the social media platform. When customers want greater authenticity from companies, live streaming on social media is a low-cost method to provide them with an unedited, genuine, authentic experience.
2. Create contests and incentives
People enjoy playing games, competing, and, above all, winning – especially if there is a prize involved. This marketing approach may be used in a variety of ways by both B2C and B2B businesses. Photo, video, user-generated content, and caption competitions are all fantastic methods to get your audience to compete. Prizes might be huge (free long-term membership to your services or a free product) or small (discounts and offers – 72% of consumers seek discounts or sales on social media).
Make sure your competitions and incentives match your company’s goals and give value to your audience, regardless of how you come up with them. People will naturally draw toward your business if your content — and contests — relate to what they desire.
Start Effectively Growing Your Social Media Community
It might feel like you’re yelling into a dark, bottomless hole when it comes to discovering, connecting, and building an organic following on social media. Don’t get disheartened if your first effort isn’t a total slam dunk; success might come from a mix of strategies.
Strategic planning and clever suggestions are necessary to connect more people with the brand since this leads to exponential growth. Whether dealing with influencers or hosting a contest, the goal should always be to engage your users honestly. The more relevant your material is, the more people will see it, resulting in organic growth for your social media presence.
Brands with a firm grasp of their target audience are more likely to form meaningful partnerships that set them apart from the competition. You may now effectively cultivate your brand area and community on social media by following the simple steps we gave.
Nowadays, social media might feel like a cutthroat atmosphere with little room for newbies. And, if not appropriately handled, gaining organic reach might be difficult.