The 5 Benefits of Hosting An Influencer Event! (Post COVID-19)
More often than not, people are looking to voices they can trust for recommendations. Most influencers have spent years cultivating trust between themselves and their audience. When they recommend products, people listen. Influencer events are a powerful tool for brands that want to build a stronger relationship with their audience. With these events, brands invite influencers to participate in a gathering, getaway or other event in order to promote their products or services. These events are a great way to tap into the audience that influencers have built up and connect with people you may not have been able to reach otherwise.
Here are the five biggest benefits of hosting an influencer event — plus some tips on how to keep your event running smoothly.
1. They Build Trust
By inviting influencers to your event, you can benefit from the relationships they’ve established with their audience. Influencers attending your event and promoting your brand will lend a little bit of their credibility to your business. While this won’t create deep relationships with an audience overnight, it is a great way to attract an audience that is engaged and open to the products or services you have on offer.
2. They Help You Expand Your Audience
Influencers — and especially micro and nano-influencers — tend to fit into online niches and cultivate strong relationships with highly specific audiences.
By partnering up with influencers, you can gain access to the audiences they’ve built. Influence events are a great way to direct your content and brand to the specific people you want to target — often, even more effectively than with other targeting methods alone.
3. They Build Long-Term Partnerships
Some businesses can struggle to create long-term, authentic partnerships with influencer marketing. If you partner with an influencer for just one or two posts, it can be hard to create content that feels like a genuine and authentic promotion of your brand or its products.
By giving influencers a positive and memorable experience, you can foster a strong relationship that will last well into the future — and may even encourage the development of further campaigns and content.
4. They Create Content
Events naturally generate a huge amount of content. Users and influencers upload photos and videos from the event to social media. Influencers also usually create content leading up to the event and after.
While you won’t have much control over this user-generated content, it can be extremely effective at building buzz and extending the reach of your brand. If you’re struggling to create new content, or experiencing a lull in your content strategy, an influencer event can be a great way to keep up the momentum.
5. They Provide Value to Your Audience
Any effective content strategy relies on content that provides real value to its audience. Often, however, it can be hard to know exactly what your audience needs.
Because influencers know what their audience needs, these events are usually very effective at delivering value. As the event goes on, the influencers you partner with will create content that’s tailored to their audience — ensuring that it’s both relevant and valuable.
Tips for Hosting an Influencer Event Post-COVID
Running an influencer event will be a big undertaking. These tips will help you ensure that your event runs as smoothly as possible.
1. Communicate Early and Often
From the very beginning, communicate with everyone involved in the project. Keep influencers and staff updated on the venue and event schedule. Build a social media strategy that clues guests in on key information. If things change — you swap venues, move events or relocate registration — let people know as soon as possible.
2. Think About Housing
Your influencers will need somewhere to stay. If your event is held at a hotel, housing may be as simple as booking a few rooms — but things may not be so easy in other cases.
You should look for housing in the area that will be a good fit for your influencers. Serviced apartments, for example, are fully-furnished living spaces — and unlike some hotels, they’ll also let your influencers bring their pets. Room cleaning service in these apartments is also typically less frequent than service in a hotel, which can afford some extra privacy and room to decompress.
3. Take Advantage of Your Venue
When selecting a venue for their event, most brands go for unique and exciting destinations in order to make the event as Instagrammable as possible. Leading up to your event, you should show off the venue you’ve selected to build buzz and excitement.
You should also take advantage of any special certifications or amenities your event may have. Many venues, for example, have the new ISSA GBAC STAR accreditation — a credential awarded to venues that make outbreak prevention a top priority. These credentials can let your guests know that their health and safety are top priorities.
4. Create an Event Schedule
Part of your comms strategy should be a good event schedule. You want to make sure that there is enough going on that your event doesn’t lose momentum, but not so much that attendees feel overwhelmed.
Sharing this schedule with event staff and influencers will help keep your team on top of things during the event.
5. Follow the Conversation On Social Media
Keep an eye on what people are saying about your event once it’s kicked off. You can use social media to see how people feel about your event — providing you with instant feedback, information to tweak the event and suggestions about making future events even better.
Building New Relationships With Influencer Events
Influencer events can offer serious benefits for brands. The right event will help your company build stronger partnerships with influencers and reach audiences that can be difficult to target.
If you want to host an influencer event, planning and a strong communication strategy will help you keep the whole thing running smoothly. Be sure to also find the right housing for your influencers and keep your staff updated on the event’s schedule.
Guest Contributer – April Miller
5 Common Mistakes To Avoid When Building Your Influencer Strategy
While it is evident that Influencer Marketing can reap various benefits for a business, it is imperative to consider the potential mistakes brands make when utilizing this tool.
Influencer marketing is not as simple as choosing a popular Instagram account and throwing money at them. If used incorrectly, this approach can cost you thousands of dollars, however, if you avoid these common mistakes, Influencer Marketing can skyrocket your brand.
A recent study by Tomoson reported that businesses are making $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.
Avoid these 5 common mistakes to be among the businesses reaping these enormous benefits:
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Choosing the wrong influencer:
Brands will often select influencers based on their follower count. While in some cases, more followers means more engagement, this is not always true. The influencer should be chosen based on their values, personality and fittingness for the brand. Researching different influencers in the same niche will give you a better idea of who you should choose for your brand.
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Focusing on one social media platform:
Focusing solely on a single social media platform will hold your brand back from reaching a new audience. While it is natural to place greater emphasis on the platform where you have built the greatest presence, you are restricting your brand from reaching an entirely new demographic. Using influencers to direct attention towards platforms where your presence is lacking can be a good strategy to connect with new people.
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Making short-term collaborations:
It takes time to build trust with your consumers; don’t expect too much too soon. While you may experience some short-term gains, steady progress will often yield the best results. If the influencer campaign has achieved favourable returns in the short-term, focus on building a long-term relationship to achieve sustainable growth.
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Lacking authentic communication:
Cliché statements and captions will appear unauthentic. Using personalised messages and giving influencers an opportunity to voice their personal thoughts on the product will be perceived as more authentic and trustworthy by the audience. Finding an influencer that truly believes in the product will make this process significantly easier.
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Not having a proper strategy in place:
Implementing an influencer campaign because it is the ‘in-thing’ is the wrong approach to be taking. Before reaching out to an influencer, it is vital that you have a well-developed plan in place. To keep your brand on track, outline the end-goal of the campaign, whether it be more impressions or followers, then formulate a strategy to reach these goals. This will help determine which areas were effective and which areas need work for the next campaign.
While influencer marketing campaigns can reap various benefits for your business, it is vital that you avoid these basic errors to achieve the results you are seeking.
How Has Influencer Marketing Changed In 2020?
The rise of influencer marketing has grown substantially over the past few years, and it’s not going to stop anytime soon. Considered to be one of the most valuable forms of marketing present on social media, many companies are turning to influencers who operate in the relevant niche to promote their products and brand name to their followers. This provides companies with increased exposure amongst their target market and enables the generation of sales and revenue.
However, influencer marketing has changed and developed in order to keep up with the changing times. Here are some ways in which influencer marketing has changed in 2020:
Surpassing The Superficial
In the past, the influencer marketing industry relied heavily upon social media metrics such as follower counts, likes and engagement to gauge success. However, today these vanity metrics are believed to offer nothing of value and is not an accurate indication for which influencer would be best for the brand.
In fact, Facebook’s recent decision to remove the amount of likes on their platforms, such as Instagram, encourages people to shift their focus away from these vanity metrics. Instead, it prompts them to direct their attention more towards valuable metrics, such as audience demographics, reach, impressions and video views delivered to gauge the suitability of an influencer to promote a particular brand.
More Content
Traditionally, platforms like Facebook and Instagram primarily delivered picture and text-based content. However, drastic improvements in interned speed have resulted in more and more influencers creating and delivering audio and video content to their follows. In 2020, people are to expect influencers to increasingly utilise video content.
This is expected to greatly benefit brands as video content is considered to deliver higher audience engagement more and also generate higher ad clicks.
Building Long-Term Influencer Relationships
In the past, brands commonly used influencers on a campaign by campaign basis, meaning that they would utilise an array of different influencers for each campaign or promotion at the time. However, brands are now discovering the benefits associated with forming lasting, long-term relationships with their influencers. By consistently using one or a small group of influencers, it enables brands to save time, money and effort by not having to continuously search for new influencers for each campaign run.
2020 is a year of great change and that rings true for the influencer marketing industry. Despite the developments and alterations experienced by the industry as of present, these changes are essential to ensuring that the industry remains current and adequately promotes a brand and its products to the specified target audience.