Hosting An Influencer Event | Simple 4 Step Guide
Hosting an influencer event is one of the most powerful influencer marketing strategies. They are done to promote new and existing products and services. They can also build trust, increase brand awareness, and build long-term relationships with relevant influencers.
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In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know before organizing an influencer event. More specifically:
- Types of influencer events
- Ways to find influencers for your event
- The most important tips when organizing events
- Best ways to promote an event for maximum exposure
Step 1. Define What Type Of Event To Host
The first step of throwing a successful influencer event is defining your “why”. Once you have a clear goal in mind, write down any ideas you come up with. Your goal will be a deciding factor in what type of event you throw.
These are the most common types of influencer events:
- Promotions – to promote new or existing products, sales, and exclusive offers
- Parties – to build relationships, and create brand exposure
- Online events – to attract sponsors
- Seasonal events – to do promotions, create brand exposure and meet new influencers
These examples of successful influencer events below can definitely help you find inspiration.
The first example is from an event hosted by YoungLa. Their goal was to promote their Black Friday sale. They did teaser posts on their Instagram leading up to Black Friday, and then did their main posts when their sale dropped. They also dropped a video on YouTube, and got the influencers to post about it on their social media.
Gymshark is another brand that’s exceptional at throwing influencer events and using them to promote sales and new product releases. This is the post from their last influencer event.
A great example of an influencer party would be any of Dan Bilzerians parties he hosted to promote his brand Ignite. Some of the biggest influencers attend these events, including huge artists, youtubers, athletes etc. These events have been extremely successful in promoting his brand.
The last example is an event called “Fortnite Friday”. This event generated millions of views on Youtube each time it was held and almost every player was a big Twith.tv streamer or youtuber. Online events like this one are very common in the gaming industry.
The event was streamed live on youtube and twitch.tv by the participating players and the organizer. It generated millions of views each time, and got the attention of big companies like Logitech and Redbull.
In general, all influencer events have one goal in mind. Influencer-generated content and brand exposure in front of their followers.
Step 2. How To Find Influencers
Selecting the right influencers is the most important aspect of the whole process. Ideally, you should target influencers with high levels of engagement that are popular in your niche.
Let’s cover some of the best ways you can do that.
Find Influencers From Your Social Media Fans
If you have more than 1k social media fans on your brand page, there’s a good chance that there are influencers among them. If you manage to identify them, half of your job is done. These influencers are the first guests you should go after. It’s safe to assume that they know and like your brand, making it much easier to approach and convince them to attend and share your event with their fans.
For pages with fewer followers you can use a chrome extension “IG follower export tool” to scan your followers and pick the ones you would like to reach out to.
But how do you identify influencers if you have thousands of followers? You’re currently reading an article by Influencers Club. We’re an influencer data provider and it’s easy for us to analyze your fans and identify influencers among them. You can get a list of anyone with more than 1k followers and use that list for super targeted outreach.
Besides the contact email of the creator, you also get information like age, interests, location, number of followers, keywords in their bio, and more. All of these data points will make it even easier to personalize your approach and get more influencers to attend your event.
To see all the data points visit this page or get in touch with our team to share your targeted social media profile. Keep in mind that we can also check the fans of your biggest competitor and identify their influencers.
Find Influencers Among Customers Or Subscribers
Another great option is to check your email list of customers or subscribers for influencers. These people have purchased your product or have subscribed to your email list and are the logical next step when searching for influencers.
Again, we’re the only company in the industry that you can use to discover these types of creators.
We crosscheck your list against millions of influencer contacts from our database.
Most often the success rate is around 6%. Calculate yourself how many influencers you have on your list.
If you want us to discover them get in touch with our team using this link.
Find Influencers On Instagram
So far we covered ways to find influencers that may already be a part of your audience. This section is dedicated to discovering new relevant influencers. As mentioned previously our database has millions of influencers, and we can filter them based on your specific needs.
For example we can find targeted influencers by keywords in their bio (we are the only service that offers this feature), or their location (if your event is in California, we will you relevant influencer contacts from California). On top of this we can apply other filters like:
- Age
- Gender
- Social Media Engagement
- Interests
- Category (1500 total categories we group each contact in)
- +20 other publicly available pieces of information
To get in touch schedule a short call with our team so we can discuss what kind of influencers you need.
Step 3. How To Invite Influencers
How To Invite Influencers Using Facebook Ads
Many of our clients use our influencer email data in Facebook Ads. Using custom audiences on Facebook they can show ads on people from our email list, resulting in super-targeted ads.
You can also import your own influencer database (or if you don’t have one you can get it from us) as a customer list and use FB Ads to invite influencers.
For this you will need:
- An email list of influencers to use as custom audiences
- Landing page with information about your event
- An ad creative that will direct anyone interested to the landing page where they can RSVP
Invite Influencers Using Email
Email is the best outreach channel to invite influencers to your event. Although it can get tricky if you’re sending emails at scale.
We already mentioned how you can get large influencer email lists, but if you want to approach only a select few then here’s how to find emails on Instagram and TikTok.
How To Find an Influencers Email Address
On Instagram:
- Visit their profile
- Look for an email/contact button
- Check their bio for an email address
On TikTok:
- Go to their profile
- Look for an email button or an email in their bio
- If there wasn’t an email on their TikTok profile, check for an Instagram button and look for their email there
To personalize your email you can be:
- Friendly and specific on why you chose them
- Why it would benefit them to attend
- Tell them the most interesting parts of the event
- Include a link to the event landing page where they can also RSVP
- Most importantly, include other important guests
Send invites a month prior to the event, and weekly reminders. People are very indecisive when it comes to these events, so you can convert a lot of last-minute attendees.
Invite Influencers Through DMs’
If you don’t have an influencer’s email, the other way to reach them is through DMs. Most of the time big profiles will not respond to DMs. But micro-influencers on the other hand are more likely to respond to your message.
Tips for writing your message:
Ways To Incentivize Influencers
Sometimes just an invite is not enough. Depending on your budget, add some incentive for them to come:
- People love free stuff more than anything, so give them what they want. Hand out gifts to everyone who shows up. They are sure to love customized items or clothing with their name or branding.
- Free food and drinks
- Do a giveaway. Give away something the participants would actually want to win (it can also be a product from your brand).
- Set up a backdrop, or a cool place to take photos that they can share with their followers.
Step 4. Organize The Event
Good organization is a key factor for success. There are a few aspects to consider when organizing influencer events like the location, budget, and marketing being the main ones.
Determine your budget
To determine the cost of hosting the event, list all the planned activities in a spreadsheet. Then calculate the expenses for each activity. Google sheet is a free tool that will let you access your list from anywhere.
These are the most common costs for influencer events:
- Location/Venue
- Accommodation and travel for influencers
- Staff
- Food & Drinks
- Activities
- Photographer
- Marketing
Find a location
Choosing a location is perhaps the most important part. Pick a location that is accessible to the influencers you reach out to. Or you can invite influencers based on the location of the event. If you got an email list from us, this should be easy since one of the data points we provide is their location.
If your event is somewhere in California for example, we can filter out influencers that only live in California.
These are the main factors to keep in mind when choosing a location:
- Is it good for taking pictures
- What venue functions do you need
- Accessibility
- Parking
Promote Your Event
- Create a landing page with all the necessary information about your event
- Include an RSVP form
- Send regular updates to attendees leading up to the event
- Retarget visitors from your landing page with Facebook ads
- Do promotional posts and teasers leading up to the event
Conclusion
By now you should have a plan for your event, and a list of influencers to reach out to.
Remember influencer events shouldn’t only be picture perfect. You have to take the time to build relationships and ultimately a team of influencers that will stay with you for the long run.
So make the event worthwhile and fun for every influencer that comes.
FIND THE PERFECT INFLUENCERS
Scale your outreach and pick the perfect influencers for your brand using our influencer database searchable by 30+ smart filters
