Fast Tips on Using Social Media and Influencer Marketing for Your Next Event

March 13, 2012

Social Media and Influencer Marketing for Events

 

Last week I joined a marketing meeting with one of our portfolio companies to discuss promotion strategies to boost engagement and participation in an upcoming event.  Like most startup and expansion stage companies, this marketing team is small and stretched thin.  Recognizing that this can’t be a unique situation, I want to share my thoughts and ideas.

First off, I was impressed to see the amount of thought and variety of marketing activities that team was executing against in order to drive signups.  Some of the programs included media sponsorship, banner advertising, weekly email nurturing campaigns, sales contests, co-marketing with other sponsors, social media and PR.

 

Knowing that the event is coming up quickly, I wanted to share some ideas that a small team can execute in addition to the other programs the team was already running.  Here were my recommendations:

 

Incorporating Social Media and Influence:

  1. Get PR fully on board.  If you have a PR firm, be sure to fully engage them on your upcoming event. Don’t hesitate on this as a PR firm should be able to create a great story about your event and engage the press, bloggers, analysts, and industry thought leaders as to why it is so important.  Specifically, you should consider sending press releases, try to secure content placements, invite the influencers to the event, and generally hype up the event.
  2. Ramp up activity on social media.  All active social media channels should focus on promoting the event in the weeks leading up to the big day.  To start, proactively follow your speakers (if any) and thought leaders.  Balance the amount of updates you share, following my favorite rule from Tippingpoint Media: for every promotional tweet, try to send 4 tweets sharing other content and 1 “retweet” of content from one of your speakers/influencers, etc.  Create a list on Twitter of all speakers and sponsors so that followers can connect with everyone easily.  Integrate social media better in all other marketing programs.  Also consider sharing pictures before and after the event via Twitter to give some personality to the event and brand.  You can use an app like Instagram or simply tweet pictures directly from your phones.  Ramp up activity to tweeting more frequently over time (3 tweets a day to 5 tweets a day).  Use Facebook to humanize the event and share information about your speakers and team to add some personality.
  3. Tap into the influencer network.  Fully engage your speakers to promote the event on their networks.  You may even want to create tracking codes to determine who drives what.  If your speakers have blogs, encourage them to blog about the upcoming event.  Think about other content that can be created and delivered quickly (written Q&As, etc).
  4. Monitor and adjust.  As the event draws closer, continue to monitor the conversion of all activities.  As always, the plan I have laid out is NOT a silver bullet and all marketers should reflect and adjust based on their experiences.

How do you incorporate social media and influencer marketing into your events?  Let me know what I have missed!

 

 

Content Marketing Director

<strong>Amanda Maksymiw</strong> worked at OpenView from 2008 until 2012, where she focused on developing marketing and PR strategies for both OpenView and its portfolio companies. Today she is the Content Marketing Director at <a href="https://www.fuze.com/">Fuze</a>.