Experiential Event Ideas To Boost Your Influencer Campaigns

If you’ve been following our blogs, you should know that influencer campaigns involving experiential events help you build stronger, more authentic relationships with them while delivering plenty of photo ops and organic brand exposure. Why wouldn’t they? At events, you’re engaging with them in person rather than just over email or sending PR gifts hoping for (or paying for) a moment in their spotlight. After spending some time together, influencers often gain a deeper understanding of your brand’s values and mission, making them more prepared to represent you. 

But what kind of events would you actually have? What kind of events promotes your product while being fun, engaging, and exciting to attend? There are different types of successful events brands have put on that probably ended up on your Instagram feed. These events give influencers several other (organic) reasons than merely free products to show you off! What route you choose should depend on your brand’s needs, your audience, and what kind of creativity you feel like exploring. 

One notable example of a larger scale influencer event is the Revolve Festival, a music festival with about 140 well-known guests including Kendall Jenner, Aimee Song, and some of the Victoria’s Secret Angels. But with several vendors, celebrity performers, and guests you’ve probably heard of, this can take a lot of time and money to plan. Starting with smaller events, here are some types of influencer events you can plan to supercharge your influencer marketing strategy.

Brunch or Dinner

A small-scale, intimate way to bring influencers together is through a networking brunch or dinner at an Instagrammable, trendy restaurant. This allows the opportunity for  influencers to have face-to-face time with you, each other, and your brand and build a genuine connection to your products and staff over some delicious food. 

You’ve probably seen tons of unpaid brunch posts on Instagram at well-decorated restaurants from your friends, so influencers might do the same if you pick the right restaurants. 

On February 27, we hosted a brunch at Margot to celebrate the launch of Jolii Cosmetics’ new clean beauty line where 40% of the proceeds were to be donated to Love Leo Rescue. The brunch brought together the founder of Jolii, the staff of Love Leo and Irose, and influencer supporters. You can read a blog post recap of it here.

Meet & Greet 

If you’ve got a store location, setting up a day or two for a meet-and-greet with one or more targeted influencers would definitely draw attention to your brand. Unlike brunches or dinners, meet-and-greets are accessible to the public, which means plenty of people posting and tagging you while getting to meet their favorite influencer.  

A benefit of meet-and-greets is to attract new customers in-person, no need for them to have any plans to purchase anything from your store. Once physically in the store, perhaps they wouldn’t be able to resist the sparkling new display of candles by the door that social media hadn’t made them aware of! 

Influencers usually announce these events on their social media so tagging you won’t hurt. Since they’re using your store space, it would allow plenty of geotags due to their followers asking them where the photo was taken at.

Panels & networking events

As we’ve discussed before, some influencers use their platforms to discuss various educational topics and social issues relevant to their field. If you want to take an informational, deeper route with your influencer campaigns, try a panel. These events are great ways for influencers to give advice and discuss interesting, complex topics in-person to attendees. For example, you could host a panel on diversity and inclusion in the fashion and beauty world, something plenty of influencers have first-hand experience with. Other influencers are great picks for discussing entrepreneurship. 

The panel can be part of a networking event complete with food, champagne, photo ops with a step-and-repeat, and gifting. It’s also a fantastic way for the public to get to know their favorite influencers on a more deeply personal level!

Large Scale Parties

A large scale party is a fun way to get everyone together and is the best route to optimizing organic brand exposure. Unlike the previous options, a party will most likely give you a bigger space to set up multiple aesthetic photo ops. And as we all know, influencers love a good photo op!

FabFitFun annually invites several influencers to celebrate alongside their employees at massive holiday parties that involve several gifting brands, photo ops, catered food, and a headliner of an A-list musical performer such as Tyga. These definitely aren’t your typical company party at the office!

Staycation

Even if you and the influencers aren’t jetsetting far away (you might still be in the same city), that doesn’t mean there can’t be some luxury and new experiences involved. Some nearby resorts offer insanely aesthetic pools, spas, restaurants, golf courses, views, and other Instagrammable characteristics on their own. No plane ticket needed! If you’ve ever been to some resorts out there, there’s no way you wouldn’t want to post a photo of you lounging around that 5-star luxury. With this option, you don’t have to put together too much decor yourself, as the resorts will be enough. 

We hosted a staycation a while back at the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel, Orange County. Although we were quite close to our Los Angeles home, we still had plenty of travel influencer-esque photo ops.

Seasonal events

Some moments that are guaranteed to be organically posted on social media are holidays as well as other special events, such as music festivals and fashion weeks. Since attendees often spend a lot of time getting ready for these memorable, usually yearly events, you can host your own events to celebrate. For example, PopSugar hosted a Coachella pre-party at a fancy hotel hosted by Emily Ratajowski. 

In regards to national holidays, you can find a way to promote your brand in a way that relates to those holidays. For example, you can host a pop-up shop with special holiday packaging with stocking-stuffer sized versions of your products.

International travel

They say you don’t really know someone until you’ve traveled with them. An international trip has you with the influencers almost 24/7, giving you plenty of time to get to know them on a deeper level. Stunning beaches, temples, jungles, statues, and other tourist attractions you can’t find at home are pretty much guaranteed photo ops. An international getaway doesn’t just guarantee photos, it’s likely lengthy vlogs will be made as well. Make sure you hit up all the hottest tourist spots as well as some underrated, off-the-beaten-path gems.

Since these trips involve a foreign country, the videos can even attract people who have never heard of you or the influencer but were searching for videos of your destination in general. It’s a great way to get discovered.

In the end, whichever type of activation you choose is up to your brand’s budget and creative direction. If you’re a newer, smaller brand, you might want to start with something smaller such as a brunch or dinner to introduce influencers and staff to each other. Once you have a strong network going on, you can move on to a party or a more costly event. If there’s a social issue you feel really needs to be discussed, gathering the right influencers for a panel would be ideal in this case.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to us for a free consultation on how we can create for you a custom event tailored to your brand’s needs, mission, and aesthetics!

xoxo,

Irose

How Influencer Marketing Created Billion Dollar Brands

Reposted from Revolve

As technology advances, traditional advertising is finding more obstacles before it can reach its intended audience. For example, you’ve probably used ad blockers before on the computer. You probably think a pro of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu are the lack of commercials. Even the “skip intro” button on Netflix was praised! 

Fortunately, the rise of social media influencers is also paving a path for a non-intrusive form of marketing: using the influencers as ambassadors.

Research shows that our youngest counterparts, Generation Z, prefer endorsements from their favorite influencers over traditional advertising. It’s not just them either: many people are more inclined to buy a product after they discovered it through a social media influencer. 40% of people have purchased a product after seeing it used by an influencer. Think of it this way: if an individual you admire is wearing something from a particular brand, it makes the brand look more appealing by association. 

Trust is another reason why influencer marketing is so important. Influencers have already built relationships with their followers, making them a trusted source of information. If you were finally able to lose that last 30 pounds with your favorite influencer’s diet plan, chances are you’ll believe them when they tell you how effective and awesome a certain protein bar brand is. Think of them as thought leaders in particular niches passing along messages that they’ve deemed worthy. Influencers can also be viewed as peers, which also increase trust. In fact, a study by Edelman found that 77% of consumers state that peer reviews are either deal-breakers or deciding factors in their purchasing decisions. 72% of customers trust a business more when it’s recommended by an influencer.

Daniela Braga x Givenchy

Case Studies

Some successful brands have attained their status through both micro and macro influencer marketing, such as Daniel Wellington. In four years, the $15000 company became a $220 million company and was Europe’s fastest-growing company between 2013 to 2015. Much of this success was due to how much it took advantage of influencer marketing in a time when it wasn’t as common and competitive as it is today. Influencers were offered free watches in exchange for posting about them, and their ROI was tracked through discount codes unique to each influencer. This marketing also gave the brand plenty of user-generated content to post on its social media, giving it a more authentic feel. Financially, it ended up spending a lot less than if it had used traditional advertising.

Another great example of success through influencer marketing is the clothing brand Revolve. Starting off with $50k and now worth $1.5 billion, Revolve launched into fame by being featured on the pages of fashion’s most followed influencers, such as Chriselle Lim, Chiara Ferragni, and Aimee Song. In fact, 70% of Revolve’s sales can be traced back to an influencer. They build relationships with these influencers not just through strategizing social media posts but also experiential trips, such as inviting popular bloggers and celebrities to a weekend in the Hamptons. 

Revolve realized that most of their target demographic, millennials, spent much of their free time on mobile and were located all over the world. Influencers became the vehicle to reach a global audience. According to their Chief Brand Officer Raissa Gerona, “Working with influencers has been key to our business and using them and their power to influence people all over the world... we can see that because 45% of the people that follow us don't even live in the U.S. We've created this global fan base, and it's been through influencer marketing.”

Aimee Song x Revolve

Traditional Advertising VS. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has a higher ROI than other forms of marketing. Having an elegant ad in the glossy pages of Vogue may make you feel prestigious, but it comes at a $200k+ price tag. Time and Inc will charge at least $100k.  And advertising on a billboard in Times Square costs a whopping $1-4M.

Instead, you could take that same amount to several influencers who can showcase your product among their aesthetic, carefully-curated Instagram feeds. And depending on the influencer chosen, a campaign can cost about $7k-$10k for an influencer with 1M followers. This is a fraction of the price of advertising in a magazine or billboard while still ensuring high traffic. Working with influencers can allow you to target a specific audience and reach your desired demographic directly. 

Madison Grace Reed x Bebe

What to watch out for

Unlike Google Ads, influencers, and celebrities are human beings. Because of this, there are different dangers to watch out for than with other forms of digital advertising. Human beings make mistakes, ranging from accidentally copying and pasting the wrong text in their promotional posts like Scott Disick to deliberately saying bigoted things. For example, in 2018, several brands cut ties with beauty influencer Laura Lee after discovering severely racist tweets against blacks and Asians in her past. So before you decide to partner with an influencer, do a bit of a background check. 

An influencer’s reputation, whether positive or negative, will affect yours. This was especially notable in Nike’s partnership with Colin Kaepernick. It seems like partnering with someone who bravely stood against racial injustice helped it increase its sales by 31% in the days after he was featured in an ad. 

There’s also the risk of inadvertently treating influencers like commodities, reducing them down to their physical features and numbers. Even if their following count is important, you can’t forget the human behind them. Remember, you’re trying to build a genuine relationship, not just throwing products at something. 

Victoria Justice and Madison Reed x Daniel Wellington

The rise of influencer marketing doesn’t mean that other forms of digital marketing should be ignored. Experiential activations, content strategy, and social media marketing such as Facebook and Instagram ads are all important avenues to hit to stay modern.

How much do all these forms of marketing cost? What combination of influencer and traditional marketing is financially best for you? Stay tuned for our next blog post, where we’ll be breaking down the prices of both!

Best,

Irose Team