Working with online influencers can be a cost-effective way to promote events at your nightclub. Here are a few simple and effect strategies you can implement that will provide significant impact in raising the profile of your club and events through influencer marketing.
1. Find influencers who are regional and have engagement.
Influencers provide reach, and they are a great way to narrow your appeal and expand your network and audience appeal more effectively. However, be careful not to focus on just their “followership." Look at their niche/fit and check that they have real engagement to drive action and not just awareness. This is incredibly important in driving real leads and, ultimately, sales for your club.
First, build a solid profile on your actual audience. To what types of topics do they best respond? What platforms do they tend to engage with the most? For example, a much younger audience might be better reached on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, so your influencer should therefore have a solid, regular and engaged profile on those networks. They should also talk about topics your audience will most likely find interesting and be drawn to naturally.
Second, you need to look at their reach not in terms of just numbers but actual engagement. This can quickly be recognized by looking at what their average follower like is for their most recent posts. It also allows for benchmarking against your competitors. Followerwonk provides a platform for not only finding the niche influencers you are after but also truly understanding Twitter analytics and comparing your presence to others. This will in turn affect actionability; an influencer who is a good fit for your nightclub will not simply spread awareness but also increase the likelihood of driving their audience to take action and follow through to a sale with you. If you have the right fit and a good balance of reach and engagement, you will do well in increasing your ability in achieving sales.
When selecting an influencer for your nightclub, it's imperative to ensure that the influencers who you want to utilize have an influence in your region. There would be little value in selecting an influencer with fit and engagement only to find they or their audience are not within your venue’s region. So stay as focused as possible, niching right down to city, town, etc.
2. Provide content to the influencer to promote the club.
It's important that the content posted is authentic to the influencer’s style of posting and trackable for you. Where applicable you should certainly provide all promotion visuals for posting and craft the messages to optimize and control the content while also saving the influencer time. Typical examples for posting content include an influencer posting the flyers for an upcoming promotion, or even doing a video on Instagram Story or Snapchat, saying that they will be at a specific event.
For example, don’t necessarily be limited to text or even photo content. If the influencer is a comedian like Michael Blackson, for example, you could incorporate a short video. Ensure your brand is always easily identifiable, and create specific hashtags while also using popular hashtags that should accompany the posts on social media. This will increase your reach and provide consistency for tracking. Also, remember to encourage sharing – don’t just assume it will happen (though if you have done your initial niche fit to find the right influencer this should happen more naturally). Be intentional about it and communicate this with the influencer in their message.
Depending on the type of event, you can use a unique discount or coupon code per influencer as this will allow you to track their effectiveness and measure your return on investment more easily. Be creative, keeping it original and actionable.
3. Promote the content.
Once content has been created you want to use all your relevant social media platforms, from Instagram and YouTube to Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook.
Social media – and the internet in general – is an incredibly crowded place. You should focus on the platforms that most effectively speak to your audience. If you are unsure about a platform, experiment with it and see what responses you receive.
Next, posting at the right times of the day can help maximize your reach and effectiveness. Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer can help identify the best times for you to post, providing a good guide for the influencer to follow as well.
Tracking the content using analytic tools will help you find out what is working, and allows you to track several influencers promoting your club at once. Once you have created a framework for your nightclub and, most importantly, identified influencers who fit your audience, you can develop an effective ongoing campaign for social media promotion through influencer marketing.