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Marketing at Beer, Wine & Food Influencer Conferences

April 16, 2021 By Sara Pletcher Leave a Comment

In our last week of our 10-week Successful Marketing video series, Allan discusses why and how brands should sponsor beer, wine and food influencer conferences.

Why market through influencer conferences:

  1. Information on marketing and communications: sponsors get good information they can apply to their business (i.e. email marketing, social media marketing, SEO, etc.)
  2. Make in-person connections
  3. Assess whether influencers are a good fit for you: meet a large variety of influencers and choose which work best for your company
  4. Reach multiple micro influencers at once

International Food Blogger Conference

2019 Well-Known IFBC Attendees had on average:

  • 8,568 Twitter followers
  • 29,124 Instagram followers
  • 32,978 Pinterest followers
  • 125,424 Facebook followers
  • Total of 196,094 followers per blogger or 3,921,880 for just 20 influencers
  • This proves sponsoring an influencer conference can give you reach into a large number of influencers, some of who have large followings.

Seven Tips to Succeed at Sponsoring an Influencer Conference

  1. Pick the Right Conference: pick general or niche industry conference – niche is more likely to provide the connections you’re looking for
  2. Set Expectations Properly: immediate results are unlikely
  3. Attend and Interact
  4. Take Advantage of Benefits: often sponsors won’t fulfill their tasks of a sponsorship (i.e. write a blog post for the conference website) and miss out on the full sponsor benefit
  5. Don’t Self Promote Too Much: people do not want to be told they should purchase your product; they want to be given a reason to have a connection with you
  6. Engage on Social Media: if someone tags your company on social media, repost, comment, like the post, etc. to take full advantage of your opportunity
  7. Follow Up: email those you connected with or utilize the attendee list your sponsorship provides

Conferences in a COVID-19 World

  • Is the conference communicating their COVID-19 precautions?
  • Sponsorships are more pertinent now more than ever – influencers need content and conference organizers need support after a year of no conferences

Zephyr Conferences

  • Three influencer conferences: Wine Media Conference, International Food Blogger Conference Beer Now Conference
  • We’re COVID-safe: negative PCR test or vaccine to attend
  • Influencers get a discount for writing about sponsors – this ensures sponsors get ROI

Our Presenter

Allan Wright is founder and president of Zephyr Conferences. He has been organizing these conferences, determining content, and securing speakers for 13 years. Allan also has 24 years of experience running his own small company and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

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Successful Marketing Video Series

Week 1: Effective Websites
Week 2: Local Marketing
Week 3: Survey Your Customers
Week 4: Consumer Reviews
Week 5: CRM & Email Marketing
Week 6: Social Media Marketing
Week 7: Video Marketing
Week 8: Public Relations
Week 9: Influencer Marketing

Filed Under: News Tagged With: beer, beer now conference, conference marketing, Food, IFBC, Influencer Marketing, video series, Wine, wine media conference

Influencer Marketing for the Beer, Wine & Food Industries

April 7, 2021 By Sara Pletcher Leave a Comment

influencer marketing

In week 9 of our 10-week Successful Marketing video series, Allan and his guest, Toni Dash, of Boulder Locavore, discuss the importance of influencer marketing in the beer, wine and food industries.

What is Influencer Marketing?

  • Working with someone who has a point of view and has a following of any size
  • Influencers are credible because they’re sharing products that align with their point of view with their community

Methods to Work with Influencers

  • Blog post to feature a product
  • Sharing content on social media
  • Preparing content for the brand’s website

What Brands Should Provide

  • Concept
  • Peremeters
  • Contractual Terms
  • More specific, the better

Check out the video to dive more into influencer marketing with Toni.

Our Presenters

Allan Wright is founder and president of Zephyr Conferences. He has been organizing these conferences, determining content, and securing speakers for 13 years. Allan also has 24 years of experience running his own small company and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Toni Dash is a professional writer/blogger, photographer, recipe developer and creator of Boulder Locavore®.  Toni has been developing recipes for over two decades. It all started with the need for quality gluten-free recipes for her family at a time when there were few resources available.  She’s been featured in several magazines, on TV, and podcasts and is a member of the IFBC Advisory Board.

Get Updates

Want these free weekly marketing tips delivered to your inbox?  Sign up here.

Successful Marketing Video Series

Week 1: Effective Websites
Week 2: Local Marketing
Week 3: Survey Your Customers
Week 4: Consumer Reviews
Week 5: CRM & Email Marketing
Week 6: Social Media Marketing
Week 7: Video Marketing
Week 8: Public Relations

Filed Under: News Tagged With: beer, Food, Influencer Marketing, video series, Wine

Is Influencer Marketing Worth the Time and Effort?

February 4, 2019 By Allan Leave a Comment

Is it worth your time and effort to engage in influencer marketing? Especially “micro influencer” marketing?

In November we outlined Why and How to Engage in Influencer Marketing. Here we will talk about the potential payoff.

There is no question that engaging with micro influencers takes more time. Putting all your eggs in one or a few baskets (major media personalities or publications) can reduce your time investment. But as we outlined, it might not produce exposure to the targeted, engaged audiences micro influencers can provide. And so while working with multiple, smaller influencers takes more time and effort, we think it is worth the money.

We’d like to offer our 2019 International Food Blogger Conference as an example. We did an analysis of 20 of the more successful food bloggers signed up for this year’s conference. The 20, on average, have:

  • 8,568 Twitter followers
  • 29,124 Instagram followers
  • 32,978 Pinterest followers
  • 125,424 Facebook followers

This gives a grand total of 196,094 followers per blogger or 3,921,880 in total. That does not include other platforms such as YouTube or the tens of thousands of unique website visitors these blogs receive each month.

In our opinion this is pretty dang impressive considering 1) most of these folks are blogging and using social media only part time and 2) the consuming public has an awful lot of choices for consumption of media. Bravo, food bloggers.

We think this also shows that working with even one food influencer can provide significant exposure, especially at reaching consumers who actually care about what these influencers have to say. This is even more true if you do your homework to work with influencers whose subject matter corresponds well with your brand.

And if you choose to attend and sponsor one of our influencer conferences, you can meet multiple influencers in one weekend!

Filed Under: News Tagged With: IFBC, Influencer Marketing

Why and How to Engage in Influencer Marketing

November 26, 2018 By Allan Leave a Comment

“Influencer Marketing” is all the rage. It is popular – and should be – because influencers can affect how people perceive your brand and, ultimately, whether consumers purchase your product or service.

Who Are Influencers?

Influencers are anyone who tends to set the opinions of others. This could be your Aunt Jane when it comes to how to create a dinner party. We talk about “early adopters” in the world of technology who are the first to purchase new products. More recently, the term influencers has come to be correlated with those who have online communities of followers in a specific subject area: bloggers and social media users.

There are three must-have attributes for an influencer:

  1. An audience or community of people who listen to the individual
  2. Expertise or at least perceived expertise in a subject matter
  3. Credibility or the belief by the audience that the influencer is speaking the truth

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Traditional marketing is you telling your customers why they should purchase your product or service. Public Relations is different, in that someone from the media tells your story for you – ideally in a positive way but this is not in your control.

Influencer Marketing is sort of a combination of traditional marketing and traditional PR:  brands engage influencers (ala marketing) to tell their story for them (ala PR). This engagement can take the form of a sponsored post on the influencer’s site, an endorsement, social media (written, photo, or video), or other forms.

There are multiple ways to engage with influencers but I’ll divide them here into two main strategies:

Work With the Stars

Some brands have decided to work with the stars. This could include those with national fame, like Kim Kardashian who has 120 million Instagram followers. But it could also include the relative “star” of the niche you are pursuing – that wine blogger whom everyone labels as the cream of the crop. This method involves quite a bit of work:

  1. Identify potential influencers
  2. Calculate the size of their audience
  3. Determine the “quality” of their audience as it relates to you
  4. Contact influencers you believe are a good fit
  5. Create a working relationship with those influencers (ie pay them)
  6. Provide them your product or service
  7. Reinforce their social media postings with your own social media accounts
  8. Follow up to ensure they do what they say they will do

Micro-Influencers

Another strategy is to worry more about an influencer’s niche and less about his or her reach. So, in the wine world, rather than that star social media influencer, this strategy would suggest pursuing a number of wine bloggers with less reach but who have great credibility with their audience. Forbes Magazine suggests this strategy is the Marketing Force of the Future.

As an example, consider a wine blogger who has 200,000 followers and who writes about the wine industry in a fun, snarky way. His readers might or might not read every blog and social media post and might or might not pay attention to his recommendations. On the other hand, consider a wine blogger who has a following of 20,000 but who writes only about Pinot Noir. Her followers do not follow her unless they are interested in Pinot Noir and interested in what she has to say.

Engagement as a Metric

Size of the audience does matter in influencer marketing. But marketers are now looking at more than just audience size. They are looking at engagement: open and click through rates of emails; likes and shares on social media; and comments or replies to posts made by an influencer.

An influencer who has an engaged audience and who writes about a subject relevant to you is very likely to have real influence over his or her community when it comes to your brand.

Media Conferences

At our three influencer conferences (Wine Media Conference, International Food Blogger Conference, and Beer Now) you can pursue both strategies but the second is the most relevant. Yes, the stars attend and you can make relationships with them. But the real benefit of a blogger or influencer conference is to bring hundreds of micro-influencers together in the same room.

We do not limit attendance to our conferences based on their reach. (Although we do get some powerful influencers – see this post about 20 top influencers at IFBC19.) Instead, our attendees are self selected because they are passionate about their subject and it is this passion that makes them credible with their audience. As a sponsor, you can then serve your product or present your message to these folks without having to spend the time and money to analyze, segment, and narrow down to get what you hope will be the right fit. And when you have access to hundreds of influencers at the same time, if your message is good then good things can happen.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Bloggers, Influencer Marketing

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