Driving attendance and foot traffic with athlete influencer marketing

I think Twitter’s great, but how is that going to get people out to my event?

There are A LOT of ways to “get butts in seats” or bring fans out to your event—traditional avenues like radio and print among them—but it’s time to run a different play to invite people to attend your next big thing: social media.

Now, it’s incredibly likely that you’re already planning to use your owned channels to make people aware that you’ve got something coming up—a game, a festival, a traveling exhibit. And you should absolutely do that, as you’ve worked hard to develop an audience on those channels that is vested in what you’re up to at all times. But one avenue you may not be taking full advantage of is enlisting the support of your key stakeholders or other relevant and influential people inside (and sometimes outside) of your network. We’re talking about athletes on social, of course.

Let’s say you’re a brand and you’re looking at potentially paying an athlete to get the word out on social about your upcoming event. How should you decide which athlete would be a good fit for this type of campaign? Start by thinking about the level of appeal for the event: will this draw a crowd locally, or will fans be flying in from around the country to join you? If your event has national appeal, you may want to consider going the “big name” route. All-Pros and All-Stars tend to have a fairly diverse geographic audience, and thus can spread your message far and wide.