Social media influencers and influencing marketing are all the rage in the advertising world, but it’s a concept not just limited to fashion, new tech, or home-meal delivery services. Sports-themed restaurants and bars can also leverage influencer marketing to get in front of their target guests and local sports fans. All it takes is a little prep and research.

Ideally, operators should be looking for someone who is in the middle of this Venn diagram:

  • Sport/League/Team
  • Social media platform
  • Location
  • Fan demographic

This person should also understand how to take your brand/message and craft it in a way that speaks to their audience and makes you look amazing. But first, you need to find the right influencer and that starts with figuring out who and what you want.

Pick a Sport, League, and/or Team

3/4 view of sports fans in red cheering at a game.

What type of fan are you looking to get in front of? Are you interested in getting interest from any and all football fans? Do you want to narrow that down to a specific league, like the NFL, NCAA, or CFL? Or do you want to get super specific and market to fans of a specific team?

It’s important to know who you want to market to so you can pick the right influencer. You’ll more likely want an influencer who speaks to that specific audience and not a general sports personality.

Don’t forget other important demographic data. You’re essentially building a customer persona, but with a greater focus on your target sport, league or team(s). And this info will be useful when you start comparing the audience of various influencers.

This is also a great time to start building your own fan club if you don’t have one already. Fan clubs are a great way to get repeat visits from guests and turn one-offs into regulars. It’s also a great way of building community at your sports bar and turn your location into the place to watch the game.

Choose the Social Platform

Close up of a smart phone and a list of social media platforms

If all you can about is getting bodies through the door and into seats, you can forgo caring about which social media platform the influencer works on. If that’s the goal, whichever influencer has the largest following that meets your target audience and has a great engagement rate is good enough.

However, if you can get butts into seats and boost your own social following, that’s even better. That way, you’ll be able to continue to market and speak to these fans regularly without the need of an influencer. In this case, you’ll want to focus on finding an influencer that’s operates on the same platform as you do.

For example, if you put most of your own marketing efforts into Instagram, you’ll want to find a local influencer who is also on Instagram to push some eyes onto your account, as well as trying to get new guests to visit your location(s).

With that said, there’s nothing wrong with cross-promoting on multiple platforms, assuming you find the right influencer and have the budget for it. But if push comes to shove, choose the platform that’ll have the biggest impact on your business long-term as well as short-term.

Find a Local, Sports-centric Influencer

Local sports social media influencer filming at home with ring light.

Unless you’re running a nation-wide sports bar operation, you don’t need a national influencer. The amount they’d cost compared to your return on investment (ROI) just isn’t worth it. It’s far better to keep it the neighborhood and look for local social media influencers in your operational area. They’ll have fewer followers than national influencers, but they’ll have far more targeted followers for you to impress.

Depending on your campaign’s goals, a generic social media influencer might be all that you need. More likely than not, however, you’ll want to find a sports-centric influencer, someone who talks to sports fans regularly and, more specifically, the sports fans you want to get in front of.

How do you find one? Two main ways:

Ask your current guests. If you’re trying to attract similar guests to your bar, why not ask them who they follow on social media? Find out what blogs and personalities do they really enjoy and on what platforms.

Search hashtags. If your platform of choice uses hashtags, scroll though related ones and see what the top posts and accounts are. If your platform of choices doesn’t use hashtags, you should still be able to search for specific key terms to get similar results.

Next Steps

After coming up with a list of influencers you’re interested in, reach out to them in their preferred method. Ask them for stats on their total followers, reach, engagement rate, and link click throughs. If the influencer isn’t willing to show you that data, that’s a red flag and you probably shouldn’t work with them. Go through that data from each influencer to help figure out who would be the best fit. You’ll also want to take into account costs for tapping into their audience as well as their personality and marketing tone.

After choosing the influencer, work with them to craft your message to their audience. You may have something already in mind, but the influencer knows their audience best and should be able to help you refine your message to their followers. Tell them what your goals for the campaign are. A great campaign should fit seamlessly into the influencers regular content posting while still driving engagement to your brand.

After the influencer campaign is over, ask them for stats on the project, including, total reach, engagement, click-throughs (you may want to provide your own tracking link), and a summary of any comments related to the campaign. If they did multiple posts for you, getting this information broken down by post is also valuable. Analyze the data and overall performance, and analyze it’s ROI!