FEVO Guide: Working with Creators

Creators, influencers, and community advocates can be powerful partners for sports teams, venues, festivals, and live event organizations looking to reach new audiences and drive ticket sales. But finding the right partner is about more than choosing an account with the biggest follower count.

The most effective programs start with a clear understanding of who you want to reach, what you want them to accomplish, and what role you want them to play in your marketing strategy.

Influencers, Creators, and Community Activators: What's the Difference?

The terms influencer and creator are often used interchangeably, but there are important differences between the types of partners you can work with. For live event organizations, it can be helpful to think about three distinct groups: influencers, creators, and community influencers or activators.

Influencers: Drive Impressions

When you think of a traditional influencer, think of someone like Kim Kardashian. They have a large, established audience and can use their reach to put your event, brand, or Offer in front of a significant number of people.

Influencers can be particularly effective when your goal is awareness and impressions. They can introduce your event to a large audience and help generate visibility around a promotion, event, or brand.

Because their reach is often the primary value they provide, influencer partnerships typically function more like a paid media channel.

Creators: Create and Enhance Experiences

Creators bring a different value to the partnership. Think of someone like Dude Perfect. Rather than simply promoting a product or event to their audience, creators are skilled at developing content and experiences that their audience wants to engage with.

Creators can function as an extension of your content team or event marketing team. They can help showcase your event in a way that feels native to their content and can even help enhance the experience itself.

For example, a sports team could partner with a dance creator to showcase the energy and entertainment surrounding game day. A creator could build content around the team's dance team, in-game entertainment, or fan experience, helping potential buyers picture themselves as part of the event.

The key with creators is to establish clear objectives and talking points while giving them enough creative freedom to develop content in their own voice.

Community Influencers: Activate Local Audiences

Then there are community influencers, or activators. These are the people who are deeply ingrained in a local network and have built trust within a specific community.

Think of your local food vlogger who knows the best restaurants in town, the person everyone follows for what's happening in their city, or someone who has become a trusted source for recommendations within a particular community.

Their audience may be significantly smaller than that of a traditional influencer, but their local credibility and personal connections can make them especially effective at getting people to actually purchase.

For ticketing organizations, this distinction matters. A community influencer may not generate the biggest number of impressions, but they may have the right audience, the right relationships, and the right level of trust to turn awareness into action.

In simple terms:

• Influencers are great for generating impressions.
• Creators are great for creating or enhancing experiences.
• Community influencers are great for activating audiences and driving purchases.

The right partner depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

Start With the Audience You Want to Reach

Before identifying a creator, influencer, or community activator, identify the audience you want to reach.

Creators and influencers typically build audiences around specific interests, identities, communities, or lifestyles. The right partner should have a natural connection to the audience you're trying to reach.

For example, if you're hosting a heritage theme night, consider working with a creator or community influencer who represents and speaks authentically to that specific heritage.

The same thinking applies to interests and lifestyles.

Think beyond the most obvious ways someone might promote your event. If you work for a basketball team, your first instinct might be to partner with a sports creator. But there are plenty of other ways to connect your event to a creator's audience.

A fashion creator, for example, could showcase what to wear to a game and incorporate team merchandise into their content. A parenting creator could highlight the experience of bringing the family to a game, while a fitness creator could connect your event to their audience's interest in wellness and active lifestyles.

Look at the experience you're selling as a whole and consider which creators can naturally tell that story.

The closer the connection between the partner, their audience, and your event, the more authentic the partnership can feel.

How to Find the Right Community Influencers

Finding the right community influencer doesn't necessarily require an expensive influencer database or a large-scale search.

Start where your audience already spends time.

Go to Instagram and search for popular local businesses, attractions, experiences, and events. Look at who is creating content about those places. Are there local creators regularly featuring them? Are people collaborating with the business? Who is consistently getting tagged in posts?

You can also search relevant hashtags for your city, neighborhood, venue, or area of interest and see which accounts are consistently showing up.

For example, if you're looking for a creator who could help promote a family-friendly event, search for local parenting accounts, family-focused hashtags, and posts from popular family attractions in your market. Look for people who are already sharing recommendations and generating conversations with local audiences.

This approach can help uncover the people who are already acting as trusted connectors within your market.

Let Your Own Fan Data Help You Find Them

You can also use your existing FEVO data to identify potential community influencers.

When fans share and purchase through FEVO's Social Checkout™, you gain insight into how ticket purchases move through their networks. That data can help identify fans who are consistently getting other people to purchase tickets through their shares.

These fans may already be acting as community influencers without formally identifying themselves as creators or influencers.

Look for fans who are consistently driving activity through their networks. Then consider reaching out to those advocates about upcoming events, promotions, or opportunities to participate in your ambassador program.

Instead of trying to find your community influencers from scratch, you can use the behavior of your existing fan base to identify the people who are already influencing purchases.

Don't Let Follower Count Be Your Only Metric

Whether creators, influencers, or community activators are reaching out to you or you're proactively seeking them out, take time to evaluate the authenticity and engagement of their audience.

A large follower count can look impressive, but it doesn't necessarily translate into engagement or ticket sales.

Look at what happens after a creator posts.

On Instagram, for example, you can often see how many comments a post receives, as well as how many times it has been saved or sent. These signals can tell you much more about audience engagement than follower count alone.

An account with a large audience but very little engagement may not have the ability to move your sales needle.

On the other hand, a creator with a smaller following may have cultivated a highly engaged community. If their posts consistently generate comments, likes, saves, and shares, that can be a strong indicator that their audience trusts and interacts with their content.

For community influencers in particular, look closely at local relevance and audience trust. The person with 5,000 highly engaged local followers may be far more valuable to your ticket sales strategy than someone with 500,000 followers spread across the country.

Make the Partnership Easy to Execute

Once you've identified the right partners, the next challenge is making it simple for them to promote your events.

This is where FEVO can help.

With FEVO's Incentives feature, clients can create customized incentives designed to support their specific campaign goals and audience. Incentives can include discounts, Food & Beverage credits, merchandise, memorable event experiences, and commissions on tickets sold.

Commission can be structured as either a flat dollar amount or a percentage of tickets sold. For higher-priced tickets, a percentage-based commission can create an even more compelling opportunity for the creator or ambassador because their potential payout increases with the value of the tickets they sell.

Instead of simply asking someone to "promote tickets," you can give them a specific reason to promote your event and a tangible benefit for doing so.

Build a Turnkey Ambassador Program with FEVO

One strategy that can work particularly well is creating a single Group Landing Page with all of the games or events you want to sell through your creators, influencers, and community ambassadors.

The advantage of using one central page is that it doesn't have to become stale. You can continue adding new games and events as the season progresses, giving your ambassadors a destination they can keep coming back to instead of creating a new campaign or link for every event.

From there, you can provide your partners with custom, trackable links they can share with their audiences.

You can also build an incentive structure that benefits both sides of the partnership. For example, you could offer a creator's network 10% off tickets while providing the creator with a 10% commission for every ticket sold through their unique link.

Another strategy is to use access to inventory as an incentive.

If you have premium tickets that were previously held but can now be released to the public, consider giving a specific influencer or ambassador exclusive access to those tickets through their link. It can make the tickets feel like a special opportunity available through that influencer without requiring your organization to promote the premium inventory broadly.

The audience gets access to something that feels exclusive, while the ambassador gets a compelling reason to share the Offer.

This type of structure can turn a one-time social post into an ongoing sales channel.

Give Creators Something Their Audience Will Value

Your creator strategy doesn't have to rely on discounting.

FEVO gives clients flexibility to build incentives around their goals and the type of audience they're trying to reach.

For example, you could create a discount that gives a creator's followers a specific percentage or dollar amount off tickets. Or you could give an ambassador the opportunity to earn a commission based on the tickets they sell.

But if discounting isn't right for your event or brand, consider adding value in another way.

Bundling is one option.

Imagine you're partnering with a dance creator. Rather than simply offering their audience a ticket discount, you could create an offer where purchases through the creator's custom link include a photo opportunity with the team's dance team.

Or, if you're working with a fashion creator, consider a merchandise bundle that pairs the ticket with team apparel or another piece of branded merchandise.

The goal is to create an incentive that makes sense for the creator and their audience. When the Offer naturally connects to the content they're already creating, it becomes part of the story rather than simply another promotional message.

Turn Creator Partnerships Into Measurable Campaigns

The strongest creator programs combine authenticity with accountability.

Creators bring the audience, voice, and content. Your organization brings the event experience and the Offer. FEVO helps connect the two through customizable incentives, Group Landing Pages, and trackable links.

Fan Incentives can also provide actionable data to help you understand what's working.

Through the FEVO Incentive Dashboard, you can track:

• Clicks and page views
• Influenced orders and revenue
• Top-performing advocates
• Overall program performance

Click and page views can help you understand the reach and interest generated by your influencers and creators, while influenced orders and revenue show how that activity translates into purchases.

This visibility allows you to optimize campaigns in real time, identify your top-performing partners, and double down on what's working.

A Simple Framework for Getting Started

Ready to start working with creators, influencers, or community activators? Keep it simple:

Define your goal and audience. Know who you're trying to reach and whether your priority is awareness, engagement, experience, or ticket sales.

Find the right partners. Look for audience alignment, engagement, authenticity, and local relevance rather than focusing solely on follower count.

Build an Offer that gives people a reason to act. Consider discounts, commissions, premium inventory, merchandise, experiences, or bundles.

Make it easy to share and measure. Use a Group Landing Page and custom trackable links, then use your data to understand which partners and offers are driving results.

Ready to Build Your Creator or Ambassador Program?

Contact the FEVO Onboarding, Training, and Enablement (OTE) Team at training@FEVO.com or reach out to your Success Rep to get started.