How can you turn a historical nonfiction book into an immersive, relevant and engaging experience for contemporary audiences?
You create a cultural moment.
Events created as part of an influencer campaign are the ideal setting to do this, as they combine experiential marketing, cultural storytelling and buzz-worthy BookTok marketing strategies to bring a book or product to life.
For our recent project with leading nonfiction book publisher Octopus Books to celebrate the Sunday Times bestselling How To Kill a Witch: A Guide for the Patriarchy by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi, we wanted to ensure our event made a cultural impact – immersing attendees and their audiences in the setting and themes of the book, and bringing the topic of the Scottish witch trials into sharp focus for new readers.
But how exactly do you do that?
From selecting your venue and strategically curating your guest list, to creating opportunities for attendees to meaningfully interact with the book’s themes, message and setting, consider the tips below to plan your own influencer event and drive authentic engagement within online communities.
How can your venue lean into experiential book marketing?
Your venue can do much of the strategic heavy lifting to bring a specific context – for instance, a topic, setting or time period – to life for new readers, particularly when thinking about historical nonfiction projects where the narratives can feel distant from modern readers. Consider how the event space and venue location can add visual storytelling to the experience, both for in-person attendees and online audiences seeking out the content.
For example, when working with the team at Octopus, we chose The Scottish Storytelling Centre as our venue, located in the heart of Edinburgh’s medieval Royal Mile. This iconic setting instantly immersed the event in the same local history found in the book, closely connecting attendees to the real women’s stories it shares, and allowed the invited creators to communicate a very specific time and place through their content to their followers – spotlighting wider Scottish culture and referencing a key part of its history.
How can you boost targeted online reach through your guest list?
Be intentional with your influencer outreach. When curating your partnerships for influencer marketing, consider which online communities you could reach. Which creators best intersect with your book or product when it comes to building new, engaged audiences in these groups? Be specific and intentional with your influencer list. Follower count isn’t everything for this approach. Focus on authentic voices within these niche groups, as they will be able to rally more interest and support from truly engaged fans, as opposed to casting the net more widely.
For How to Kill a Witch, aligned with our goal of marketing historic nonfiction to wider audiences in mind, we carefully cultivated and engaged a diverse group of creators to build a custom audience of overlapping communities – each with existing interests or passions that could easily map onto the book and its themes.
How can you create memorable, sharable moments for social media?
Provide interactive activities and visually-rich, filmable moments to allow creators to engage with your product beyond surface-level. For example, as well as planning for the key parts of the event, including an author talk, audience Q&A and meet and greet, we also created an activity checklist, bespoke goodie bags and branded event materials to spark curiosity, foster in-depth conversations and provide attendees a rich library of content for their posts.
Be mindful to provide both timetabled activities as well as ad hoc tasks to complete in between to help you minimise lulls and allow for a good mix of content opportunities.
How can you ensure influencer content that cuts through?
Provide clear follow-up actions for your invited creators. Circulate a creator guide to your influencer attendees, providing key information, ideas and inspiration for posts they could create and share with their audiences. This can give parameters for the content you’d like to see them create, as well as elements to focus on – for instance, raising awareness for the Witches of Scotland campaign and sharing takeaways from the event.
Also include accounts to tag, hashtags, links and suggested post formats. This approach can produce content that delves deeper and keeps audiences talking long after the event has taken place.
By creating a memorable, themed experience around How to Kill a Witch, creators could meaningfully interact with the themes and subject matter of the book, where the cultural and historical context could be felt and communicated to their online followers with knowledge, passion and enthusiasm. As a result, the book could become part of wider culture – vibrant, immersive and relevant to even more niche communities – instead of simply another piece of content.
Turning a nonfiction title into a cultural moment calls for a strategic approach that expertly maps its themes onto the right communities. If you’re ready to build a campaign that inspires curiosity and earns attention with integrity, let’s talk. We partner with mission-driven brands across publishing, education, culture and technology, delivering full-circle marketing that resonates with your audiences.