The SADC Pontiac hosted a workshop Thursday afternoon entitled Preparing to Work with an influencer at the Brauwerk Hoffman Brewery, which sought to prepare local businesses to find, work with and manage relationships with social media influencers while marketing their businesses.

The workshop was run by Dee Brun, a freelance digital content creator from Southern Ontario and former marketer for Coca Cola.

Brun left the marketing world to start being involved in the influencing business, doing TV and making cocktails online. She became an early adopter of social media, which allowed her to . . .

see its dynamics from both the perspective of a business and user.

Brun’s talk covered a variety of topics about how businesses in tourism and adjacent industries could use social media influencers to attract people to them. Key points of the presentation included:

• What are “Influencers”?;

• Why would you want to collaborate with them

• How to Find Relevant Influencers

• Logistics of Influencer

• Tools for measurement and planning

More specifically the talk covered how to manage influencers, including an interesting segment on when businesses had hired the wrong influencer who did more harm than good, and how to avoid that.

One way to do that was to keep it local.

“I think there’s enough in the Pontiac region that is exciting to bring people from other places and local influencers who basically are like the boots on the ground. They go to these places, they eat at these places, they post pictures of these places,” said Brun. “So why not use them to promote your business?”

She also talked about the benefits of using social media to its maximum potential, with tips such as setting up an area in your business where people can pose for Instagram shots and creating a Tik Tok account.

During the conversation with business owners at the talk, Brun talked about how potentially attractive the Pontiac is to people who are from the Greater Toronto Area due to the over saturation of the cottage/ rural tourism industry in central Ontario and how the Pontiac is poised to take advantage of that market.

“As you’re going through you think maybe you’re gonna see a lot of fishing motels, a lot of ski-doo motels and basically that’s it but there’s so much more here,” said Brun about her initial impression of the region. “There’s some great places to eat. There’s amazing businesses, so many makers making their own things.”

Brun said in an interview after the talk that the audience was very receptive to the ideas presented and that they were really engaging with each other. Part of her presentation focused on the relationships between businesses in the area and how that could be leveraged to improve their collective potential.

“I don’t live here right,” said Brun. “I’ll give you all my information and you can contact me anytime and ask me any question, but I don’t live in the area. You guys do, so please use each other.”

Brun has relationships with several Pontiac businesses, Tourisme Outaouais, SADC Pontiac, MRC Pontiac and MAPAQ and can be found on Instagram as @onceadeeva.

Amy Taylor, business advisor at the SADC Pontiac, said that this was the first training session offered by the organization and to follow the group for similar workshops and presentations.

Overall Brun sees a lot of potential in the Pontiac for attracting visitors.

“I didn’t know that this area was as beautiful as it is,” concluded Brun. “I brought a friend today driving through and she couldn’t believe it. She thought it was gorgeous. I didn’t know all this was here, and you really do feel like you are stepping back in time.”

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