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DBC Is The Design Influencers Conference

The Design Bloggers Conference, often referred to by its familiar DBC acronym, launched as a digital content marketing conference for the design industry in Los Angeles in 2011.  The event was created so design bloggers, the main online design influencers at the time, could meet up to enhance their personal brand building skills while participating in unmatched offline networking.  If you ask me, or anyone that has been to any of the last four annual conferences, DBC has always been The Design Influencers Conference.  At Esteem Media, we are finally allowing our branding to catch up with the conference’s actual programming that has driven consistent year-over-year attendee and sponsor growth.

DBC The Design Influencers Conference

Influence is platform agnostic.  Design bloggers still continue to live at the heart of this phenomenon, regularly nurturing their businesses and brands with steady content creation.  Yet, digital platforms and off line strategies like Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, book publishing, YouTube, podcasts, licenses and lines, e-commerce, live events, email marketing, public speaking, online groups, and public relations have formed the arsenal that design professionals rely on to build influence and business results for themselves and other brands. Whether you are a home furnishings brand, manufacturer or a design professional looking for design influencers to support your business, or you aspire to leverage your influence on behalf of other brands, DBC has become the place to connect, discover, and learn.

Interior Design Influencers and Brands

Why are Design Influencers So Important Now?

Influencer marketing has taken center stage for marketers over the past couple of years in the Home Design industry and elsewhere.  Influencer marketing is not new by any stretch of the imagination.  But with the vast connection platforms and content tools now available to anyone with expertise and a point of view, it has just become more relevant and accessible.  No longer does it require big time celebrities now that “niche celebrities” with eager online followers have as much, if not more, influence in their specialty fields.  Hire Influence, one of the leading Influencer Marketing Agencies sums this all up nicely:

Influencers are those people who have a significant impact on the opinions and actions of other people. An influencer can be a regular person, a journalist or reporter, an expert in a field, or someone with celebrity status. In marketing, an influencer is a person who’s connected to a key role – typically the promotion of a product or business – through a community, a social media outlet, a consumer group, or an industry or organization. By offering praise for a brand, an influencer fulfills their role by encouraging consumers to buy the brand. Influencers are responsible for introducing new customers to the brand, sharing brand content, offering brand testimonial, writing reviews or sharing ratings, creating content about the brand, telling stories about the brand, and interacting with other consumers about the brand. Because influencers are so important, many companies have put in place influencer programs.

During the last three years, DBC’s content extended beyond blogging to include every element of influencer marketing tactics and strategies. In 2011, 80% of DBC’s delegates were design bloggers. This year, while 80% of attendees continued as design influencers,  only 20% were primarily bloggers coming to connect and broaden their knowledge about content marketing and design influence. 60% of attendees were designers and every other kind of design professional influencers (architects, builders, landscape architects, artists, etc.) that use content in some way to build influence on and offline.  The rest of the record-breaking 450 delegates in 2018  were brands looking for design influencers, public relations and marketing professionals, and traditional media editors and publishers.

Design Influencers and Brands

Nine months from now on February 24-26 at the Grand Hyatt Buckhead in Atlanta, DBC will offer a kindred educational and networking experience (with a several powerful new surprises) that established and aspiring design influencers, brands, and design professionals have come to expect at previous conferences.  At Esteem Media we always prefer calling a spade a spade….so DBC is now officially The Design Influencers Conference. New moniker, same memorable experience.  Registration is now open, just click this link!