If you’re into the travel and tourism business and looking for ways to promote your brand, there’s a high chance you’ve come across the term “travel influencer marketing.”
Travel influencer marketing is highly effective for the travel and tourism business. Why? It helps brands easily reach their targeted audiences and build customer trust.
However, to this end, entrepreneurs need to follow a strategic marketing plan, which we’ve shared in this article.
We’ve also discussed the importance and benefits of travel influencer marketing.
Next, we have talked about how to choose the best influencer.
Finally, we’ll talk about how to run marketing campaigns.
Now, let’s get the ball rolling!
What is travel influencer marketing?
Before discussing what travel influencer marketing is, let’s talk about who travel influencers are. Travel influencers are people who create and share travel-related content in different formats. Such as videos, articles, blogs, social media posts, etc., on various platforms to influence others.
Travel influencers with loyal fan bases generate high-quality content about their trips, travel strategies, and dream destinations. Okay, now that you understand who travel influencers are. Let’s now imagine that you run a travel and tourism business. You want to promote your business, generate your dream revenue, and become a brand.
So, you contact some travel influencers with lots of followers. Then, you invite them to promote your business/products/services in exchange for money/gifts/services/ through their content.
Basically, you make a business deal with travel influencers. And that’s what travel influencer marketing is. Hence, you now have a clear picture of travel influencer marketing. But do you really need it? If you do, how beneficial can it be for your business? Let’s figure that out.
Benefits of travel influencer marketing – should you partner with influencers?
There are many benefits to investing in travel influencer marketing. Here are some of the most significant ones you need to know.
1. Build authenticity and trust
You can build authenticity and trust among your potential consumers by putting your brand in front of travelers with the help of travel influencer marketing. You know travelers seek genuine experiences, and travel influencers offer people just those. They specifically give people a glimpse into their destinations.
Travel influencers tell relatable stories and give recommendations that deeply inspire others. So, traditional travelers trust influencers and follow them. If your business can reach those people through influencers, you’ll gain a loyal customer base.
2. Increased exposure and visibility
Reaching the right people can significantly benefit any business. You can reach a large group of targeted people through influencers. Additionally, you can increase your overall revenue and number of customers if you identify the correct travel influencers and invite them to promote your business.
For example, you can work with influencers who create content for adventure seekers, luxury enthusiasts or budget travelers if you want to target specific cohorts.
3. Reach out to new audiences
You can reach out to new audiences and convert them into paying customers with travel influencer marketing. Again, travel influencers have warm audiences who constantly remain active with influencers’ content. So you can easily reach out to those people. Also, you can efficiently increase your brand awareness through travel influencer marketing.
4. Marketing gets cost-effective
Traditional marketing can require you to spend a lot of money to reach your targeted customers. Luckily, this won’t happen when you try out influencer marketing. You’ll spend comparatively less money.
Yet, you’ll get a significant ROI ( Return on investment) from your marketing budget. So, this is another remarkable benefit you’ll get after engaging in travel influencer marketing.
5. Get measurable results
As we’ve already told you, you’ll get better ROI if you choose the correct travel influencers to get your business going. Besides, you can track your progress and measure the impact of influencer marketing campaigns. You can do that with the help of social media analytics.
All in all, you get insights into your marketing effectiveness. These are all the major benefits you’ll experience with travel influencer marketing. Let’s now discuss these influencer types and how you can collaborate with them in the following sections.
Types of influencers for the travel and tourism business
Below, you can see a list of detailed information on different travel influencers.
1. Travel bloggers
Travel bloggers are famous for sharing their authentic travel experiences. Most of their followers trust what they share and follow in travel bloggers’ footsteps. So, by collaborating with them, you can reap the benefits of a unique marketing strategy.
2. Social media influencers
These influencers utilize social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. They share lucrative travel-related content to attract and influence other like-minded people.
3. Lifestyle influencers
Lifestyle influencers are a kind of travel influencer. But their contents don’t revolve around traveling only. Instead, they create content featuring different topics such as fashion, food, and travel.
4. Micro-influencers
Micro-influencers have a small yet highly engaged following on their social media profiles. They can benefit you if you want to target a small and particular group of people and run marketing campaigns.
5. Celebrity influencers
Unlike micro-influencers, celebrity influencers possess a large following. They can give your travel business a broad reach and exposure. But before working with them, remember that their recommendations may not always resonate authentically with your expected travel audiences.
Hence, these are all the different types of travel influencers. Next, we’ll explore how you can collaborate with them to grow your business.
How to collaborate with travel influencers to grow your business
Here are a number of important factors to consider while collaborating with travel influencers.
Choose the best travel influencers.
Choosing the best travel influencers is crucial to grow your business. Here are a few factors to pay attention to while selecting influencers.
Followers: First, you need to check how many followers the potential influencers possess. Some travel influencers can have a million followers. And you need to figure out if those followers are real.
To do this, you can check out those influencers’ post engagement. See how many people like and comment on their posts. We highly recommend you visit a few of the followers’ profiles to check whether they are real persons or bots.
After checking all these, you can inspect the next factor to pick one or more influencers to promote your business.
Values and Fit: Now that you’ve come across a few travel influencers with significant followers. It’s time to narrow them down to find the right fit for you.
If you want to promote your travel business, you need to select influencers who have many active followers and constantly post travel-related content.
After selecting one or more influencers, try to build a relationship with them before jumping into any business deal. You can do this by engaging and commenting on the posts of those travel influencers. Doing this can significantly favor you during negotiation.
Set a budget
After finalizing the selection of travel influencers, you need to set your marketing budget. How much you’ll spend on marketing depends on various factors.
For example, first, you need to consider your chosen travel influencers’ number of followers and engagement rate. If their followers range between 0 and 1,000, you can set a low marketing budget for them.
On the contrary, you can set a comparatively high marketing budget for influencers whose followers dwell between 1,000 and 50,000. While determining the marketing cost, you need to consider travel influencers’ social media platforms as well.
Just to let you know, Facebook influencers with 1,000 followers charge anywhere from $15 to $25, while Instagram ones are reasonable at $10. You can find more on this topic here.
Their price can increase or decrease depending on the post type you want them to make. Indeed, the price for a post with a single image will differ from that for a video post. So, consider all these factors while setting your marketing budget. Knowing how much you can afford can help ease your travel influencers hunting.
Plan your campaign
Once you’ve chosen travel influencers according to your marketing budget, it’s time to plan your campaign. Here are the best practices to follow to set up different campaign types for your travel business.
Sponsored posts
Sponsored posts are ideal for your business if you want to create brand awareness and customer acquisition. You’ll pay travel influencers to create content featuring your brand and share it on their posts. Besides, you can invite them to try your products or services for free.
It’ll give those influencers the necessary insight into your products/services. And it’ll help them openly speak about your brand. Furthermore, you’ll have high-quality content that you can repost over time.
Long-term collaboration
Image credit: Freepik
You can arrange a one-time or long-term collaboration with your chosen travel influencers if you have no budget constraints. You can offer discounts on your products or services and invite influencers to feature your products/services in their stories or posts more than once.
You can have those influencers follow a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule to post the pre-set number of posts for a specific time. This kind of collaboration can help you boost your sales and build a long-term relationship with your targeted audience.
Review
The review option is comparatively cheaper than other campaigns mentioned above. You need to get travel influencers to try and experience your products or services if you plan to go with the review campaign.
Once they get familiar with your services or products, you can tell them to share their impressions online with the audience.
The only drawback of this option is that influencers can give positive or negative reviews about your products or services. Therefore, you need to be cautious with this marketing campaign.
Giveaway
Giveaway is one of the best marketing campaigns if you want to reach a broad audience, keep them engaged, and convert them into paying customers.
You can collaborate with travel influencers and give them your products. Then, tell them to arrange contests where they’ll give away your products to randomly selected audiences. You can set specific criteria to do so.
For example, tell travel influencers to get their audiences to follow your brand, comment on a specific post on your page, share your post using brand hashtags, etc. This way, you can increase the number of followers for your business, reach a broad audience, and eventually build a brand.
These are the ways you can follow to plan your campaign.
Host an exceptional travel influencer experience
Hosting a memorable travel influencer experience can be costly, but it’s undoubtedly worth the money.
Imagine you arrange a familiarization trip where you bring many travel influencers together at once. Then, you tell all influencers to create and share content about their free trips. This way, you can create a lot of buzz quickly.
This marketing strategy will help you boost your business and make many people aware of your business.
Bonus tips on travel influencer marketing best practices
Alongside the marketing strategies mentioned above, you can follow these bonus tips for the best result.
Set clear goals
Setting clear goals should always be the first fact you need to consider before starting any marketing campaign. If you want to leverage many influencers and increase sales, that’s great! But remember to implement the SMART formula for the best outcome.
If you need to learn the SMART formula, here you go.
- S = Specific
- M = Measurable
- A = Attainable
- R = Relevant
- T = Time-bound
As you can see, your goals need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
For example, you can set a goal of gaining 20,000 new Instagram followers by the end of the quarter, taking help from an influencer. Additionally, you can drive 20% more website traffic and increase sales by 15% next quarter.
Pay attention to authenticity.
Authenticity matters a lot when you want to build customer trust. You know customers can detect fake endorsements. The worst part is – when they do, you’ll lose them for good.
Hence, before picking any travel influencers, ensure they are authentic. Such influencers foster meaningful conversations and help your business effectively resonate with your target audience.
If you partner with authentic influencers, you can build customer trust, drive high engagement and conversions, and build long-term loyalty.
Build long-term relationships
Image credit: Freepik
Many business owners make a mistake by going with influencers on one-off partnerships. While this kind of partnership has value in some cases, these won’t drive a high ROI in the long run.
Therefore, build long-term relationships with influencers if you want to build a sustainable business that generates high revenue for a prolonged period. Building long-term relationships has many advantages, some of which are as follows:
Credibility: Influencers can make more genuine, credible endorsements to the audience. When influencers become more familiar with your business, products, and services.
Consistency: You can reinforce your brand’s message and image by working with the same travel influencers for an extended period.
Deeper insights into the audience: Long-term relationships can help you gain a deeper insight into your target audience. As influencers interact with their followers and give reliable feedback, you can dive deeper into your audience’s mind.
Brand advocacy: Travel influencers will become advocates for your business if you maintain a long-term relationship and appreciate their work.
Long-term growth: As you know, travel influencers’ followers grow and evolve. You can expand your brand’s presence by building a long-term relationship with such influencers.
FAQs
What is the most important influencer marketing?
Instagram is the most popular platform for influencer marketing. According to the HubSpot survey, around 72% of marketers use this platform to run influencer marketing campaigns.
How do you approach travel influencers?
First, set clear objectives or goals. Then, create a collaboration strategy. After that, develop creative promotional tactics. Lastly, set your campaign budget and hunt down the best travel influencers to work with.
Final words
If you run a travel business and want to enhance your brand visibility, travel influencer marketing can immensely benefit you. You can reach your target audience, drive more traffic to your business, increase sales, and generate your dream revenue at a low cost!
You can get all these just by collaborating with travel influencers. Hence, take advantage of influencer marketing and see ultimate success in your tour business. However, adhere to all the strategies you’ve read in this content before planning to go with travel influencer marketing.
