It was once unthinkable for social media stars to reach out to hotels and offer their services in exchange for free stays. The tourism industry’s influencers and businesses have developed increasingly positive relationships to the point where it is standard practice for both parties to propose working together. Collaborating with travel content creators is a fantastic way to promote your brand if your business is in the tourism industry. Bloggers who write about their travels can be a valuable source of inspiration, first-hand accounts, and low-priced advertising. Read on to discover why brands should team up with bloggers travelling the world.
You’ve decided to promote your business by teaming up with a travel blogger. Great! Working with bloggers who write about your destination can help spread the word about your brand. Partnering with famous and influential Travel content creators can help you reach a broader audience and raise your company’s profile.
Why Should Travel Agencies Collaborate with Influencers?
Hotels and tourism industry brands have taken the initiative to implement such marketing strategies after witnessing results far surpassing their expectations. They no longer wait for influencers to approach them with proposals but actively seek out profiles with which to collaborate and set up marketing strategies to grow their business.
As such, we are very particular about every detail of our trips. While there are always those who prefer to wing it, most of us considering a vacation do quite a bit of research online first.
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People now believe what they read on blogs
It’s no secret that the internet’s blogging community is a go-to for reliable news and analysis. Research from MuseFind data shows that 92 per cent of consumers place more faith in an influencer’s opinion than in an advertisement or a conventional celebrity endorsement.
Travel bloggers have earned their readers’ trust by sharing genuine experiences through their writing, videos, photos, and social media posts. It’s almost as good as hearing it from a friend if a blogger recommends something.
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The most influential people in the travel industry don’t promote anything; instead, they reveal what they’ve learned from their trips.
Consumers rarely believe in marketing efforts because they know the end goal is to increase sales and tend to distrust brands. However, this service is much more organically provided by travel influencers. Like they’re chatting with an old pal, they dish on the details of their stay, including how they felt about the service, the amenities, and the food.
To effectively promote a product or service, brands should work with influencers because they are the only ones who genuinely understand the tastes of their target audience. The following are some considerations for brands when working with influencers:
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Use visual mediums to connect with millennials
The whole point of travelling is to experience something new and different that is visually appealing. Storytelling through striking visual content is well-suited to capturing the allure, emotion, and first-hand travel experiences.
According to Drew Binsky of The Hungry Party, a popular travel blog, Instagram and Snapchat are the two most important social channels for travel brands. It’s all about giving tourists a platform to share their own stories in their own words, be it through Instagram photos or Snapchat videos that are captured in real-time and not filtered in any way. Drew’s millennial-aged Snapchat followers enjoy seeing him travel worldwide through his eyes. His pictures motivate them to see the world. Already the third most popular #3 social app among millennials, Drew claims that Snapchat “in the next three years, [it] will become the single most important marketing tool for the travel industry.”
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Blog posts well-received by their readers can do wonders for a company’
Top-tier blogs understand how to achieve high search engine rankings for various keywords. This means that not only will your sponsored post appear in search results for terms for which you don’t already rank, but it will also appear in branded search results, thereby increasing positive brand visibility.
Before making a final purchase decision, consumers often consult a wide variety of resources. When searching for a product, a consumer’s confidence in making a purchase is bolstered when they find positive reviews of that product written by various bloggers.
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Gain access to exclusive articles, images, and videos
Bloggers frequently inject their unique perspectives and experiences into their writing. You can benefit from everything that makes travel blogging so competitive.
Their fresh outlook, photos, and videos can give your brand a new dimension. If you give a blogger complete creative control over an ad campaign, they will do a fantastic job connecting with their readers and generating sales.
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Your Marketing Authenticity
In the travel industry, in particular, peer-created online content has been shown to have a trustworthiness of 92% of customers trust online content created by peers above all other forms of advertising. Nowadays, rather than relying on traditional advertising, millennials look to their favourite bloggers, Instagrammers, vloggers, and YouTubers for ideas on where to go on their next vacation.
When you consider that a consumer’s trust in an influencer’s opinion on a product or service is higher than that of a celebrity, it’s easy to see why so many tourism businesses are teaming up with influencers to promote their destinations and boost sales.
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Boost Reservations
When making travel plans, people often take the advice of trusted travel influencers, so they need to recommend hotels they’ve enjoyed. That’s why working with famous travellers is an excellent idea to boost your hotel’s bookings.
Providing discounts on hotel stays is a straightforward approach to attracting more bookings for your establishment. When influential people write about their holidays or write reviews of your hotel on social media, you get free advertising.
To take things to the next level, you can offer discount codes to famous travel bloggers so that they, in turn, can promote your business to their readers. Increased bookings are possible due to your increased exposure to a broad audience of potential customers who share a passion for travel.
Travel influencers can boost your website’s visibility and the number of reservations it receives by linking to it in their social media posts. When writing about a hotel, it’s always preferable to include a link directly to the property’s booking page.
Closing Remarks
Establishing campaign objectives and choosing the ideal influencers are the first steps in any marketing campaign, and this is also true when working with travel influencers. The subsequent steps are to define the campaign’s actions, develop content, connect with relevant travel influencers, implement a plan, and evaluate its success. In conclusion, the use of “travel influencers” in marketing campaigns has gone from being an unusual idea to one that has helped many brands achieve great success and become the norm.
Are you interested in starting a tourism influencer marketing campaign? Reach out to Influencer.
