The right influencer is the key to campaign effectiveness. Not every travel influencer is alike. In reality, they are all different in their approach, personality, creative style, and audience. Your success relies on your ability to find the right travel influencer for your brand.
Getting this wrong can be incredibly time-consuming and costly. In this article, we’ll share some common mistakes when choosing influencers for travel brands, and then talk through a step-by-step process for finding the right travel influencer for your next campaign.
Common Mistakes With Travel Influencer Marketing
These mistakes are very common, especially for brands new to influencer marketing. Let’s get this out of the way so we can move on to practical advice to ensure you don’t make these critical errors.
- Using the same influencers as competing markets. It may be tempting to simply find influencers who have already done what you need them to do, but this leads to overreliance on a few well-known people, reduces your overall reach, and limits your campaign success. Resist this urge—which really is just the easy way out—and instead, take the time to search and vet to find the best influencers to meet your needs.
- Using lifestyle influencers who don’t know how to convey the best parts of your destination. Lifestyle influencers may occasionally share their travels, but their focus is more broadly on their life, hobbies, family, and passions. These influencers have a diverse audience, which can be limiting in terms of engagement. Travel influencers, on the other hand, built an audience specifically around traveling and know how to create content that showcases the experience. Their audience is known to be interested in travel.
If you’re looking to raise awareness with a new and diverse audience, lifestyle influencers may be a good fit. But if you’re looking to drive bookings or encourage action from motivated potential customers, look to travel influencers. You need to know the difference between these two types of influencers and choose based on your goals.
- Using one-off influencers who are never going to mention your destination again. Instead, create long-term relationships with brand ambassadors. Social media is fleeting; that post that took time and money has a short lifespan (even shorter if it’s primarily done through Stories). One individual post may be successful—depending on the influencer and the power of their audience—but generally, you’ll need to create campaigns with more deliverables and longer timelines. Brand ambassadors allow for that longer play, plus they’ll continue to talk about you over time. People often need to see or hear messages several times before they will take action.
- Using influencers who don’t have real followers, or the right audience for your brand. Audience fit is one of the primary categories when you’re vetting influencers. They have to be the right people to purchase from you, based on demographics, psychographics, and finances. If they aren’t your ideal target audience, the campaign has little chance for success.
When you’re assessing influencer followers, you also have to look for quality and level of engagement. Quality means that the followers are real people; they are who they say they are. This means that they aren’t bots or fake followers, and they weren’t purchased by the influencer. Both of these scenarios are dangerous because it may look like an influencer has a huge following, but if those followers aren’t real, you’ll be overspending on your campaign and won’t see the impact you expect.
Engagement is all about how active those followers are, and how engaged they are with the influencer. Having a big following is great, but if those people never engage—which either means they aren’t seeing the content or they don’t care about it—your campaigns won’t work.
- Using influencers based on follower counts only. This is a big one; we tend to see a large follower count and immediately assume that that influencer has influence. Or see what appears to be a successful influencer (i.e. they do many sponsored posts), and assume that means they’re great at it. But if you make a snap judgment about an influencer based on followers alone, you won’t ask enough questions. Every influencer must be vetted to the same degree to ensure you’re finding the right person for the job.
Related, many brands fall into the trap of thinking celebrities are the best influencers because of their fame. But in reality, celebrity or macro influencers often aren’t right for campaigns because their audiences are too varied and diverse. They aren’t travel experts, and they won’t be long-term brand ambassadors. You’ll also overspend on campaigns that don’t see results.
How to Find the Right Travel Influencers
Now that you understand where most brands get it wrong, let’s walk through our proven process for finding the best travel influencers.
Define Your Campaign Goals
Every great marketing campaign starts with goals and objectives. For influencer initiatives, your goals might be increasing website traffic, growing your social media following, or driving bookings.
Part of this process also includes campaign planning. Who is your target audience, based on your project and goals? Does this campaign lend itself more to one social media platform over the others? What is your budget? And how would you like to see this campaign play out, over what timelines?
Once you have a clear sense of what you’re doing and why, you can start looking at individual influencers.
Create a Short List of Diverse Influencers
At this stage, all you’re doing is creating a list of influencers who may be a fit. You’re not yet vetting or assessing these people, you’re just identifying prospects.
So where do you find these people?
Start with influencers you’ve worked with in the past, or those you’ve noticed but haven’t yet worked with. Then take the search broader, using hashtags to search on social media channels. Also, use search engines and find influencers who already have content related to your topic or brand. If they’ve partnered with—or posted about—related themes or brands, they already have familiarity with your value proposition, which may also signal an appropriate audience for your offering. (Remember the mistake above about relying too much on this, but it is a helpful starting point!)
You can also find influencers by attending industry events, reading industry publications, or otherwise just being active in the community. Many influencers take their jobs seriously and will make a point to participate in industry happenings.
Finally, you can look to agencies or platforms to help you find great influencers. There are many of such services, including marketplaces where influencers can create profiles to be found by brands. Again, these types of platforms help find new influencers, especially those who aren’t as famous but may still have loyal, engaged followers, like micro influencers or people in very specific niches.
As you’re building this short list, don’t get lazy. It’s easy to find a few big names, but it’s worth the effort to dive deeper to find new, upcoming, and untapped influencers who could lead to incredible outcomes for your campaign. Brands with the best influencer programs aren’t just skimming the surface here. Also, be sure to prioritize diversity in your influencers. Notice if your shortlist is looking a bit too homogenous and make an effort to include influencers of all types to accurately represent real life and your brand values.
Now that you have a list, it’s time to critically analyze each and every influencer.
Vet Your Potential Influencers
Vetting your potential influencers includes using data, but also incorporating a human element.
First, explore the content on their pages. This includes all social media accounts, website, blog, YouTube, etc. You’re looking at their content, what they post, the quality of their images, and their tone or personality. Would they be a good representative for your brand? Does their content align with what you’re envisioning for the campaign?
If the content aligns, dig deeper into their audience. How many followers do they have on each channel? Do those followers engage with their content and in what way? Does it appear that there are relationships or is it one-way communication? Does the audience fit your campaign goals? Are they the type of people who would engage with your brand or book with you?
Then, flush out the fakes. If you thoroughly analyzed the influencer’s content and audience, you probably have an idea of who is legit and who bought their followers, but take the time to put a dedicated eye on it. The easiest way to identify fake followers is through their profiles. You’re looking for profile photos, a bio, photos in their feed, and that these followers have followers of their own.
You can also use software tools to help with this. Some allow you to identify odd follower spikes, which could have occurred naturally, through media coverage, for example, or could signal that they bought followers.
Develop Personal Relationships With Your Influencers
Going through the vetting process will eliminate many of the influencers on your shortlist, but at this point, you may still have several folks on that list. Now is when you take the time to meet them, and start to cultivate actual personal relationships.
Your influencer partners are an extension of your marketing team. They shouldn’t just be one-and-done, but instead, you want them to be ambassadors for your brand. To achieve this, you need to understand who they are as people, what motivates them, how they got started, their long-term goals, etc.
Don’t skimp on this step; you’ll learn a ton by meeting everyone still on your list, and you’ll be confident in your choice. You’ll also hash out details like workflows, processes, expectations, and rates, all of which are vital when executing your campaign.
You obviously won’t hire everyone on your shortlist for this campaign, but the idea with this step is two-fold:
- Remove the wrong influencers and save time by getting these people off any future shortlists.
- Develop future shortlists. The influencers who seem great, but aren’t quite right for this campaign can be a starting point for the shortlist with future campaigns, saving you time.
Going through this process isn’t just for this one campaign; it’s an investment into your entire program.
Formalize Your Partnerships
Ok, now that you’ve chosen your influencer partner and have discussed the campaign goals, creative inspiration, and timelines, it’s time to make it official.
It may be tempting to send an email to align on specifics and go from there, but being formal about your engagements is crucial. These types of contracts are designed to protect both sides and spell out expectations so there are no unanswered questions.
Every campaign should have its own partnership agreement, documenting the goals, terms, timelines, deliverables, payment schedules, and division of responsibilities.
Get Help From Travel Influencer Experts
Finding the right travel influencer is time-consuming, complicated, and expensive, but when done well, it’s entirely worth it. Influencer marketing can be an incredibly high ROI tactic.
If you believe in the power of influencers and want to take your travel brand to the next level, we can help. Steller helps travel and tourism brands find and hire influencers, develop effective and successful campaigns, and build world-class influencer marketing programs.
