Top 10 Tips For Hiring Travel Influencers
The world of digital marketing is always changing, and travel brands are catching on to a big trend: working with influencers. Today, if you want to grab the attention of travelers, partnering with the right travel influencers is key.
These influencers can do more than just show off beautiful destinations, they connect with audiences personally and make travel feel accessible and exciting.
Coming up, we’ll share our top 10 tips for hiring and working with travel influencers. With years of expertise in the travel sector, we’re here to provide you with straightforward, effective strategies that make an impact.
These tips will help you choose the right influencers and work with them in a way that benefits everyone—especially your audience. Get ready to enhance your approach and make your next influencer marketing campaign a hit.
Why Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing has more than proven its effectiveness and has drawn the attention of countless brands and businesses. Considering every dollar spent on an influencer marketing campaign earns $5.79, it’s easy to see why brands are eager to try influencer marketing.
Some other reasons to make influencers part of your marketing strategy:
- The influencer marketing industry is worth $21.1 billion & expected to grow
- Influencer marketing is more profitable than print marketing
- 86% of women consult social media for purchasing advice
With all of this in mind, hiring an influencer becomes an essential part of any marketing strategy—as is learning how to navigate the process.
10 Tips for Hiring & Working with Travel Influencers
Despite growing popularity, it can still be difficult to learn how to hire the right influencer as you work to build a successful long-term partnership. There’s no standardized process to follow, nor is there a direct method to hire influencers through social media platforms.
You need to begin by learning how to hire an influencer to experience the impressive results that have made influencer marketing so popular.
Let's discuss ten tips for hiring and working with travel influencers to help you put together an influencer marketing strategy that increases brand awareness, audience engagement, traffic, and conversions.
1. Create An Approximate Budget To Hire Influencers
How much does your brand want to invest in influencer marketing? You’ll need to begin by creating an approximate budget for this specific influencer campaign. Like other forms of digital marketing, it's important to set a budget. This lets you gauge campaign performance and determine your ROI. It also provides a foundation to build upon.
Your budget also determines the level of influencer that you can reasonably approach. Influencers with millions of followers and high engagement metrics usually come at a higher price point. When working with professional content creators, you should anticipate content fees, as well as the in-destination costs of hosting the creator.
However, you can hire social media influencers with smaller accounts, known as micro-influencers. They can be more affordable and still deliver excellent results—especially if you are looking for a niche audience or a specific geographic following.
2. Understand Your Target Audience
You need to understand the exact audience you’d like to reach with your sponsored content. Start by thinking about the audience you hope to reach, and this will give you the insight needed to find your target influencer.
Note: There’s a difference between target audience and niche, but they do work together. Identifying your target audience considers your product’s consumers, including their age, location, interests, and income. The more specific you can be about your target audience, the more effective your experience with influencer marketing will be.
Keep in mind that the influencer is not responsible for helping you discover your target audience or even catering to your specific audience.
3. Pick One Influencer Platform To Focus On
Brands with experience running influencer marketing campaigns can certainly focus on more than one influencer marketing platform. However, those new to influencer marketing should pick a single social media platform for all influencer campaigns.
Keep in mind every industry has a dominant social media platform. Industries that lend themselves to engaging images, such as travel and fashion, do well on Instagram. However, more technical and data-driven industries, such as cryptocurrency and cybersecurity, are more dominant on X formerly known as Twitter.
Understanding how to hire an Instagram influencer will be slightly different from hiring a Twitter influencer. Picking your influencer marketing channel should be done early on in your journey to finding an influencer. Also, ensuring your brand has a social presence on the platform you intend to promote on is vital. We can’t stress this enough.
Owning your brand’s handle gives the influencer a place to direct traffic and encourages consumers to follow you to learn more about your brand journey, products, and sales.
4. Identify the Influencer’s Reach
Reach is defined as the number of people who see the content an influencer creates. So, don’t hyperfocus on a high follower count since high engagement is often far more valuable than the follower count.
Many businesses have hired social influencers with large followings only to discover that the followers are not engaged in the content. This results in the specific campaign failing to reach a positive ROI.
Followers, views, comments, subscribers—they can all be bought. Any type of social metric you can see on the front end is not an accurate representation of how engaged the audience is. Engagement is where you’ll make sales or enhance your brand’s image.
Before hiring an influencer for a campaign, be sure to review their back-end analytics to see the full scope of their account metrics and audience. If you aren’t using a proprietary tool, you can request these insights from the influencer you hope to collaborate with.
5. Prioritize Influencers with High Engagement
Engagement is a measure of how much the influencer’s audience interacts with a social media post. Liking and commenting is how people engage on Instagram, with the addition of retweets on Twitter, and views on Youtube and TikTok.
You want an engaged audience. However, it can be extremely difficult to understand an influencer’s engagement rate.
There are a variety of influencer marketing tools out there that can help evaluate accounts in various ways to understand how engaged the audience is. Some of these tools are paid, but they’re worth investing in if you plan on regularly hiring Instagram influencers.
Another benefit of working with an Influencer agency is they usually subscribe to a variety of tools they can access on your behalf during your campaign.
6. Consider Potential for Improving Brand Lift
Brand lift is a term that describes the overall public opinion of your brand. It can be difficult to measure and analyze, and you don’t necessarily need to worry about doing that, but you should understand that working with influencers may benefit your brand’s image.
Improving brand lift is typically only a meaningful benefit when working with influencers with big followings in your industry. They need to be a respected authority to impact your brand’s image. Having your competition and business partners see your sponsored post will certainly improve brand lift.
Learn more about what influencer marketing can do for your brand.
7. Research the Influencer’s Reputation
It’s not uncommon for a social media personality to do something controversial. This controversy can often harm brands that have worked with the influencer.
If your business wants to get into the influencer space, avoid relationships with influencers that might become a public problem for your company.
You can determine if they’ll be an issue by researching their reputation. A simple search with their name and username will likely reveal everything you need to know. Here are a few things to look for:
- Have they already had a major controversy?
- Are they public about their political opinions?
- Does their account display content that would conflict with your brand messaging or image?
- Do they support or oppose any social movements that could negatively reflect your brands?
Fully understand the influencer’s entire online presence before working with them. You don’t want to work with the wrong person and have it impact your business.
8. Get a Feel For the Influencer’s Voice
Ideally, the influencer’s voice will match the general voice of your brand. You want the message you’re passing through the influencer’s posts to resonate with their audience similarly to their organic posts.
Aligning your brand’s voice with the right influencer will make the marketing message more powerful and positively impact your campaign goals. It will make the paid message appear organic and will connect more with the influencer’s audience, potentially converting followers to customers.
9. Reach Out with the Preferred Contact Method
Most influencers will have a small section in their bio that will reveal how they wish to be contacted. It may say something like, “for business inquiries.” The most common methods are a specific business email or a simple DM to the account.
Keep in mind many influencers have managers or agents and it’s best practice to reach out to those emails if they’re available before sending a DM or connecting through a personal email.
Do not leave comments on their posts asking to “collab” or otherwise work together. These comments come off as spam. Leave a positive comment on their post and reach out with the preferred method.
It’s also a good idea to follow the creator and engage with their content for a few days or weeks before reaching out about a partnership. This builds a more trusted and authentic relationship when they can see you’re genuinely interested in their account.
10. Look For Ambassadors with Long-Term Potential
Building a relationship with an influencer and your brand takes time. It’s important to work with an influencer who understands your brand and its products and is willing to grow with you long-term.
When you create long-term relationships with influencers, it’s that much easier to have them become loyal brand ambassadors for your company. They will better understand your products and what makes them special, and consistently create authentic and genuine content.
This results in a more consistent brand message and the ability to engage that influencer’s audience through authenticity and familiarity.
You Can Have Success with Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing can be daunting and sometimes confusing. However, you can certainly find the right influencer to work with by following the tips outlined in this blog.
You can also use our services to find the perfect influencers to help your brand reach the next level. We specialize in effectively managing every stage of influencer marketing—from influencer outreach to content creation.
Call 1(587)900-0870 or email hello@modernspeak.co today to see how our services can work for you.
FAQ
What is an influencer’s job?
Influencers build trust with their audience by creating authentic, high-quality, and honest content for their followers, so their job is to use their knowledge of what resonates with their audience to promote your brand and products. It’s important to pick an influencer with an audience that matches your target customer.
What is an influencer’s voice?
It’s the overall tone and mood that their online presence conveys. Voice can be determined by the way the influencer interacts with their audience, the type of captions they write, and the overall sentiment of their feed.
How do you pick the right influencer to promote your business?
You can find the right influencer to promote your business by thoroughly researching any potential influencers, fully understanding relevant metrics, and keeping your brand’s goals in mind at all times. To simplify the hiring process, reach out to our team today.
