Influencer marketing is trending in 2020. Travel Influencers is one of the most repeated searches within the tourism industry. And it is that among the Performance Marketing strategies for the tourism sector that can be developed, collaborations with travel bloggers and influencers are one of the most important.
These are people who have the ability to influence the purchase decision of their followers. Personal recommendations are considered the most powerful advertising mode. For this reason, on the other hand, the tourism sector needs so much to work on the reviews and testimonials of its clients, to gain credibility.
Most users follow the recommendations of their friends and trust recommendations of Facebook and Twitter influencers. Many of them have bought an item online after seeing that an influencer was using it on Instagram or YouTube. So when it comes to product recommendations, users find that social media influencers are almost as trustworthy as their own friends.
More and more brands decide to venture into campaigns with influencers and everything seems to indicate that digital influencers will continue to strengthen in the advertising field. The majority of the marketers consider their influencer marketing strategies effective and plan to increase their investment in 2021. More than $ 10 trillion will go to work with influencers over the next few years.
Instagram continues to establish itself as the social network of influencers who prefer it over Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat. Where it is increasingly difficult for brands to differentiate themselves and where originality and authenticity are the keys to success, strategies with influencers are constantly exposed to change.
Travel agencies, hotel establishments and different brands in the world of tourism have verified that the results of the influencer marketing tourism sector are positive. So much so that they have exceeded their expectations. In fact, brands now don't expect influencers to approach them.
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Here are the top influencer marketing trends that are coming on which you should pay attention to maximize the results of a brand:
1. The audiovisual narrative has taken off
The video is the leading format of the content branded in 2020. The statistics in the industry suggest that the audiovisual format represent around 80% of all Internet traffic in 2021. Whether in the form of stories, tutorials, step by step, product reviews, influencers are now more than ever producers and distributors of content.
In addition, for brands, the content generated by these creators is a very profitable and efficient way to distribute their message and video content among masses of audiences and therefore they will turn to influencers with a strong learning in audiovisual production.
Without a doubt, influencers have transformed the travel industry. The so-called Instagram travelers have become a source of inspiration for new generations by presenting destinations in a new way, giving tips and transmitting new ways of traveling through high-impact audiovisual content.
The hotel and airline chains are joined by clothing brands, accessories, technology companies, food, decor and many other areas that will see how the exposure achieved in the content of these influencers takes their brand to another level.
2. Stories are more in demand than posts
According to statistics, 500 million users interact with stories on Instagram per day. The time we spend looking at the activity of our followers is increasing and the versatility of interaction options offered by Instagram responds to this phenomenon. While through a Post a brand can aspire to achieve Likes and Comments, in a Story the influencer can create surveys, include links, graphic material, create sequences and many more possibilities.
Dynamics such as the production of featured miniseries, chains between influencers connected through Stories or Carousels with music are just some of the experiments that we are seeing in this full-screen format. After all, it is about capturing the attention of users and what better way to do it than interactively in short entertaining videos.
3. Using Lives to introduce conversation topics
The success of podcasts has also reached Instagram and TikTok and influencers did not take long to adapt it to the social network.
Through the Instagram Lives from the influencers' profile, the brands began to introduce relevant conversation topics for their campaigns. Being a format that enables conversation, we are already seeing how influencers raise debates and generate expectations about upcoming events or issues of interest with the aim of generating buzz.
Thus, a food influencer interacts on healthy eating habits to promote new vegetarian places while fitness influencers talk to us in a Live about the new technology of footwear.
4. Brands supporting social causes with influencers
A trend that we have already begun to see and that will increase in the long term is that of the strategy of brands that partner with influencers to transmit their campaigns to support social causes and problems.
Faced with the growing scepticism developed by new generations towards brand communication, they have found in influencers a golden ally when it comes to spreading their values and connecting with audiences that increasingly value social responsibility. We have already started seeing a lot of this during the ongoing COVID scenario.
5. Create campaigns with team of influencers
Finally, we are already beginning to observe on Instagram how brands abandon individual actions with influencers to introduce team campaigns. What does this mean? Group dynamics of cross-interaction that promote and create a community of its own followers of the campaign.
In this way, brands achieve greater identification of users, which results in a much higher interaction than what the brand could achieve alone, as well as generating organic content on a large scale.
6. Selecting influencers beyond reach
In many disciplines of digital marketing, a strategy based on affinity with the medium has gone to very complex data and programmatic solutions, where data is key in planning and decision-making. Influencer marketing follow these same steps, since evaluating influencers based on basic metrics such as number of followers and reach becomes somewhat obsolete.
Brands now evaluate where those followers are from, how many they will be able to reach, if they are related to them and not just identify the influencer's reach (number of users who have seen their publication).
Thanks to the algorithmic nature of social platforms, influencers can be evaluated from other factors such as the number of followers in the target (future consumers of the product), the percentage of false followers, the engagement ratio or the growth rate, among others.
7. Goals beyond Instagram and YouTube
Brands are going to focus advertising and influencer marketing towards emerging channels such as TikTok, despite the fact that Instagram and YouTube remain the networks par excellence.
The substantial growth of new social networks has pushed brands to diversify their strategy and expand content on new platforms that also represent good opportunities to reach a target that is difficult to reach and convince: millennials and generation Z. Creativity on the part of influencers and the personalization of campaigns are essential to gain a foothold in new platforms.
8. Promotion during popular events
If you are looking for influencer marketing campaigns, it is likely that one of the most repeated cases is that of Airbnb. The brand has shown how influencer campaigns can help travel brands at featured events to publicize their own services. In this case, its strategy was developed during the famous Coachella music festival in California.
Airbnb provided accommodation to great influencers for the event's audience, such as Martin Garrix or Drake. In addition to a large group of influencers and models. In return, these people had to share their experiences in networks in those houses.
The result was demonstrated with a large participation of the public in these publications, where influencers managed to promote the brand among millions of people. That's why the Airbnb campaign during Coachella is a clear example of how brands in the tourism sector can take advantage of popular events to promote themselves.
9. Chromo Influencers
An influencer marketing campaign was promoted by a British hotel chain which stands out mainly because it targeted the luxury traveler. In order to reach young professionals, the campaign featured luxury fashion Chromo Influencers, featuring bloggers and Instagram stars and the campaign was perfectly adapted to the followers of these profiles.
Prior to the hotel stay, the brand sent the Chromo-Influencers to a therapy venue. This attracted public interest and marked the area as a destination for young fashion conscious professionals. And of course, all of this was captured in high-quality content on a wide variety of social platforms like YouTube and Instagram which had helped to publicize the name of the hotel chain.
