The Rise of Influencers in Travel Marketing

Travel marketing companies have a challenge today.

If they’re unable to draw enough qualified traffic and convert them to customers, then it could be the consumer market has changed. And keeping clients relevant, visible, and generating leads is becoming more difficult.

With SMBs web traffic and social media traffic fading, the quest is to find a replacement lead source.  The goto source, Travel PPC campaigns, are expensive so big travel companies are turning to what are called influencers — bloggers, vloggers, and social media celebrities enjoying massive followers.

Many Brands are Getting Worn Down and Are Seeing Web Traffic Decline

And as you’ll read below, it’s not just visibility, traffic and leads. Big corporations suffer from depersonalization, lack of authenticity, trust, and significance. Travelers have moved forward to engage with travel influencers whose personal strengths are these very things. For corporations who use Generative AI in Travel, brand erosion makes them desperate for compensation. Influencers are benefiting from this AI trend.

Let’s dive into the realm of travel influencers and how they might fit into your travel marketing strategy.

Travel influencers have qualities that make them attractive: expertise, experience, likability, flair, and the ability to really engage with travel audiences.

And even as an SMB travel company, you might benefit from a relationship with many of these influencers — via content offers, cross promotion, or paying a fee.  As important as they are now, many exaggerate their audiences, engagement, and lead generation. It’s buyer beware. There’s lots to know, so let’s get started on that.

Influencer Effectiveness. Screenshot courtesy of MediaKix

For travel advertisers, a influencer’s travel blog sees longer view times with deeper engagement in copy, videos and images, although the influencer must allow commenting and respond to comments. Given all that can take place in a blog including video, photos, details of adventures, and helpful tips, a blog is very powerful.  On their social pages and YouTube, visitors are emotionally engaged, however conversion via those pages is difficult given travel is a considered purchase, with an average 2 month span between first thoughts and purchase.

That means your Website and blog must be developed to provide a spectacular welcoming, engaging and transaction place for them to fully experience their travel dream.

Corporate advertisers are trying to leverage the growing celebrity and selling power of travel influencers. It’s not just the brand of these influencers or the traffic either. There’s more reasons why influencer’s place at the travel marketing table is improving.

There are travel influencers in every travel category from wedding travel to destinations to types of travelers. They’re growing in number.

These are people with a certain zest and flair for traveling and their online content is inspirational. Travelers find them credible and rely on their advice to make their own travel decisions. And here is why they’re so popular with the big OTA’s, DMO’s, Cruiselines, and Tour companies. They have trustworthiness, credibility and significance with their engaged audiences which the big corporations and companies don’t possess.

This experience, authenticity, genuine joy for travel, and deep immersion in travel locations and experiences is saleable asset now.

Likely, as a travel company owner, you’ll be working with some travel influencers as an additional travel marketing channel.

Of course, they’re feeding into your digital marketing funnel, to be converted by your irresistible unique value proposition. They won’t be doing all the work. Visitors will come in intrigued and open minded perhaps with the influencer’s recommendation/urging, and you must engage them to build trust and desire like any other visitor.

Here’s the Top Benefits Travel Influencers Might Offer Your Business

Authenticity and Trust: Big brands can struggle for credibility, truthfulness and trustworthiness in the advertising. Mass advertising just has that drawback of not being personalized. The generality of it means it misses being meant for a travel consumer. Travel influencers, on the other hand, cultivate a personal connection with their audience whom they engage with daily. Travelers see them experience their desired destinations firsthand, learning more about its oferings, and they come to trust their recommendations and thoughts.

Established Presence: If your own social media campaign has never taken off or flattened, you can appreciate the difficulty that these people have overcome. You’re paying for reach that would be very expensive to build yourself via an in-house influencer (contractor/employee) given the time, resources, strategy and hard work entailed in that.

Targeted Reach: Influencers often cater to specific niches within the travel market. Their inbound traffic is highly relevant based on destinations, events, tours, and activities.

Engaging Content: Travel influencers are often in the places they produce photos, stories, videos for and this resonates better with audiences who want reliable, trustworthy and authentic reviews and information.

User-Generated Reviews: People are increasingly turning to online reviews and recommendations before making travel decisions. Partnering with influencers essentially creates a stream of user-generated reviews that resonate more with potential travelers than traditional advertising.

Cost-Effective Marketing: Influencer marketing can be a more cost-effective way to reach a targeted audience as spending can be adjusted based on follower size, clickthroughs, impressions, and the engagement rates of the influencer.

Real-Time Interaction: Travel influencers can directly engage with their audience in real-time through comments and messages. This increases authenticity, impact, and allows for immediate feedback and creates a stronger sense of community, making their travel recommendations even more persuasive.

Big Brands vs. Influencers: Big travel brands and OTA’s lack authenticity, trustworthiness, personal relevance, and customized products. They are aimed at low cost, typecasted products and traveler profiles, and often push their own products which are often not competitive except at low prices.

Personal Connection: Travel influencers can connect with their audience on a personal human level, fostering meaning, trust and a sense of authenticity that big brands can’t replicate, since brands aren’t a human person, nor can appeal strongly to a specific group of travelers.

Niche Authority and Expertise: Many travel influencers specialize in specific travel styles or destinations, offering in-depth knowledge that a large brand’s generic ad campaigns might not communicate authentically.

Visual Storytelling: Influencers are often masters at creating compelling, enjoyable travel stories that include high-resolution photos of specific features along with videos that showcase the emotional aspects of travel which reflect the joy of travel that inspires travelers.

Real-time Engagement: The ability to present travel destinations, tours, and activities directly in real time streaming via Facebook, Twitch, Instagram, YouTube, etc.s with their followers and answer questions helps them create significant attention, impact and engagement.

The Future of Travel Influencers

Will the trend of investment in travel influencers continue or will it be rife with spam, insincere promotion for money, and distrust? In some cases, that’s happened, so you might see churn. Consumers often tire of the views of a single influencer and begin exploring other travel influencers, YouTubers, and celebrities.

Reports by influencer related businesses of course offers few downside risks to the outlook.

However their continued viability as a visibility/lead source will be hampered by the greed of Meta/Facebook, Google, Tiktok, Microsoft and others. They’ll see their own traffic get cut through algorithmic changes.  The media monopolies will continue to create more zero click searches reducing their reach and then leveraging creators content for their own profit centers.  There’s no doubt the big media monopolies covet their traffic and celebrity and they’ll be silently and algorithmically (via AI) assimilated, despite protests. Most micro or macro influencers won’t even know what happened.

AI-powered search will result in fewer travel influencers being presented to travel consumers, where it’s one answer for one question. That means it’s winner take all.

However, this is the influencer era, and finding influencers to work with now may be a priority for travel marketers.

To find out more, check out these companies:

Collabstr:  collabstr.com/influencer-price-calculator/travel offers connectivity to influencers and a price calculator to show you the typical engagement fee.

Aspire Influencer Marketing: The Aspire.io influencer Marketplace  Aspire.io

Upfluence Marketplace: Connect and pay Influencers on One Platform upfluence.com

Influencity Influencer Platform: Engagement with Creators and Analytics

There are many influencer engagement platforms available. It reflects how eager influencers/creators are in leveraging their traffic and followers, and how businesses are connecting with throngs of them.

That’s what has spawned the development of SaaS software platforms to manage this channel.

As part of your Travel marketing service package, I may be able to help you leverage this opportunity.

It indicates to you how important learning, adaptability and resourcefulness are to digital marketing, and that doing it all cost-effectively is the real challenge.

If you’re planning a startup venture or are needing to turn around your flagging travel management company, call me at 416 998-6246 and lets discuss it!