Collaborating With Travel Bloggers and Influencers in 2024

There are plenty of ways to develop creative promotional tactics. While the options are endless, collaborating with travel bloggers and influencers is probably one of the best ways to create and distribute authentic, engaging content.

Influencer marketing ensures you reach a diverse target market, all while improving your brand visibility. That’s not all, as these key partnerships can also support the ever-important EEAT ranking factors for Google and increase your sales.

It sounds great, but it’s not all easygoing. How do you pick the right influencer for your brand? What type of marketing campaign should you focus on? Does the influencer create content relating to your services?

These are all questions you need to ask yourself before starting your marketing campaign. Fortunately, this guide will help you figure out who to work with to ensure you start generating leads through your campaign.

Without further ado, let’s get stuck in!

What Is Influencer Marketing?

In short, travel influencer marketing is when brands and businesses work with individuals to target an engaged audience and increase brand visibility. Generally, these collaborations take place through sponsored experiences, like hotels offering paid-for stays or tour operators offering free activities.

This enables the influencer to have first-hand experience with the brand and helps them create high-quality content that their followers enjoy.

The most successful partnerships result in a high level of trust built between the influencer, their followers, and the brand. Influencer marketing also ensures that your business can reach potential customers you otherwise might not have reached through traditional marketing tactics.

As you can see, this type of user-generated content (UGC) through travel blogging or social media posts can be extremely beneficial for your business.

Why You Should Work With Travel Bloggers & Social Media Influencers

Now that you know what this marketing technique is, let’s dive into the benefits of utilising this strategy. Whether you’re in tourism or hospitality marketing, here are the top reasons to collaborate with a travel blog or social media influencer:

Increases Your Brand Visibility Across Multiple Social Media Platforms

One of the best reasons for these collaborations is the fact you can target your relevant audience across multiple platforms. From Facebook and Instagram to TikTok and Google, working with influencers ensures your brand name is mentioned beyond the limits of your business’s social media profiles.

This can also help improve your business’s positioning within Google, as their EEAT model calls for trustworthiness and authority. When multiple well-regarded influencers and travel bloggers support your brand with authentic content, it can really make a difference.

Helps Showcase Your Brand Values

One key takeaway from a brand-influencer partnership is the opportunity to showcase your company’s values.

If you’re a family-oriented hotel or tour company, working with an influencer who focuses on travels with their family showcases that value. If you focus on luxury experiences, then an individual who reviews boutique products and experiences would be the ideal candidate.

Simply put, potential partners should align with your brand values and offerings, ensuring it’s the best possible fit.

Top Tip: These collaborations also allow your travel blogger or influencer to experience the services you offer that tourism boards or adverts don’t cover. These personal experiences can make all the difference in your audience’s purchasing decisions.

Uses UGC to Create Engaging Content That Is Authentic & Trustworthy

User-generated content (UGC) is information created and shared across the internet by real people who provide honest reviews and information about a brand.

Not only is this usually visually appealing content, but it also tends to be more impactful and memorable for viewers. It’s also slightly more authentic than branded content, and users tend to trust the valuable insights provided by UGC a lot more.

Saying that UGC makes a difference is one thing, but having the stats to back up the claims is a whole other story. Fortunately, we have the stats to support our claims.

A study by Search Logistics found that UGC is 35% more memorable than traditional content. Social media campaigns using UGC also have 50% more engagement, and 79% of people say UGC impacts their purchasing decisions.

To add the cherry on top, campaigns that use UGC tend to have a 29% higher conversion rate. This is thanks to the use of authentic storytelling, which viewers trust a lot more than content created by brands.

Helps You Reach a Wider Target Audience

Another benefit of pairing up with influencers is the ability to target a wider audience. These individuals tend to have a strong following that regularly engages with their content. So, you’ll often be able to reach more people in a far more engaging and cost-effective way than traditional advertising.

Influencers like to provide valuable insights for their followers as well. And when you pair these insights with captivating content about your brand, it makes for a powerful combination that often results in higher sales.

Top Tip: When looking for travel bloggers to pair with, ensure they have a high domain ranking and earn plenty of traffic. You want to make sure you’re partnering with someone who produces authoritative content that does well.

It Is a Measurable Marketing Strategy

Possibly the greatest benefit of influencer marketing is that it’s a measurable strategy. From tracking the post-engagement rate to determining its effectiveness at generating leads, there are plenty of ways to calculate the campaign’s return on investment (ROI).

It also helps you assess which influencer partnerships were a success and which didn’t pan out so you can strategise accordingly in the future. Much like pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns, this is a trial-and-error process. But you can definitely reduce costs if you plan well in advance.

How to Create a Powerful Travel Influencer Marketing Campaign

Establishing a successful marketing campaign involves several aspects. While some are more obvious than others, skipping one of the following steps could either make or break your campaign.

1. Set a Realistic Budget

Before you even start setting goals or finding influencer collaborations, you need to set a budget. This will help ensure that the campaign and the people you work with align with the goals you hope to achieve.

If you’re a small hotel, then a lower budget working with a larger pool of micro-influencers may be ideal. For large tour companies, perhaps a smaller number of more expensive, well-known influencers would work better.

At the end of the day, how much you can spend on the campaign will dictate the goals you set and the influencers you work with.

2. Create Goals for Your Marketing Campaign

There are a whole plethora of goals you may want to achieve, so ensuring you set these before finding your influencers is essential. Here are some good questions to ask yourself when setting your benchmarks:

• Do you want to increase the number of direct bookings?
• Are you looking to expand your audience demographics?
• What are the engagement rates you hope to achieve?
• How much can you spend on each partnership?
• What type of influencer marketing campaign are you looking to establish?
• What does your company need: improved brand visibility, higher conversion rates, long-lasting partnerships, etc?

3. Pick Suitable Brand Partners

There are plenty of ways to find the right influencer for your campaign. Whether you attend industry events and meet influencers there or search for candidates from your home office, there’s no right or wrong way to pick your brand ambassador.

There are various types of influencers you can focus on, and here are the main options at your disposal:

• Travel Bloggers — Offer authentic blogs with high engagement rates
• Nano-Influencers — 1 – 10K followers and are often open to partnerships
• Micro-influencers — 10 – 100K followers and offer one of the best ROI rates
• Macro-influencers — 100K – 1M followers and are fairly expensive
• Mega-influencers — 1M+ followers and are ideal for large hotel chains looking to reach a wide audience

That said, attending travel and tourism conferences is one of the best ways to meet great creators in person and develop a report. More often than not, they’ll also offer you a copy of their media kit, which usually has all the information you need to make a decision.

That said, when picking your brand partners, make sure they align with your budget, goals, audience, and brand values.

Top Tip: If you can’t attend industry events, a manual search can often help you find influencers to work with. Alternatively, influencer agencies can provide a curated list of influencers with their media kit and any other information you may need to make an informed decision.

4. Provide the Best Travel Influencer Experience Possible

Last but certainly not least, make sure your influencer has an amazing time. The last thing you want is for the individual to have a less-than-adequate time, which will be reflected in their honest review of your hotel, tour, or service.

Providing an unforgettable adventure is a surefire way to have a happy influencer who may just become a brand ambassador due to your care. This often translates to their audience, who know if the person they are following is being authentic, especially when compared to other content they produce.

5 Influencer Marketing Campaigns to Consider

With a powerful strategy in hand, it’s time to assess the different types of campaigns you can use.

1. Affiliate Marketing Programmes

This method requires little effort on your part, as there won’t be much of a need for scouting. Influencers and travel bloggers can sign up with your affiliate programme and start earning a commission for sales resulting directly from the link placed on their website.

It’s probably the most affordable way for you to earn leads and make sales, but it won’t always result in authoritative, first-hand experiences.

2. Brand Ambassadorship

Brand ambassadors are usually long-term partnerships with an influencer whose audience aligns with your brand’s target market. In these instances, your brand will regularly be promoted by the influencer, ensuring their audience often hears about your brand.

These partnerships are usually cheaper than press trips, but they require regular contact with your ambassadors to ensure their content regularly includes your brand.

3. Ad Placements

Much like PPC campaigns, ad placements are the use of space on a blog or social media profile to promote your brand. These are generally adverts created by the brand, so there’s no user-generated content creation involved in this strategy.

While this can guarantee that your brand is promoted on the website, it may not be as successful as other collaboration strategies due to the lack of UGC. The costs can also add up quickly, but it does ensure you target your ideal audience without draining funds on PPC campaigns.

4. Press Trips

Probably one of the most expensive strategies are press trips. While they are pricey, they do often result in the most authentic content, as influencers can use original images and videos shot by themselves.

This is probably the most authentic and effective form of partnership, as it ensures your influencer truly experiences your product or service.

Top Tip: Press trips can also result in multiple promotional pieces of content from one influencer, as they can break up their experience into several pieces of content.

5. Sponsored Content

Sponsored posts or content can be as simple as a brand mention on a blog or a photo of a tour experience. Brand ambassadors and press trips often result in sponsored content, but they don’t necessarily have to be labelled in the same way.

For instance, sponsored Instagram posts usually have the #sponsored tag, and blog posts may have a disclaimer at the start of the post. On the other hand, brand mentions can be naturally incorporated into the content, while press trips can purely be about the influencer’s experience.

FAQs About Influencer Partnerships

Before sending you off to find your next big collaboration, here are some quick answers to commonly asked questions.

Who Are Better to Work With, Macro or Micro-Influencers?

This depends on your budget and what you hope to achieve with your campaign. However, micro-influencers are generally more affordable and result in a better ROI, as per Damelin College.

What Are the Best Social Media Platforms for the Travel Industry?

Generally speaking, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube are still the best social media platforms for travel industry collaborations with influencers.

Is Influencer Marketing Worth It?

Influencer marketing does more than just generate leads; it also improves your brand’s overall positioning on the internet. From improving your website’s EEAT to building long-lasting relationships, it’s definitely worth the effort.

Final Thoughts on Working With Bloggers and Travel Influencers

With all these tips and tricks, you can start collaborating with the best influencers and travel bloggers for your business.

While it can be hit and miss sometimes, if you strategically plan your campaigns well ahead of time, the increased leads and growth in sales can start trickling in far sooner than you might expect.

If you have any questions about collaborations or want some help finding your next big partnership, book a free call with us today.