How Brands Work with Travel Influencers

As a travel and tourism business, you've likely considered working with influencers to promote your brand.

But are influencers worth the investment, or just a necessary evil?

With so many self-proclaimed influencers reaching out for promotions, it's natural to be skeptical about whether influencer marketing provides a return.

This article will discuss the pros and cons of working with travel influencers and how to evaluate the actual ROI. We tapped Tyler Anderson, founder and CEO of Casual Fridays agency, who has over 20 years of experience in influencer marketing.

Tyler shares his insights into the real mistakes businesses make with influencers and how to ensure your campaigns are successful.

By the end, you'll have the information to decide if influencer marketing is right for your business.

The Biggest Mistakes Brands Make with Influencer Marketing

"I first got started in influencer marketing back in the MySpace days in 2004," noted Tyler. "It's been fascinating to see how the space has evolved since then."

We asked Tyler directly - in his experience, is influencer marketing worth it for businesses or just a "necessary evil"?

"There is value to working with influencers when done properly," said Tyler. "But most of my clients have felt burned at some point by self-proclaimed influencers only looking for free vacations. It takes diligence to ensure you choose quality influencers promoting your brand."

The more significant mistake brands make in influencer marketing is choosing influencers based only on their follower count without vetting whether those followers are real or engaging. They also fail to have clear objectives and contracts in place. This leads to wasted budgets on influencers who don't deliver results. Tyler advised we must dive deeper to avoid these pitfalls and ensure ROI from influencer campaigns.

Does working with influencers actually help brands?

Influencer marketing can provide several benefits to a business. According to Tyler, some key pros include:

Increased Awareness, Reach, and Impressions - By partnering with influencers, you expose your brand to a whole new potential audience at a fraction of traditional media costs. This boosted reach can grow awareness of your business.

Potential for New Customer Acquisition and Sales - Tyler has seen first-hand that influencer campaigns can result in actual room bookings and sales for hospitality brands when the right influencers with engaged audiences are selected.

Authentic Word-of-Mouth Marketing - Instead of typical paid ads, influencers integrate brand promotions naturally into their lifestyle content. When done right, this creates authentic and trusted word-of-mouth marketing for the business. Followers believe the influencer genuinely supports the brand.

3 Critical Influencer Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

However, there are also some drawbacks Tyler has witnessed when businesses do not properly manage influencer campaigns:

Mistake #1: Choosing Influencers solely on Follower Count

Influencers may have millions of followers, but most could be fake or inactive. Thoroughly analyzing engagement is key.

Mistake #2: Lack of Clear Goals and Objectives

Without clear goals and objectives in contracts, influencers might drop the ball on showcasing aspects of your business you hoped to promote.

Mistake #3: Influencers failing to deliver or cross promoting competitors

As Tyler learned, there is a risk of influencers accepting promotions from competitors. Proper contracts can mitigate this. Influencers may also fail to provide assets or posts as agreed.

When Influencer Relations Go Wrong: Valuable Lessons Learned

Influencer marketing's early days saw enthusiastic brands clamoring to sign up big-name influencers. But Tyler's experiences revealed critical lessons about preventing costly mistakes.

He recalled one top influencer's stay at an upscale San Francisco hotel for a local conference. With a large livestream following, expectations from the hotel were high. But the livestream fell flat when viewers watched the influencer obsess over gift shop candy for 20 minutes rather than giving viewers a tour of his grand suite.

Unsurprisingly, the hotel felt shortchanged on content value from their substantial investment. But worse was yet to come from other "influencers."

Shortly after the conference, that same influencer was livestreaming about another hotel just down the street.

The influencer's authenticity soon came under scrutiny. Initially attracted to his genuine personality and perspective, his audience began questioning his credibility as he moved from one hotel review to another. It became evident that his rave reviews were not the product of genuine experiences and appreciation, but rather the result of promotional deals.

The constant stream of hotel livestreams made his audience feel like they were tuning into a continuous, thinly veiled advertisement, rather than enjoying engaging and authentic content.

As a result, the influencer's support began to wane, demonstrating the vital importance of authenticity in influencer marketing.

Measuring the ROI of Influencer Marketing

When done right, influencer marketing can provide a positive ROI. However, Tyler stressed the importance of setting measurable goals upfront:

Importance of Setting Measurable Goals Upfront - Goals may include tangible metrics like room bookings or softer metrics like follower/engagement growth.
Using Metrics Like Cost Per Impression (CPM) - Just as traditional channels use CPM, influencer CPM allows quantifying ROI. Tyler has found average Instagram influencer CPMs are $5-7, enabling cheaper rates.
Examples from Casual Friday's Client Campaigns - One hotel gained 50,000 new Instagram followers working with micro-influencers during stays. Another saw increases in room bookings after promotions from top Disney influencers. Consistently tracking KPIs allows Tyler to prove influencer marketing's value for hospitality brands.

By appropriately scoping out goals and tracking analytics, businesses can measure the true success or failure of influencer relationships beyond vanity metrics like follower counts alone.

Why Micro-Influencers are in and Macro Influencers are Out

As a hospitality marketer, showing real returns on investment from campaigns is crucial. Tyler knew more than just tracking traditional metrics like followers or reach alone was needed - his clients needed to see sales translations.

Enter one of Casual Fridays' resort clients located right by Disneyland. With ambitions to boost bookings, they ran a campaign leveraging top influencers in the Disney niche.

These weren't mega influencers, but credible creators with dedicated Disney fan followings of 30-50k each. The resort hosted their stays, offering a behind-the-scenes sneak peek of the property alongside make-believe magic.

Naturally, Disney devotees took note. But more importantly, reservations started pouring in from the influencers' engaged audiences. Where typical efforts yielded awareness alone, now rooms were filling up.

By tracking promotional codes used at checkout, Tyler's team proudly reported the solid bump in bookings attributable to these micro-influencers. For the first time, a client saw clear proof influencer marketing was no necessary evil - it delivered real ROI.

Small-scale sweet success like this taught Tyler's agency the power of aligning niche passions, crafting win-win partnerships, and letting results do the talking. It remains a model for influencer relations done right.

How Brands Should Work with Influencers

Based on lessons learned over decades, Tyler recommends the following tips to ensure influencer partnerships are fruitful:

Tip #1: Choose Influencers Based on Content/Engagement Not Just Followers

Look beyond numbers at quality and connectivity. The easiest way to find influencers is to use the SARAL Google Chrome extension. You can discover influencers from YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. SARAL will reveal an influencer’s engagement rate and Predicted Likes based on past engagement.

The latest influencer marketing trends reveal that engagement varies by follower size:

Nano: 500 to 10,000 followers with an engagement rate of 3%
Micro: 10,000 to 100,000 followers with an engagement rate of 2.3% engagement
Macro: 100,000+ followers with a 1.6% engagement rate

Tip #2: Contracts Addressing Content Ownership, Non-Competes, Delivery Timelines

Protect your brand and set expectations. If an influencer send you a contract and you don’t have a legal team, you can use AI to analyze influencer contracts.

Tip #3: PROVIDE A CAMPAIGN BRIEF AND LEAVE ROOM FOR CREATIVITY

Guide representation while preserving influence.

Tip #4: Leveraging a Variety of Influencer Types and Scaling Campaigns Over Time

Not all influencers fit each objective; evolve relations strategically.

Additional tips include researching influencers thoroughly, having exploratory calls to align goals, and managing expectations on tangible outcomes versus influences. Maintaining honest, long-term relationships sets the stage for the greatest influencer ROI.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing provides both opportunities and pitfalls for travel businesses. It can boost brand reach, sales, and user engagement at attractive costs when done correctly. However, diligently choosing the right influencers, defining objectives, and tracking results are crucial to avoid wasting budgets.

This article covered the pros of greater awareness and leads through trusted word-of-mouth and the cons, like selection mistakes and lack of defined expectations. We also explored Tyler's frameworks for defining measurable goals and quantifying ROI like traditional media.

A sincere thank you to Tyler Anderson for sharing over two decades of expertise in influencer relations. Whether just considering starting an influencer program or optimizing an existing one, businesses now have pragmatic best practices to evaluate.

For more influencer marketing strategies and case studies, explore SmartHotelMarketing.com. Evaluate if adding the right influencers makes sense to fuel your travel brand's growth in the new world of authentic, creator-based promotion.