The big thing for travel companies these days is influencer marketing. Forbes recently ran an article by Renee Morad about social media influencers who travel the world, sharing photos and stories about their vacations and getting paid quite well to do so. Morad also offers some tips on how to break into the social media influencer game yourself, if you’re so inclined.
“Influencer” is a term used to describe somebody who has a lot of followers on their blog, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media channels, and who can convince people to buy or do things by sharing their experiences. It’s somewhere between the mundane trendsetter and the cult of personality.
Influencer marketing was once a mere social media experiment. Today, though, major brands are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a month on getting influencers to share their brand-sponsored experiences.
Megan Jerrard, who writes the travel blog Mapping Megan, is the primary example in the Forbes piece. She gets lucrative deals with hotels and adventure travel companies to make sure that she goes there and talks about it on her blog and social media. People who follow her see this, and maybe they book with the same hotel or enjoy the same travel experience.
Many top influencers bring in six-figure incomes in addition to the travel perks they receive from brands in order to mention them in their blog and social media posts.
In other words, influencer marketing is the new version of the celebrity endorsement. But these celebrities have a different, generally closer, relationship with their fans than an actor or athlete did in the 1970s.
There’s nothing wrong with all of this, although the Federal Trade Commission is trying to figure out how to handle disclosure of sponsored blog and social media posts.
But people like to travel, and they like their social media, so it’s pretty smart to combine the two. It’s even smarter for brands to make connections with travel-loving bloggers so they travel to your sites and post pictures of your amenities.
It’s not clear yet how well influencer marketing is working for the companies doing the sponsoring, but it seems like a pretty sweet gig if you can get it.
Influencer blogging isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme, though. You can’t just start a blog and a social media presence and expect to rake in the bucks. You need to take the time to build your audience and gain their trust through solid, honest reporting of your experiences, and that could take years. Patience and a solid business plan are virtues if you are looking to cash in on the influencer marketing trend.