Choosing the best travel blogger for your brand’s influencer marketing campaign is imperative for its success. Instead of simply looking for a personality with a huge following on social media, think in terms of who will best represent your company.
Throwing your name out there to whoever is around to see it isn’t that goal you want for your travel influencer marketing campaign. Rather, carefully crafting a targeted message for a well-researched audience should be the focus of the strategy of any Travel SEO campaign.
As a travel brand, look to your mission and values as a starting point for selecting an influencer. Consider your ideal buyer, and the journey that this customer takes from merely thinking about travel to actually making a purchase decision. Then, reflect on your marketing and branding.
What type of travel blogger would best spread your mission, values and branding to your target audience, at the exactly the right time? It’s probably not the person with the highest amount of followers on Facebook or Instagram. Likely, it’s a niche influencer who has built a genuine and fairly substantial reputation online.
Here’s how you find that perfect person.
Identify a Travel Blogger Who Shares Tons of Great Content
Travel bloggers who are already sharing tons of great content, and who have a decent readership, make excellent influencer partners. Hotels, transportation companies like airlines, tourism bureaus and even businesses selling travel gear do well to team up with travel bloggers to broaden reach of a brand message.
When you work with notable travel bloggers, you can be pretty sure they already know how to influence followers using carefully curated photos and well-crafted stories. They’re accustomed to describing accommodations, modes of transport, destinations and nearly anything related to travel in a way that’s appealing and compelling. Great travel bloggers suck readers in with their perfect portrayal of the wanderlust lifestyle that calls many. This engaging content makes their audiences feel like they must be there or experience that, and this is what you want working for your brand.
Find an Travel Blogger Who Is a Genuine Fit
Of course, whether you choose travel bloggers as your influencers or other online personalities with great followings, you have to make sure the fit is genuine. It doesn’t matter if a blogger or celebrity has a million or more followers or readers, you won’t reach the target audience you want if that personality just doesn’t gel with your brand.
Think again about your missions and values, and the type of person who would authentically sell you as an ideal solution to specific wants and needs. In this regard, don’t think of selling as a hard sale, but instead approach it as honest promotion of a brand by someone who would personally use your service or product. When you partner with an influencer, the influencer and you will come under scrutiny and you’ll want the relationship to make sense.
Focus on Building Relationships
Get to know the influencers who are right for your brand. Work to understand their businesses, the audiences who trust them and what you can do to help those influencers find more success while you do the same.
Customizing part of your marketing campaign for particular travel blogger is a great way to build a strong relationship for future mutual benefit. For instance, if you’re a hotel brand with an influencer who usually shares about travels throughout Europe, consider creating a custom itinerary focused on this area. Plan a trip for your influencer that includes stays at some of your hottest boutique properties there, or maybe in some your most luxurious accommodations (remember, get to know your influencer well to see what makes sense). The goal is to have your offering meet the influencers needs, which in turn provides for your needs to be met in the end.
These are a few good ways to select an influencer for your travel brand’s campaign, but there are more. Contact Galileo Tech Media to learn how you can partner with the right influencers and see real success. Galileo can assist you from end to end, pulling the best talent from our network for you to select, negotiating rates, handling drafts and taking care of all other details. Talk to us today.
