Reach your tourism market through influencers

Working with influencers is a great way to raise awareness for your tourism business and generate sales. In today's competitive market, working with influencers has become an essential marketing tool to stay ahead of the competition and recruit new audiences.

Understanding influencer marketing

Influencers are experts at building trust with their followers. They can help smaller brands, including tourism brands, reach new audiences. The global influencer marketing industry is fast-moving and forecasted to grow to around 21.1 billion USD in 2023. This type of marketing is widely used by various brands in many sectors. Younger generations, namely Gen Y and Gen Z, value this 'word of mouth' marketing and trust it more than traditional forms of advertising.

Influencers working in the travel sector publish blogs and videos and post content on social media platforms. With their content, they aim to generate awareness and inspire their followers, who are already interested in what they have to say. There are many benefits of working with influencers that go beyond making sales. For smaller businesses looking to enrich content, establish authenticity, build long-term relationships and save money, investing in influencer marketing can help.

Influencer marketing is particularly suitable for travel campaigns for destinations or businesses. Inspiring images and videos of scenery and exciting travel adventures have the potential to appeal to a vast audience. Possible outputs of an influencer campaign include:

• Familiarisation trips;
• Shoutouts;
• Giveaways;
• Platform takeovers;
• Sponsored content
   

Inspirational case studies

It is a good idea to look at what other travel brands are doing. There have been many successful campaigns from large travel brands such as Booking.com, Delta Airlines and Cunard Cruise Lines. Examples of successful campaigns include:

• An influencer familiarisation trip to Guyana which generated more than 11.8 million impressions for #discoverguyana and 200,000 mentions across various social media channels; and
• A social media shoutout from the Jamaica Tourist Board which generated more than 1.5 million impressions for #MoBayLive and 1,500 comments, enquiries, and discussion points.

Both of these examples show how successful influencer marketing can be for businesses.

Learn more

There are plenty of resources to help you plan and manage an influencer marketing campaign. The CBI study on how to work with influencers is a useful guide to understanding and navigating the influencer marketplace.

Acorn Tourism Consulting Limitedwrote this news article for CBI.

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