As a hotel, your brand is everything. It’s a representation of your vision, drives public recognition, and builds trust with your guests. From the second they book a room to the moment they checkout, it’s front and center during their experience.
When it comes to influencer marketing, the individuals you choose to partner with represent your brand to the public. Often, these are audiences that might not have heard of your hotel before.
In that light, it’s crucial your brand not be tarnished as its promoted to the world. If you partner with the wrong influencers, you risk damaging your brand and the ever-important trust between you and your guests.
At Luxpitality, we’ve spent a lot of time securing influencer marketing partnerships. It hasn’t been easy to cultivate these relationships, but along the way we prioritized the sanctity of our brand and learned a lot about finding the right people.
Below, we’ll share our strategies, tips, and best practices to help as your boutique hotel goes out and seeks influencer marketing partnerships. And if you’d like to learn how our team of influencers can help grow your brand, reach out to us right now.
Influencer Marketing By the Numbers
Contrary to what some would say, influencer marketing is not dying. In fact, the numbers show that it’s actually growing, and 2020 stands to be one of the best years for brands that take advantage of influencer marketing.
Take a quick look at some of the data points that Influencer Marketing Hub published in their 2020 Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report. In this report, they surveyed 4,000 marketing agencies, brands, and industry professionals, and this is what they found:
- Influencer Marketing is projected to grow to approximately $9.7B this year
- For every $1 spent on influencer marketing, brands earn $5.78
- 87% of respondents use Instagram for their influencer marketing campaigns
- 80% of respondents plan to set a budget dedicated to influencer marketing in 2020
- 68% of respondents prefer their influencer marketing to be campaign-based marketing
Clearly, there’s a sizable opportunity for hotels that want to get in on the action and take their piece of the pie. However, there are two other stats from this report that really stick out and warrant a word of caution.
First, survey respondents claim the greatest challenge for influencer marketing was finding influencers. Second, more than 66% of respondents were duped by fraudulent influencers.
Above all else, you need to avoid influencer fraud. If not, you risk a shoddy partnership and, worse, damaging your brand’s credibility in the public’s eye.
How to Start Influencer Marketing
We know that influencer marketing is expected to keep growing into 2020 and beyond. At the same time it’s never been more important to make sure you’re partnering with genuine and authentic influencers.
It’s paramount to your success to identify and vet partners, especially if you want to get the highest ROI possible. Below, we’ll walk you through our pro tips to help ensure you’re making the right moves.
Note: For the purposes of this blog, we’re going to focus on influencer marketing through Instagram specifically.
Choose Partners Aligned With Your Identity
You can’t just pick any luxury content creator because they have a big following. Instead, pick someone who aligns with your brand, operates in the same (or similar) industry, and is passionate about their own content creation.
For example, if you operate a coastal hotel built on surf culture, you wouldn’t want to choose an influencer who deals with high-end and corporate lifestyles. Instead, choose someone who loves surfing, the ocean, and lives in or near your area.
To be clear, your potential partner does not need to be directly involved in the hotel industry. All that’s required is they align with your brand. Choose the people who you think would mesh well with the culture you promote to the public via your brand.
From there, you need to focus on securing a partnership with them. Don’t be afraid to engage with their social media profiles by regularly sharing and commenting on their content. Then, after you’ve built a rapport, reach out to them with your official ask.
PRO TIP: It can be helpful to start the conversation by inviting them to simply talk about your brand and brainstorm ways you could collaborate. Treat it like a pseudo job interview.
Vet Their Engagement
It can be tempting to jump at the opportunity to partner with an influencer who has a massive following. Focusing on the vanity of the profile can distract from what really matters: having a highly engaged following. Specifically, you want to focus on organic reach and overall engagement.
Organic reach is essentially how many people see the influencer’s content without searching for it directly. Engagement is the interaction with the content through shares, profile clicks, comments, and likes.
One quick way to vet an influencers engagement is to browse through some of their posts and read the comments. Does the influencer respond to comments? If so, do the responses feel canned, or genuine?
You’re looking to see if the influencer is relatable and trustworthy. If they’re not, move on to the next one. After all, it’s a buyers market out there so don’t feel pressured to jump into anything your gut warns you against.
To take it even further, we recommend using this handy tool from our friends at Influencer Marketing Hub (we love what they do!). Just plug in a specific Instagram account and it will tell you the:
- Total number of followers on the account
- Aggregate engagement rate across all their content
- Like to comment ratio
- Estimate audience quality score
Don’t Ignore Micro-Influencers
As you vet influencer marketing partners, don’t ignore micro-influencers. These are individuals who have between 1,000 and 100,000 followers, and they have serious potential to drive results for your brand.
Often, they’re considered experts in their respective areas, like fitness, cooking, or traveling. And since they have a more focused niche, they can drive higher levels of engagement. In fact, micro-influencers with only 1,000 followers generated an 85% higher engagement rate than those with 100,000 followers.
For your hotel, this means getting your brand in front of individuals who would be genuinely interested to learn more about your property and potentially book a room. This further underscores the need to partner with influencers closely aligned with your brand though, as an irrelevant promotion would only turn people off to your hotel.
Treat It as a True Partnership
To ensure your partnership is mutually beneficial for all involved, start by setting clear expectations. Be direct in your ask and make sure you’re not skimping on any details.
If you want the influencer to give you five dedicated feed posts on their Instagram page, ask for it. Otherwise, you might end up with only Instagram stories, which disappear after 24 hours. Similarly, equip them with all the proper hashtags, handles, locations, and other supplemental information needed.
Once everything is set in stone, you have to give them some creative control. If you’re demanding that they only post content that you curate for them, it defeats the purpose of a partnership in the first place.
You chose this person based on the voice, style, and tone they’ve worked hard to cultivate on their page. Don’t snuff it out now to serve your own gain. Treat this as a true partnership and let them infuse their creativity into the content.
Not only will this help generate authentic content for your hotel, it will go a long way towards fostering a lasting relationship with this influencer. Provide a good experience, and they’ll want to partner with you again and again.
Track Your Data
As a final note, make sure you’re tracking all the relevant data to calculate your ROI here. If your influencer is delivering content, but there’s not much engagement, it might be time to find another partner.
Consequently, if their content is blowing up all over Instagram, you need to be able to track all the requisite data like:
- Visits to your profile
- Amount of followers gained
- Profile interactions
- Referral traffic to your website
Most influencers will help you track this data, but be sure you specifically ask for their assistance while setting expectations for the partnership. Additionally, most social media management tools, like Later (that’s what we use), will track these metrics for you.
Don’t be intimidated by the thought of influencer marketing. Influencers are people, just like you and me, and in most cases they’re incredibly hard working individuals with a strong drive for success. The key is to choose the right partners, set clear expectations, and honor the value of the partnership.
At Luxpitality, we offer our independent hotel partners full-scale marketing services and partnerships with our pre-existing influencers falls under that. If you’re interested to hear how we can activate our network to grow your brand, reach out to us today.
Image Credit: Austin Radcliffe