Agreements between companies in the tourism sector and bloggers & companies specialised in hiring them or measuring their impacts is now very much a reality and becoming more and more common every day
Suitcase contents for a perfect trip: comfortable clothes, trainers, a camera, food recommendations, planning and a few thousand followers on Instagram or Facebook…
It’s no longer seen as weird to have a large number of friends on your social networks, so our trips become a social showcase sponsored by leading brands.
Moreover, it’s not only fashion and accessories brands with people who are famous on social networks on their books and agree to advertise and market their products. Destinations and hotels jumped on the bandwagon some time ago, hiring these brand and amenities’ influencers and rewarding them with cash payments or vouchers for hotels and trips.
Big brands are now collectively spending $255 million a month worldwide on sponsored posts on Instagram, according to Captiv8, a company that specialises in connecting influencers with brands.
And it comes as no surprise. Spanish start-up SamyRoad has become an important CRM tool with access to 160 million social profiles worldwide, and brands need to have their finger on the pulse if they want the best influencers to help them with their content marketing.
Their work is not limited to travel-focused influencers. They also hire bloggers who specialise in lifestyle and have travel sections on their websites and social networks. Just ask Lovely Pepa, one of Spain’s most popular bloggers, who has a pretty impressive travel section on her blog, and at the time of writing this article, had almost 40 different blog posts about travel destinations.
However, we mustn’t just look at the big influencers with thousands or even millions of followers. Social networks are full of people with a large influence because of the engagement and interaction they achieve with their posts. They become models to follow, either because of their number of followers, high conversion ratios, specific location or specialisation in some sector, which in this case is travel.
There are also platforms like Traackr out there to help brands identify, manage, and measure these influencers’ content. Companies can select the person who best suits their marketing goal for a campaign or a one-off event.
We’re not talking about the future or new trends. Tourism companies have aligned themselves with the technology and influencers that interest them most, and this alliance is not going to disappear anytime soon.
