by James Berglie
Last updated: 10:25 AM ET, Sun November 28, 2021
I've come to terms with the fact that social media users, (especially those in my target market), are not very interested in tuning into their social media accounts to see a middle-aged man.
I'm not doing TikTok dances and middle-aged dad bods, for some reason, are not all the rage on social media. That's ok though, as I'm not nearly as good on camera for social media as I am in a sales meeting anyway.
So while I'm not against showing my own personality through social and being on camera, I turn to others for help in keeping our content fresh and a bit more appealing for our target market.
Prior to entering the travel industry, I was a professional photographer and had worked with models, celebrities, and politicians for some time, so I knew the power of good content, combined with a more "marketable" face than my own. Coming from that industry, into travel, I knew working with influencers, (this was before they were called "influencers"), was going to be in the cards for our business as I knew I wanted to leverage their followers, (who were in my target demographic anyway).
Working with influencers, however, comes with its own set of challenges.
Like celebrities, (which they are in their own right), many are extremely flaky and unreliable. Some are so full of themselves that working with them is frustrating, and some agree to a deal and then back out last minute. I've even had one no-show / no-call for her flight. Dealing with this kind of unprofessional behavior can be quite frustrating.
Coming from a world of "creatives" in the media industry, I've often come to the conclusion that creatives are not reliable, and reliables are not creative. Others have demanded up to $5,000 a day plus expenses, or wanted to give us next to nothing in terms of the number of posts, and wanted the world from us. However, despite all it's challenges, I've also been lucky enough to find the diamonds in the rough that worked out very well.
I would stress to any travel advisor looking to work with an influencer to look for authentic people who are not in it for the "fame and money," so to speak. You can easily find great content producers who are reasonable to work with. When looking for an influencer, it's easy to only look for follower count, but I'd stress it's far more important to look for people who are authentic.
It's pretty easy to look at an account and immediately spot someone who lets their real self show versus someone who only peddles sponsored products non-stop. While there's a case to be made for the product peddlers as no one can ignore the numbers in their following, we really try to work with those who truly fit our brand and will produce the kind of content that goes well with our message.
In selecting an influencer to work with, I personally tend to lean away from the "travel influencers" as I believe many of the accounts I've seen lack the authenticity we are searching for (and their followers I'd argue are OTA customers vs. agent customers). I'm looking for accounts that people follow because they show the world who they really are. I believe it's much more engaging, and their followers tend to be the same type of people in my client base.
As for measuring your results, other than views and likes, it's hard to assign an exact ROI on something like this, like it is with most advertising.
Yes, the business person in me wants to focus on ROI, but the creative in me knows that this isn't a direct result investment. More importantly, it's about me having content regularly, and it's about leveraging the followers of the influencer to also follow our account.
If you really want to try to track ROI, you can look to incorporate a referral code of sorts to give an incentive to book with you and track your lead source. But if you are going to consider working with influencers, I'd encourage you to look at the long game.
Working with a well-known influencer brings credibility to your brand by putting you in front of hundreds of thousands of people who wouldn't otherwise hear of you. Some of those people will begin following you, giving you an instant pass to show up every single day in their pockets moving forward.
One influencer's campaign brought our TikTok up from 300 followers to more than 10k followers, virtually overnight. There is simply no way we would have been able to do that without working with an influencer as the algorithms today have become harder and harder for accounts to gain traction.
So even though it's frustrating that the world doesn't want to see this 30-something-year-old man dancing on TikTok, that doesn't mean that I can't still use social media and the power of influencers to get our brand out there and continue to build a following.
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