3 Tips to Improve Your Resort’s Influencer Marketing

Nothing is less efficient and a bigger waste of money than investing in the wrong person... especially when marketing funds are limited. With 2020 being a transformative year for marketers across all industries, the pressure for brands to invest in the right opportunities is more imperative than ever.

Influencer marketing is an area that is constantly evolving and therefore remains a gray area in the industry. With new social media platforms emerging, hotels and resorts must continuously adapt to these changes and ensure that their influencer partnerships remain up-to-date. With roughly one billion active users on Instagram, messaging around your property can get lost within the sea of posts. Using your property's audience insights is a great way to map out your content and highlight your hotel's top amenities.

To help navigate this unchartered water, our team at Smarthinking Inc. has put together three essential tips to develop a strategy with data-driven analytics and the proper assessment, ultimately leading you to select the right influencer for your next campaign!

TIP #1

Assess follower-to-engagement ratio to reveal the use of fake followers — In 2019, it was reported that fake followers cost advertisers $1.3 billion in fraudulent activity. This is an issue as fake followers won't translate into actual sales. By calculating an influencer's engagement rate, brands can leverage the below formula as a filter to reveal whether someone's followers are fake and if they're translating into an organic high engagement rate.

CHARTS

To take it one step further, assessing the comments can also determine if they were bought or not. Generic comments that repeat the same emoji or phrase can indicate the use of fake comments and likes. Comments that demonstrate an actual brand affinity for influencers or the brand tend to be more detail-oriented and extensive. Beware of the below when seeking your next brand collaboration.

TIP #2

Does their brand match your company? — Knowing your audience is vital to any marketing strategy, so why not apply that same standard to influencer marketing? Before signing a contract with your influencer of choice, we encourage you to request audience insights. This will give you a better understanding of whether they reach audiences in the right location, age range, and gender for your brand. Also, analyze their previous posts and ask yourself, how did they perform? Would their followers demonstrate an affinity for your product or brand? The closer the influencer's niche is to your product or brand, the better their audience will react to your partnership, as it will come across most naturally, rather than being a forced partnership.

TIP #3

No engagement with competitors — Trust is earned, not given, and we see that through the relationship between influencers and their followers. If they promoted your competitor last week and promoted your brand today, it could cause some confusion and dilute the significance of your product. This also applies throughout your partnership. Although it might seem like a big request, you can add a clause into your contract stating that they cannot work with any of your direct competitors as long as they work with your brand. This exclusivity will allow your brand to stand out within its content and start to form a relationship with their followers and generate the most ROI.

Whether you're working with nano, micro, or macro-influencers — approaching your strategy from a data-driven point gets you one step closer to making a more significant impact with your ad spend.