Influencers (n.m.): advocates who recommend a purchase, prescribers whose choices are binding on buyers, and opinion leaders who influence the perception of the offer.
We prefer to call them content creators, or talents, as they have been at the heart of our campaigns at Travel-Insight for several years now. Creators, because they are freelancers, entrepreneurs who produce photos, videos and speeches for qualified audiences, and talents, because it’s their tone, their digital and artistic identity that sets them apart.
If they are at the heart of our digital communication campaigns, it’s for two main reasons.
The first is that this is an area of investment that has emerged in recent years, alongside press relations, in advertisers’ communications and marketing budgets.
We need to listen to our customers, brands, destinations and tourism players, to answer their questions and respond to their desire to invest in this new area of digital communication.
The second reason why we are concentrating our efforts on this fast-growing marketing area is the results we are seeing.
In 4 years, we’ve worked with over 100 content creators, bloggers and social network professionals on assignments for destinations and tourism brands.
In the Dominican Republic alone, 23 influencers went on mission for the destination, in groups or as individuals.
The result?
12,340,619 people reached on social networks between 2017 and 2019.
Did you know that the 1pm news on TF1 attracts 6 million viewers?
The majority of social network users are millenials, aged between 18 and 34.
This raises the question of their purchasing power, and how private brands and budgets can convert them into buying decisions.
Where public players will capitalize primarily on brand awareness, travel agencies, airlines, hoteliers or receptives want to see an impact on their sales.
In 2018, we created a meeting between a travel agency and a content creator.
We told you about this project in an article on Designing a trip with an influencer.
A gamble that generated 100k euros in sales for the travel agency on an influencer marketing campaign.
Influencer marketing therefore generates not only awareness, but also purchasing actions.
Today, it’s no longer necessary to convince a brand to be present on social networks, its digital showcase, but influencers still often have an unprofessional and costly image.
Yet the figures are in their favor.
Did you know that in France, 61% of consumers interact with an influencer at least once a day, and that 80% of consumers have already made a purchase following a recommendation from an influencer?(Source Rakuten Marketing).
The term “influencer”, often overused and with a questionable reputation, now hides a real profession that propels brands and products forward every day.
Have you never experienced the power of recommendation?
Wouldn’t you, dear readers, prefer to rely on the opinion of someone close to you or an expert when choosing between several products or services?
Isn’t a word from outside a brand more credible than direct communication from the brand itself?
The first advantage of influencer marketing is its power of recommendation, based on credibility and authenticity.
A campaign with influencers enables you to reach targets in a more intimate, more subtle way than traditional marketing.
It’s not the brand that speaks, but a person with whom its community identifies.
A person who speaks in the first person singular and who has strong prescriptive power.
Users are more aware of digital communication and see the tricks of the trade; they know that brands are present on social networks with a commercial objective.
Users are therefore more receptive to commercial content produced by influencers, who also integrate it into a more personal and authentic universe, and choose the product or brand with which they associate themselves.
INSTAGRAM, the number 1 tool for Influence marketing
With 1 billion monthly users, and 64% between the ages of 18 and 34, the platform is the most sought-after by brands in all sectors, for this audience: the opinion leader on digital, with exponential purchasing power.
This is a natural fit with our communication strategies: firstly, to make a brand or destination known (audience power), to make it loved (embodiment of assets and values), to make people act (to encourage them to join, interact, consume).
Instagram is constantly developing its “call to action” tools along these lines: Inspirational and viral reels, swipe-up links, lives for “no-net” speaking, filters for brand appropriation from home, re-shares, hashtags, highlights… On Instagram, all formats and all times of content consumption are available.
This is the platform that has turned influencer marketing into a legitimate and revolutionary business strategy.
The popularity of this new practice has become such that the number of influencers has exploded in the space of a few years.
In fact, influencer marketing is growing at a rate of 50% a year, despite the fact that the very concept of digital “influence” didn’t exist before the arrival of the application 10 years ago.
How can we explain this evolution?
While advertising on your social media channels (SMO) remains an essential budget to master in order to convert, influencers are a complement that allows you to bypass the barriers inherent in traditional advertising and communicate with your audience in a more authentic, less intrusive way.
They help you forge real links by offering relevant content, and build trust and humanity.
Of course, the dazzling success of influencer marketing has cast doubt on its durability and relevance, with some seeing it as a passing fad that has become too competitive and overpriced.
“On the contrary, forecasts indicate that they should further increase their influence in 2020 and be worth nearly $8 billion by the end of the year.” Source Influencer Marketing Hub
Video, the big winner in content creation formats
Video is the ideal type of content for conveying a message or showcasing the quality of a product/service.
Users absorb 90% more messages via video, compared to reading an article.
This content format is therefore much more impactful.
Some experts estimate that video will account for 80% of global online traffic by 2020.
In fact, the stories format is the most consumed on Instagram, and yet its ephemeral aspect doesn’t alter its impact and virality with audiences.
At the same time, let’s look at the figures for Youtube, which attracts 2 billion users worldwide every month.
The message is clear: the world wants to consume information and video inspiration.
Lifestyle marketing, tourism’s big brother
It is our driving force, the incubator of digital communication trends.
The lifestyle sector has shown us the way by dissociating its press and influencer budgets.
No, the influencer is not an e-journalist, but a creator, marketer and publicist.
The stakes and collaborations are not the same, and neither are your objectives.
If we’re heading in this direction, it’s also because our budgets are different, and we don’t offer the same services or invest the same human and production costs as the fashion, beauty or food sectors.
Our industry is slowly but surely moving in this new direction, and is investing more and more in this sector.
Budgets are on the rise, reflecting the ROI of past operations.
On average, companies worldwide earn $6.50 for every dollar spent on influencer marketing. Source : Tomoson
Transforming communication investments by a factor of 6, but also boosting events, embodying product launches, rejuvenating an image, gaining positive opinions and customer feedback, and increasing notoriety through these opinion leaders: these are all crucial issues for an advertiser that we can’t ignore, especially in view of the sectoral upheaval we’re undergoing in 2020.
This year, to reinforce our influencer expertise, we incubated a lifestyle influencer marketing service within the Travel-Insight agency: Coupdepush.
So, for several months now, we’ve been working alongside mainstream and mass-market brands to manage influencer budgets and campaigns, while accompanying professional influencers in some of their collaborations to increase engagement and creative activations.
By managing such large-scale budgets and projects (retail, banking, food, beauty, fashion, technology), we have solidified our analysis of best practices for influencer marketing that works, and this has fueled our analysis and recommendations for the benefit of the tourism sector.
Telling stories
Creating encounters between influencers and brands, telling stories, imagining differentiating concepts: this is the essential recipe for creating emotion in our digital audiences.
Influence in other sectors is aggressive and powerful, and content creators are over-solicited (on average, they receive 4 requests for collaboration a day).
To keep users and their opinion leaders interested, and take them along on your adventures, we need to redouble our strategy and exploit all possible levers to extract as many KPIs as possible.
A written history for Orleans Loire Valley tourism
Creating this encounter and storytelling the campaign will be the first asset of a good digital communications agency.
Similarly, if the number of influencers is exponential, so are the requests for collaboration.
An agency is there as an intermediary to help you make the right choices, on the basis of criteria that go beyond the mere number of subscribers or a celebrity.
The quality of the content, the rate of engagement, the tone and aesthetics of the content in line with brand values, contracts and budgets…
As part of the creation of a digital communications strategy, we always take care to integrate Influencer Relations, as this is what enables you to create a general campaign relay and carry messages and calls to action on social networks.
Like a digital press attaché, we represent and guide our clients all year round to maximize influencer marketing and boost awareness of the destinations and brands we work with.
It also means keeping an eye on ROI opportunities: content recovery, new product incarnation, new tool activation, e-reputation, and maintaining an acute knowledge of the tools and legal frameworks in this sector.
Just as, on the other side of this agreement, we must ensure that the values, commitments, content and audiences of the influencers who place their trust in us are respected.
The intermediary, this link, only makes sense in the context of a reciprocal and transparent commitment, because it’s in our interest to work over the long term, earning the trust of both parties.
For influencer marketing to continue boosting sales and brand awareness, we need to be vigilant in our campaigns, and respect the entire chain to maintain optimal quality.
If you’re reading this, you too may have done a Google search to understand “influencer marketing” in our industry. An online search that has increased by 1500% in 3 years(Source: InfluencerMarketingHub).
So you’re not alone in wanting to understand and take part in this movement that combines communication and marketing.
If you still doubt the power of a “virtual” audience on Instagram, we’ve extracted some figures from media we’re all more used to.
Like M6’s sacrosanct 12.45, the news program that attracts 1.59 million viewers every day.
Did you know that 22-year-old Lena Situations now has an audience of 3 million subscribers?
As for our daily Figaro newspaper, with a daily circulation of 200K, we’re seeing more stories being opened on the account of Camille Callen, aka Noholita, who a few months ago announced in an interview his conversion rate (sales after a story or post): at least 2%, or 4,000 immediate buyers per product.
Let’s target our campaigns according to the audiences we want to reach, as ages and interests obviously vary.
But let’s not forget that our travelers of today, and tomorrow, likely have an Instagram account, to get inspired, to get informed, to buy, and to show off about your destination, your hotel, your airline.
Just like their favorite influencer, they will in turn viralize your communication campaign.
It’s up to us to master it.
Find out more about influencer marketing on Coupdepush.com
