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In the modern digital age, social media is more popular and has more users than ever before. This social media boom has created a very lucrative industry for influencers, whether they're celebrities using it as an additional revenue stream or a career influencer who built a following by epitomizing trends and churning out inspiration content for followers. As we all know, where there is money, imposters will follow, cashing in on the wave of marketing budgets with hefty allocations for influencer marketing. And obviously disingenuous promotional content by some influencers has led to some serious consumer scrutiny, even when influencers are legit.

We understand that it's intimidating to broach a type of social media advertising that has endured some fumbles in the past, so we're going to break down best practices for acquiring and maintaining the right social media influencers for your brand. With a well-rounded marketing plan and these eight tips, influencer content can be an extremely effective tool in your marketing arsenal.

1. Assess Your Goals

Before committing to taking on a social media influencer, make sure that what the influencer offers will accomplish your pre-established marketing goals. If your goal is to get new clients flooding through the doors of your hotel or to quickly increase your online bookings, influencers probably aren't going to provide the results you're looking for. Influencers are most effective for brand awareness. If you're an established brand, use influencers to let consumers know you rolled out a new service or amenity. If you're a new brand looking to get on the radar of consumers bitten by the wanderlust bug, getting onto a travel personality's page is ideal.


2. Make Sure It's a Fit

Know who you're influencing! As with any good marketing initiative, you need an established consumer persona so that when choosing an influencer, you can make sure they are the type of person your ideal customer would want to take advice from.


3. Do Your Homework

If your resort in Napa Valley, which caters to chardonnay-sipping travelers who love the finer things in life, ends up on an influencer's page with a bio that reads "World Traveler" but it turns out they travel by bike and stay in hostels, it won't do you much good. Make sure you go beyond the bio and follower count when choosing influencers. In order to make a great business match, the influ encer you choose should have qualities that are parallel with your brand. Consider the big-picture factors:
• Moral Guidelines: Make sure the influencer - and all brands with which they have worked in the past - adhere to your brand's overarching moral guidelines. You take moral alignment into consideration when hiring internal personnel, so don't ignore it here, or else it might negatively impact you by association.
• Brand Aesthetics: Put plainly, an influencer's persona should match your brand and the goals of your current marketing campaign. A chef or foodie influencer could be a good fit for promoting a new restaurant in your hotel, but take it a step further and make sure the food they normally promote on their page is aligned with the offerings at your restaurant.


4. Reach

Although reach - the number of people you can potentially communicate with through your influencer's follower base - is an essential metric to consider, be sure to also factor in the quality of reach. Reaching the higher-niche audience of a mommy blogger is more valuable to a family-centric resort than reaching hundreds of thousands of disinterested followers on a celebrity's page, for example.

5. Engagement

When vetting a potential influencer for your brand, make sure you assess the level of engagement throughout their page. A few things point to an influencer who's great at engaging their followers:

  • The influencer regularly responds to comments
  • The influencer prompts feedback from followers through story polls, asking questions in their post captions, etc.
  • Followers of the influencer comment and interact with the influencer's feed repeatedly - a sure sign of good relationship building

6. Believe Us…

Reliability is huge for influencers, as we previously mentioned, because of the tumultuous history between consumers and influencers. People are wary o f influencers who promote too many brands or whose endorsements come off as too scripted. Be conscious of an influencer's advertisement saturation: If an influencer promotes too many brands, not only will consumers be distrustful, but your brand will most likely get lost in the crowd anyway.


7. Give Them the Reins

Many (good) influencers are creative, generating content constantly and often posting multiple times daily. Don't underestimate their ability to craft a message that their audience will be receptive to - it's why you hired them, after all! Educate your influencers about your brand, your property, and what you are trying to get them to convey, then allow them to appeal to their audience in a way only they know how. And going back to point number 6, it will come off more genuine, which is a big plus.


8. Look Beyond Social

A lot of influencers write blogs, run websites, create videos, or have some other sort of outlet adjace nt to social media that they are talented with as well. Get them involved in other aspects of your marketing initiatives by having them write a guest blog or make a promotional video for your hotel's website.

Jennifer Munro
Copy & Photo Editor
Hawthorn Creative