The pandemic has changed consumer habits and the global economic state. This has had a widespread impact on most sectors and businesses, which has ultimately impacted the way businesses reach their customers with marketing, including one of the most popular and effective means, influencer marketing.
According to AnyMind Group’s State of Influence in Asia 2021 report, and with cross-border travel restricted for most regions over the past two years, influencers have taken to creating content around domestic travel.
Impact on the travel industry
The same report also highlighted that the two most popular influencer verticals in Asia are fashion and beauty influencers and arts and entertainment influencers. Apart from both sets of influencers frequently creating content around clothing and food, domestic travel also appears in the top five types of content. There was and still is demand for people to consume content around travel and new experiences.
With restrictions on travel being eased across the world, consumers are resuming their travel plans again (both domestic and international travel). This inevitably causes a rise in demand for the purchase of flight tickets and accommodation, which helps fuel the travel industry and its stakeholders.
There are many ways for travel businesses to accelerate out of the blocks, from pushing promotions to users and collaborating with consumer brands to pull in more users to utilising influencer marketing to spread the word out fast.
What can travel businesses do with influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing has come a long way since before the pandemic. One of the pain points for marketers in the past, attribution for influencer marketing campaigns to business results, is no longer a challenge for the more advanced influencer marketing platforms.
Diving deeper, consumer behaviour to reach a purchase decision has also shifted and is now driven more by online reviews and consumer experiences of a product. This presents the perfect opportunity for brands in the travel industry to work with influencers to create experience-based content that ignites aspirations, enabling these brands to reach both fans and new audiences.
For example, destination and airline brands can partner up and work with influencers to create content around aspirational experiences, from the time an influencer steps out of their house and throughout their flight to content around the destination and activities they take part in the goal.
Also Read: Business travel in the new normal: Strategies and tools for SME travel programme
In addition, other influencer-generated content can include promotional campaigns or content that shares travel tips.
One example is how an online travel company in Indonesia worked to revive the domestic travel market by utilising the power of influencer marketing. The brand tapped into the homecoming season with two exceptionally-different campaigns to drive more usage of their platform through nano and micro-influencers on TikTok.
The influencer marketing campaigns were successfully joined by 100 influencers and drew in audiences with an average engagement rate of 4.84 per cent, with up to 312,000 views from TikTok users in Indonesia.
In addition, travel brands can work on cross-border influencer marketing campaigns that leverage overseas influencers to drive more interest and excitement to the brand. By working with overseas influencers, travel brands can tap into a wider customer base compared to just domestic audiences.
The future of the travel industry and influencer marketing
According to Statista, the number of foreign tourist arrivals by air to Bali in April 2022 surged 647.844 per cent to 58,320, and those reaching Jakarta climbed 133.09 per cent to 36,000 compared to the previous year. Additionally, the number of arrivals by ship to Batam soared by 4,159 per cent to 8,140 foreign tourists.
Tourism is being revived.
It’s been more than two years since travel brands have had to look at capturing overseas mind share, and much has changed within just influencer marketing since the onset of the pandemic.
With travel brands now having to increasingly compete to get a share of tourism dollars, influencer marketing presents brands with a perfect opportunity to capture this growing pie, as it transcends geographical borders and provides marketers with a more human approach to swaying destination and purchase decisions by consumers.
Is your brand ready?
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