The Future of Influencer Marketing: Is It a Fad or a Force to Be Reckoned With?
Influencer marketing has been a popular strategy for hospitality businesses in recent years. By working with influencers who have a large following on social media, businesses can reach a wider audience and generate interest in their properties. However, influencer marketing is not without its complexities.
One of the biggest challenges with influencer marketing is finding the right influencers to work with. There are a lot of influencers out there, and not all of them are created equal. You need to find influencers who have a relevant audience for your business, and who are likely to create authentic and engaging content about your property. Not to say there is no value, we believe it’s shifting dynamic and be careful to invest to quickly.
Another challenge with influencer marketing is measuring the ROI. It can be difficult to track how many bookings you generate from an influencer campaign. And even if you can track bookings, it's hard to say how much of an impact the influencer had on those bookings.
Marketing Budget Spent on Influencer Marketing for Vacation Rentals (in millions of US dollars)
For all of these reasons, it's no surprise that the complexities of influencer marketing for hospitality are starting to become difficult to manage. Businesses are starting to balance the ROI as budgets have exploded over the past five years. As you can see, the trend is clear: marketing budgets spent on influencer marketing for vacation rentals have been increasing steadily over the past five years. This is likely due to the increasing popularity of influencer marketing as a marketing strategy, as well as the growing number of vacation rental businesses that are using influencer marketing to reach a wider audience.
Instead, it may seem obvious to managers and industry leaders that businesses should remain vigilant and remain focus on the guests themselves. Realizing that the guests are the true ambassadors of your properties should always help decide the ultimate decision where capital should be spent, especially when things get tight. As we all know, as guests have a positive experience, they are more likely to share their photos and videos on social media, and they are more likely to recommend the property to their friends and family.
We call this the true economies of scale and it drastically reduces Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). For the future we see a blended model between guests and influencer marketing. Tools will get better overtime to really target campaigns and initiatives for each and every property. Not to mention the managing bad reviews from guests is an entirely different battle that needs to be removed from the equation of booking.
When you focus on the true guest experience, you don't need to worry about influencer marketing. Guests will do the marketing for you. We built JENIE with the property manager and guest who actually experience the property in mind. By allowing the property to leverage their guests we believe this will lower your CAC and allow you to remain focused on their experience so they ultimately recommend the property after their stay.