Influencers marketing: micro is better

The Travel & Tourism market is one of the most influenced by the word of mouth. In fact, it is convincing that a person would rely on someone that he/she believes to be trustworthy when it is time to book a holiday or a trip. This is true both when booking a hotel and when looking for a more complex product, as a package tour.

In this scenario, blog and social medias have deeply changed the customer’s relationship with the holidays market. They have provided a huge amount of advices which daily influences the customers’ behaviour. What is now called “influencers marketing” was born, and the players of the Travel & Tourism industry could not stand still. This is a particular sector of marketing which uses online-influencing people (more precisely, accounts) to obtain the publication of “sponsored” advice following a payment, the free supply of products or the free access to VIP services. “Sponsored” needs to be enclosed in quotation marks, because it is not always true that the published message is clearly recognisable as advertisement.

Considering the high number of global influencers, one of the biggest challenges of creating a good advertising campaign based on a “paid word of mouth” is selecting the people to be involved in the visibility actions for the brand. Some times ago, the main method to choose an account was considering its number of followers. Now, several researches demonstrate that the most efficient way to guarantee a major return in investment is considering the quality of the influence.

A recent study realised by Markerly analysed 800.000 Instagram users, about 5 million posts, which gave a surprising result:

microinfluencers-en

Provided that influencers who have less than 1000 followers result to be the ones with more influence, the best correlation between influence and managing complexity is found in the segment of users who have between 10.000 and 100.000 followers. The old myth of the celebrity or the web star is unmasked in favour of “normal” people who managed to build a considerable audience.

The reason is simple: the higher the number of followers is, the more the influencer’s action turns from a vertical to a horizontal level. Horizontality is an enemy to focused communication. This is why a horizontal influencer results to be less efficient in communicating with the referring target of a campaign. 

In the Travel & Tourism industry in particular, one of the necessary keys to win the competitiveness is being prepared to face the digital challenge. At Twissen we observed that influencers are a useful tool to communicate brands and products. Notwithstanding, they need to be used capably: improvisation could be risky.

 



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