One of my favorite things about blogger outreach as a marketing strategy is thinking outside the box and coming up with creative ways to reach new consumers.
Among the many verticals that may be relevant to your brand, studies and trends are showing that travel bloggers are surprisingly effective partners for many types of brands.
Types of Brands Working with Travel Bloggers and Successful Techniques
To get a feel for travel blogger outreach strategies let’s start with a top level overview of how marketers are finding creativity and success.
Fashion: All types of fashion brands have jumped on the travel bloggers band wagon. By far, the most popular strategy is for brands to send bloggers clothing or accessories specific for a blogger’s upcoming trip.
Many fashion brands create an ongoing strategy with a handful of bloggers and send them an outfit for all of their trips. This leads to authentic and visual content from admired influencers.
Hotels and Resorts: The way destination locations are working with travel bloggers is advancing quickly. Some hotels even offer discounts and free rooms to influencers with large followings in exchange for social media and blog posts!
Restaurants: Restaurants, who have a country wide location, have teamed up with travel bloggers to highlight new food and strategies. From gluten free menus to image revamping—connecting with travel bloggers has helped restaurant chains get their message across to many people. After all, who doesn’t go out to eat?
Brands for people on a budget: One of the more popular niches within the travel blogging genre is traveling on a budget. Therefore, sending items to these bloggers is a great way for brands that appeal to budget savvy consumers to spread their message.
Tech brands: Travel bloggers of all types need to find a way to easily integrate technology into their “on the go” way of living. This philosophy obviously appeals to consumers of all types. So many tech brands are working with bloggers on showcasing how their products can aid in their busy life style.
Why Working with Travel Bloggers is a Great Idea
In case you need convincing, here are a few reasons why marketers prefer working with travel bloggers over other types of influencers.
- Their posts show an authentic experience with the product they are integrating into their trip. By far, the most effective thing marketers can do for their brand is to create experiences for influencers with their brand. Having a travel blogger write about how they use a product in a practical and entertaining way is word of mouth marketing gold.
- They are followed by a variety of people. Whether your brand appeals to active vacationers or consumers who follow travel bloggers for entertainment reasons—travel bloggers are not only some of the most followed influencers but they are also a genre that creates more consumer engagement than other groups.
- They produce visual content. Whether you blame it on a short attention span or a draw to pretty shiny things—consumers are digesting content visually now more than ever. Travel bloggers include a ton of photos of their experiences, and this grabs people’s attention.
- They are active on a variety of social channels. In order to promote their blogs, travel bloggers are a lot like marketers in the sense they are active on a variety of digital channels. Teaming up with travel bloggers also scored brands a lot of Instagram and Facebook posts.
Easy Ways to Identify Travel Bloggers
Keep in mind that travel bloggers are contacted a lot by brands. You want to be strategic and specific in the way you go about identifying and reaching out to the right bloggers. The following ways are great strategies that I’ve seen my clients implement to foster personal relationships with the right influencers.
- Travel blogger conferences: Conferences are a great way to connect brand and influencers. Many conferences are geared toward bloggers in different genres and brands can represent their company and make personal connections.
- Blogger outreach tool: There are a handful of blogger outreach tools that help marketers identify bloggers based on content topics, social presence, traffic data and more.
- Blog rolls: This is a list of bloggers that other bloggers put together and post. What I like about these is that they are vetted by the person posting and often encompass some very specific niches.
4 Things to Keep in Mind When Working with Travel Bloggers
- Vet your bloggers before reaching out. Pass their blog through a few filters that are important to your brand. Check out their social reach, traffic data, visual appeal of their blog, non-controversial content, niche topics, etc.
- Less is more. A lot of brands work with an average of 20 travel bloggers so that they can maintain strong relationships for ongoing mentions. This allows for personalization in all areas of the blogger outreach process from pitching to following up after a post.
- Think of a way to help your bloggers create content that is inspired and engages their audience. Instead of having them post a photo of them wearing the cool shirt you sent them, foster ways for the bloggers to incorporate your product in to their vacation or specific day of travel. This creates more interesting posts and more audience engagement.
- The campaign cycle is lengthy. Because there are a few logistical components to working with travel bloggers, the time between pitching and earning a post can be long. Keep in mind travel bloggers plan ahead a lot and getting them the product and them fitting said product in to one of their travel experiences can take a few months. But, when these posts are scored they are so worth it.
Do you have any tips or questions concerning marketing with travel bloggers? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
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This is an excellent post Kristen!
We travel bloggers have a lot to offer to companies and we are very professional.
I am very happy to help them connect with readers around the world and in different languages ;)
We create a lot of content for the many social media platforms which allows to reach a wider audience/market.
One thing you can be sure of is that it is a great investment that will provide great results!
Great info for ways brands can connect with bloggers. Love it.
Great post! We work with a lot of brands who are looking for travel bloggers, this is a great way to expand your marketing strategy.