Influencer marketing for tourism destinations

Abstract

The influencer marketing is a strategy that uses the influence of prominent individuals in a certain field to drive consumers’ brand awareness or their purchasing decisions. These individuals do not have to be celebrities and they just need to create contents on a certain topic as well as have a fanbase’s support on social media. Travel influencers are people who create and share travel-related contents in forms, including blogging, sharing photos and videos, giving reviews or making comments on a service, a product or a tourist destination. Although it has a short history, this form of marketing is showing the outstanding effectiveness, as evidenced by the data on tourism industry growth, statistics on the number of travel agencies or destination marketing agencies, which are increasingly choosing to partner with travel influencers for destination marketing campaigns. In addition, the tourism industry practice has witnessed some successful destination marketing campaigns in cooperation with social media influencers, further proving the effectiveness of this form. There are some reasons for the success of these campaigns, in which the reliability, objectivity, and proximity in the way the brand message is conveyed by favorable influencers are among the outstanding advantages. This topic is still quite new in the research community, so more elaborate works are needed to increasingly shape and be able to come up with appropriate application models.