Hotel Marketing with Influencers: A Quick Guide

If you feel like you’ve exhausted all the other hotel marketing ideas to give your business a leg-up, then why not try hotel marketing with influencers?

Social media influencers on a number of platforms can help boost the awareness of your hotel while inspiring their followers to get involved and rent your rooms. That said, if you’ve never worked with influencers before, it can be a challenge to strike an arrangement.  Luckily, connecting with influencers on social media is pretty simple if you know what to look for. Here’s a quick guide you can use to execute hotel marketing with influencers and help grow your hotel’s success: 

Find Influencers in Your Price Range

First off, you have to find influencers in your price range to help you with your hotel marketing ideas. 

This means assessing how much money you have in your hotel marketing budget to spend on influencer marketing and choosing someone with the right type of following to promote your brand. 

Here’s a simple breakdown of what the typical influencer costs according to their following: 

• Micro-Influencers with Less than 1000 Followers: anywhere from $50 to $100 per post 
• Middle-Level Influencers with Less than 100K Followers: anywhere from $200 to $500 per post
• Top-Level Influencers with Over 100K Followers: anywhere from $1,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars per post

At the bottom level, you can easily find everyday users on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube with solid followings and partner with them for advertising and user-generated content. Just send a simple message to their inbox and offer your proposal and terms. For middle-level influencers, you may want to investigate their following to ensure that it aligns with yours. Then, make sure that they have some experience with hotel marketing or at least with other brands that are comparable to yours. Send them your pitch and see what they say. For top-level talent, you may have to do some digging and reach out to their management company in order to strike a deal. 

Obviously, affording a top-level influencer can be costly, but the reward could be tons of new followers and customers supporting your hotel. Not to mention, good press from an influencer can skyrocket your online engagement and turn your hotel in a huge success overnight. 

Just be sure to look online for influencers you align with and that understand your brand. Once you do, put together a clear outline and incentives/terms to make sure everyone is on the same page. 

Some Hotel Marketing Ideas to Try with Influencers

So after you’ve selected which influencers you want to work with, your next step is to figure out what hotel marketing ideas you want to try with them.

For instance, you have to ask the influencers to do something to promote your hotel to their followers. Sometimes this can be as simple as a video or Instagram post to their followers, but if you want to get a bit more creative, here are some other hotel marketing ideas to consider:

• Invite the influencers to your hotel for a free visit and have them film the entire experience—and share it with their followers
• Have an influencer write an informative blog post your hotel and what makes it the best choice among hotel guests
• Use your hotel reception area or lobby to host an influencer event where followers can come take pictures and interact with the online star for a set period of time
• Create a dynamic content plan that cross promotes Instagram posts, Twitter posts, blog posts, and YouTube videos to cover each platform and reach the greatest amount of people

The beauty is that hotel marketing ideas can never really go wrong. With content being entirely online, you have the freedom to try new things and gain traction. The best part about working with influencers is that they already have a successful formula in place to guarantee results. As long as your mission and hotel marketing strategy aligns with theirs, you should have no problem finding success and reaching new customers.