Collaborating with travel bloggers is a great way to market your brand. Travel bloggers have the ability to provide you with unique ideas, authentic storytelling, and cost effective marketing. Check out the top reasons brands should collaborate with travel bloggers.
So you’re thinking of working with a travel blogger to promote your brand. Great! Collaborating with travel bloggers is a really effective way of marketing your travel brand. Reach a wider audience and generate more brand awareness by partnering with trusted travel bloggers to promote your business.
Why Brands Should Collaborate with Travel Bloggers
1. Bloggers have gained the trust of their audience.
Bloggers are a hugely trusted source of information. Research from MuseFind shows that 92% of consumers trust an influencer more than an advertisement or traditional celebrity endorsement.
By putting a personal touch on every blog post, personal anecdote, Instagram caption, and Tweet, travel bloggers have been able to gain the trust of their audience. A recommendation from a blogger is almost like a recommendation from a friend.
2. You can reach a wider audience.
By collaborating with a travel blogger, you can reach a wider audience to promote your brand. Just a little bit more exposure can mean a lot of difference.
Bloggers use multiple channels to connect with their followers. They have blogs, email lists, social media, forums, and more. A blogger may be more active and have a wider reach on a platform that your brand isn’t yet established on. This is a great way to reach new people that may be interested in your brand.
3. Blog reviews help boost your brand visibility.
Quality blogs know how to rank highly for different keywords. This means your sponsored post can show up in search results for terms you weren’t already ranking for, but it also means coming up in branded search results and adding positive brand visibility.
Consumers look at a lot of different sources before making a decision to purchase. When they search for your brand, having positive reviews from different bloggers adds to your credibility and makes the consumer more comfortable choosing your brand.
4. You get access to unique stories, photography, and video content.
Bloggers put a lot of their personality into their content. Everything that makes a travel blogger stand out in a saturated market works to your advantage.
Their unique perspective, photographs, and videos can help paint your brand in a whole new light. Let a blogger have creative control over the campaign, and you’ll be amazed at how well they can make their audience connect with your product.
5. Blogs create lasting value.
While a social media post can provide instant inspiration and generate a quick buzz, a well-crafted and optimized blog post can benefit you for years to come.
Most bloggers will keep a sponsored post up for the lifetime of the blog. A well-optimized blog post can rank in the first page of search results for years. And bloggers will continue to promote older blog posts through social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
You’ll continue to reap the benefits of the collaboration even after the campaign is officially finished.
Where Brands Can Find Travel Bloggers to Collaborate With
- Contact Pages — This is the best way to connect with bloggers. Travel bloggers who are actively working with brands will usually have a Work With Me page or a Contact page on their blog. This typically outlines their audience, the types of collaborations they offer, past campaigns, and their social media.
- Social Media — You can easily find travel bloggers that work with brands by searching hashtags on social media like #sponsored, #hosted, #collab, #ad, and #partnership.
- Influencer Networks — These networks are good for when you want a lot of bloggers on a campaign or when you’re having trouble finding someone in your niche. Many influencer networks are skewed toward social media campaigns, but there are a few that are also good for blogging campaigns. Get Blogged, Intellifluence, and ValuedVoice are good places to start for your blogger outreach.
Top Tips for Working with Travel Bloggers
- Creating content takes a lot of time and effort, so compensate bloggers accordingly. You’re paying for access to a blogger’s reach, their curated and engaged audience, written content, photos and videos, social promotion, and a lifetime of advertisement on their blog.
- Bloggers can’t pay the bill with free product. That’s why many bloggers required some amount of monetary compensation along with the product to cover the costs of creating content.
- Bloggers can’t review something they haven’t tried. If you want a review of your product or service, provide the blogger with it in addition to monetary compensation.
- Only have a small budget? Be upfront about it. Many bloggers are willing to work within your budget. You may also consider offering an affiliate partnership in addition to your budget if the blogger is someone you want to create a lasting partnership with.
- If you want authenticity, let the blogger have creative control of the collaboration. We know our audience, and our readers know our voice. Readers know when something is sponsored, but they don’t mind as long as the collaboration is genuine.
- The FTC requires sponsored content to have a disclaimer. Please don’t ask us to not include this.
- Google requires sponsored links to contain a nofollow or sponsored tag. Please don’t ask us for a follow link. Going against the FTC or Google is bad for both of our businesses.
- Get a detailed report of the campaign stats, that way you know exactly how well the sponsorship did, how many people the sponsored posts reached, and more. I use InfluenceKit to provide a sleek report of my campaigns. Brands can sign up for a FREE trial here.
Want to know more about Paige Minds The Gap? Check out these links:
- Learn more about me: Who is Paige and what is Paige Minds The Gap? Learn all about me and the blog here.
- See where I’ve been published: Want to see more of my writing? See my published articles here.
- Let’s work together: Want to chat about promoting your destination or brand? See how I can help you here.
Cheers!
Paige
What are your thoughts on brands collaborating with travel bloggers? If you’re a blogger, what are your thoughts on working with brands? Leave a comment below!
