“The main reasons big brands work with
influencers are to shift brand perception,
target new consumer groups, change the
conversation, and provide engaging content.”
(DMOs) are jumping on the influencer
bandwagon, particularly on Instagram:
the Hawaii Tourism Board, Visit Dubai
and Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, to name
a few. Almost half of DMOs surveyed in
a recent study by Skift Research report a
very high or good ROI from working
with influencers.
The Cons to Working
with Influencers
While many big brands have had big
wins, there have also been some epic
fails over the past year. Influencer
campaigns can easily go upside down if
you’re not careful. From celebrities
copying and pasting their instructions
into their posts, to Kendall Jenner’s
Pepsi controversy, to the discovery that
many influencers are either buying
followers and comments or have a huge
percentage of fake followers, these fails
illustrate how influencer marketing is the
wild west of internet advertising. The
FTC has put measures in place to ensure
more transparency, but sometimes it’s
difficult to properly scrutinize
influencers.
Influencers can also be a hard spend
to justify for smaller brands. In one very
viral incident in January of this year, a
hotelier in Dublin named Paul Stenson
banned all social media influencers from
his hotel and adjoining café after a
YouTube star asked for a free stay in
exchange for promotion on her social
media channels.
Stenson had a point to make: if he let
influencers stay for free, who ultimately
pays the bills for her stay? Who pays the
hotel staff? Who pays for the utilities
used during that stay? And, cheekily, he
added, “Maybe I should tell my staff
they will be featured in your video in lieu
of receiving payment for work carried
out while you’re in residence?” He also
argued that it put the authenticity of an
influencer into question if they said
good things about something just
because it was free.
It’s a point well-made for small
brands who don’t have large marketing
budgets. You may be able to take it on
as a marketing expense if you’re a resort
spa, but for smaller establishments, it
may cut into your hard costs and profit
margins, and take money out of your
employees’ pockets. If you’re constantly
comping influencers’ services and
adjusting commissions and gratuities
downward, you’re doing your staff a
huge disservice.
It can be difficult to quantify the
ROI for an influencer campaign for spa
brands. It’s hard to tell exactly when the
guest made the decision to visit your
spa. Even with a trackable link or
discount code, “to have an exact
quantifiable amount in terms of how
much revenue was produced from that
one visit is extremely difficult,” says
Halla Rafati, public relations director for
the Four Seasons in Toronto. n
Influencer marketing is a powerful tool, but it isn’t for everyone.
If you want to grow or gain greater market share, you’ll have to
get serious about your marketing spend, tracking its ROI and
how effective it is in the long run for your spa.
ireNe MaCCaBaNte is the co-founder and creative director of chix creative, which specializes in
branding and marketing for high-end spas and spa products. macabante has over 20 years of diverse
experience in graphic design, web development, user interface design and marketing.
August 2018
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