The role of influencer marketing in the marketing strategies of DMOs

The objectives of destination marketing varied between the studied DMOs, but all agreed that collaborating with social media influencers strongly support their marketing strategies. Several destinations place a strong emphasis on sustainable tourism development - one of the inter-viewed DMOs even referred to their wish to decrease the number of international visitors in their destination. A few of the interviewees aim to highlight sustainable values referring to the sustainable local lifestyle in their destination in their collaborations with influencers. Instead of actively aiming to attract prospective international visitors, one of the interviewed DMOs aims

to approach the visitors who already are in the destination and use influencers to drive attention to the less known areas of the destination through their created content. Some of the interviewed DMOs do not represent an internationally well-known destination, and for them, increasing the awareness of their destinations in a sustainable manner in their strategically selected target mar-kets is listed as the one of the main objectives highly supported by influencer marketing. In some cases, maintaining a strong online presence including recommendations and brand am-bassadorships with influencers and having an extensive amount of updated information about the destination in various channels are also considered important objectives in terms of collab-orating with influencers.

In terms of destination marketing, social media influencers are primarily employed to share their experiences authentically and communicate positive characteristics identified with the destination brands instead of ultimately increasing the volume of international tourism. The interviewed DMOs work regularly with influencers and execute several collaborations and campaigns annually. They all have experiences of collaborations with individual influencers as well as groups of influencers. In recent years, one of the interviewed DMOs reported having over 100 influencers staying in their destination in a year whereas another DMO had approxi-mately 50 influencers as guests and negotiations with other 50 influencers in one year. Some of the interviewees recognize the strategic importance of influencer marketing, but stress that their organizations have not yet found the optimal practice to execute it. For most of the interviewed DMOs, influencer marketing is strongly integrated in their organization’s marketing strategy.

According to one of the interviewees, influencer marketing is an essential part of their digital marketing strategy whereas in another DMO, influencer marketing is not tied into one depart-ment as it affects the whole organization. A couple of the interviewees depart-mentioned that their organization no longer uses traditional marketing tools, such as buying advertising space on newspapers, as they only focus on building and strengthening their online presence where in-fluencer marketing adds considerable value. As expressed by most of the interviewed DMO representatives, the basis for integrating influencers into destination marketing is that they are employed to various destination marketing activities to support the DMO’s strategy.

“Normally, we have an influencer line which is like one leg in our digital marketing and that’s what we have been doing for quite many years, the last 3 years.” – Wonderful Copenhagen

“In our organization, influencer marketing is considered a matter of the whole organization, not merely one department.” – Helsinki Marketing

As it emerged in the interviews, influencer marketing adds significant value to DMOs’ market-ing efforts. Influencers can even be considered as an external resource, which enables DMOs to reach their strategic marketing objectives related to destination branding, creating awareness, capturing attention, and maintaining a presence in the potential travelers’ minds. Besides work-ing with traditional media and invitwork-ing journalists writwork-ing on newspapers on press trips, it has become essential to collaborate with social media influencers to maintain a wide presence on social media as well. Increasing awareness and strengthening the brand of the destination by emphasizing the distinctive elements of the destination brand, increasing the amount of eWOM related to the destination, and the opportunity to reach new target groups were expressed as main advantages of collaborating with influencers by the interviewed DMO representatives.

Many of the interviewees have experienced that the content produced by the influencers have directed attention to some relatively unknown elements in their destination as well as given visibility to some local businesses. Through the influencers who create relevant content featur-ing the brand messages of the DMOs and highlight their focus areas and marketfeatur-ing themes, DMOs can reach social media users who they could not otherwise reach with their own com-munications on their official social media accounts. Some influencers are profiled with a certain topic such as gastronomy, architecture, or design, which gives the DMO an opportunity to es-tablish their destinations within that area through an influencer and therefore, strengthen the positioning of their destination brand. As a marketing tool, influencer marketing is perceived as extremely strong by the interviewees because the content is often of high quality and can be used afterwards on the DMOs’ own social media channels. Furthermore, the interviewed DMO representatives have experienced that the executed collaborations have directed new followers to their own official social media accounts and the produced content, especially on blogs, are often considered to support and improve the search engine performance of the DMOs’ official websites.

“Through them (influencers) we can effectively do digital word-of-mouth and recommendation mar-keting and through them, we get to communicate our focus areas and the themes that are important to us. And of course, the collaborations make it possible to reach new target groups. And surely, increase

the awareness of our brand and destination. “–Visit Turku

“One thing is that they’re posting the content or video on their feeds. So, for us it’s that we reach some target groups from their following that we wouldn’t reach by our communications. We think we

would not reach them ourselves. We reach new target groups with relevant content.”

–Wonderful Copenhagen

“It’s been successful most of the time because we have really nice pictures and good content that we can use even like a year or so. Great Instagram stories, Instagram posts. Based on specific theme like

food and so we don’t have to go and actually look for new content.” – Live Riga