Why Working With Hospitality Influencers Is A Must For Your Business

I've done quite a lot of videos and podcasts and blogs and etc talking about influencer marketing and you coming into this video, coming into this podcast, wanting to find out more about working with influencers. So what I wanted to do is to delve down into a couple of extra little ways and means where you can start to build relationships with influencers and then get them to come and stay at your property in exchange for helping to promote your business to their audience. So before we start, my name is Mark Simpson, I've been founder of Boostly now for six years. Coming up, I help host just like.

You with the tools, the tactics, the.

Training, but most importantly the confidence to go and get your own direct bookings using so many different types of marketing resources and tools and tips and all I want for you to do is just to try one. So if you are interested in working with an influencer then we can do so. Now if you don't know what an influencer is and please make sure that you check out the channel, there is tons and tons and tons of contact on influencer marketing. Amazing video with Harry Hugo from the from the GO agency of talking about that, about the different forms of of influences. So I won't go into too much detail about that but what I want for you to do is just to really sort of shake your head, give your head a wobble and sort of forget about everything you think of what an influencer is. An influencer isn't somebody with millions and millions and millions of followers. What I want for you to do and to figure out is and to sort of change your mindset is that everybody who comes and stays with you is an influencer in their own way, shape or form. Every guest is an influencer who can talk about your business. But what I want to do is in this video is how do you find those people that have got a really engaged following that are maybe about three or four hour drive circle around where you are that would be interested in working with you to promote your business, your brand to their followers. So there's got to be a relationship, there's got to be a matchup, you've got to have it like the ecosystem system. For example, if you've got a family friendly property, so it's family friendly, everything about you is for families, you know, loads of room, all the space, cool things to do, etc, you're not going to go and try and find an influencer or a person of influence online that is catered towards going out, getting Larry and all those things it just doesn't match up. So how do you approach number one? What you're going to do is, is utilize the best channel for this, which is Instagram. Instagram is one of the easiest ways of doing so because unlike any other platform, you can send a message to them without them following you. Which is key because if you try doing this on Twitter, it wouldn't work. LinkedIn, it's very hard to do so. But you can send a message to somebody on Instagram if they don't follow you, which is, which is cool because what you can do is you can start to look on Instagram for people that have got popular followings. And again, it's, it's, it's sometimes hard to see if it's a real following or a fake following. And a fake following is somebody that pays for fake followers. There's so many fake follower programs and softwares and things out there. And unfortunately people do so to trick the brands to thinking, well, actually, hang on a second, this person is really popular because they've got 1 million followers, but 999,000 of them are fake and bought. So people do do that and people used to get caught out. Luckily, thanks to Social Chain and some really cool software that's out there, they can highlight when people are a fake follower or real follower. But anyway, you can go and you can start to follow them and what I would recommend you do, and don't do this instantly, but follow them for about a month to two months. If anybody's been involved with network marketing, you know that this is one of the things that they teach you time and time again. Follow people, find out more about them, send a message, et cetera. We're not going to do that. What we're going to do is we're going to follow them and make sure you engage with them. So I would recommend picking three to five people max. Three to five people. Do a bit of research. If you want a bit more of a deep dive on this do go and check out all the free videos that we've got on the Booster YouTube channel where you can find out more about that. Just go and type in Influencer in the search bar on YouTube. It's the best way of finding it all. Again, if you're a member of the boostly academy, you know exactly where to go into the vault to get the full deep dive, the exact templates and everything that I use to do. So you can go and grab that as well. Boostlyacademy.com but what I would recommend that you do is find somebody, three to five people, and follow them consistently. Check out what they're posting, check their stories, check the posts, make sure you hit a like, make sure you show up in the comments and get their attention. And then after about a month or six weeks or two months, if you feel like this is somebody that you could have a connection to, but you would actually want to have a chat to, this is a good way of describing it. If you would like to have a little discussion, a discussion, a proper discussion, have a chat with them, actually welcome them, and sit down and have some, spend some time with them, then this is the next step. What you're going to do is you're going to approach the influencer of choice and whoever it may be. You may start with three to five and you may whittle it down to one or two. But over time you just send a couple of messages and again, just, just chatty, just say, oh, this is really cool. X, Y and Z. They may reply, they may not. But over time what you'll do is you'll find them on Instagram. And what I would do is I'd pick up the message and I'd send a voice message. Voice messages stand out so much because it has that level of intrigue around it. When someone sends me a voice note, bear in mind, I get lots of messages, emails, LinkedIn, you name it. Just what I do now, it attracts lots of messages, which is cool, I love it. But the ones that I will bookmark or go back to is the voice notes, because it's intriguing, I don't know what it is. So send a little voice note, no more than one minute, and just explain what you do and that you'd like to work with them. And again, so send a voice note, put a little note in your reminder to chase them up for you. 24, 48, 72 hours. If they don't listen back, and if they don't listen back or they don't reply, then what you're going to do then is you're going to go do a little bit of digging. So go find their blog. Every single one of them will have a blog of some sorts because they will have got taught in influencer school or whatever it would be that they've gone to. But you need to have a blog for SEO and all that. So cool things. But everybody has one. And in there you'll find their email address. Go and get the email address and send them an email. Now, the reason why this is cool is that so many influencers or influential people will just get messages on social media. They don't really get emails anymore. So if you send an email and if you use a cool tool like Boomerang, so the Boomerang app, I recommend it, it's a Gmail extension. I've got all of the members of Boostly team, Boostly members, as in the people who work for Boostly, using it because it's such a powerful tool. When you send an email, you will get notified when, number one, they open the email and number two, it will get boomeranged. So it gets sent to the top of your inbox after a certain amount of days if they haven't replied, opened or clicked on the link. So again, it keeps it all nice and organized. And in terms of you and your timekeeping, doing this and what you're going to do and what you want to try and achieve with this is you want to basically send an email just saying, hey, I send you a message on Instagram, I love what you do. Don't have it as a big paragraph, a big novel. Just a couple of lines are saying, I would love to chat to you about potentially working with you on an upcoming project. Would you be interested? Okay, super simple. Again, put a little boomerang on it for maybe 72 to five days, 72 hours to five days. And if they haven't got back to you at that point, then what I would just do is just say, you know what, they're too busy, they haven't got the time, they haven't got the systems and structures in place, they haven't got an assistant, they haven't got things in place. They're just not going to be a good person to work with. Me personally, if they haven't responded within a week, whether it's on an Instagram message or on an email, and they haven't seen that after one more chasing as well, I would say rule of three, move on. Because a good influencer, a good business owner, a good person will have the systems and the structures in place to where they can reach out or reply. And if they haven't, then it just means that they're all over the place, they're skitty as. And it would never be a good deal working with them because actually getting to work or agreeing with a date with them is going to be a nightmare. But that's how I would play it. Start off with Instagram, make sure again, you're going to follow them. So don't go balls out, don't just literally follow them. And then Send that message on the same day because it's spammy as follow them, get to know them and then start with 3 to 5. And again, if you want to find how to find influencers, look on the Booster YouTube channel. There's tons of videos on this. And then obviously the boost, the academy, you've got the vault. Once you've found your influencer, follow them, you know, for a good month to eight weeks, get to know them, get to know their personality. You'll see the type of post, you'll get to see all of the engagement and the audience and the people that respond to it, which is good. And then once you've got there and you feel like you could actually sit down and have a chat with them, then you'll reach out. Start with Instagram, start with a voice note, and then what you will do is if they don't respond within sort of four hours, find their blog, find their email address and send them a message. Or before the email just come to mind, try and find another social channel that they're on that they're not as popular. Big one, this one. So if they're super popular on Instagram, say 50,000 followers, but you can find their LinkedIn and it's only got like 100 people, they're connected to send a message, the more likely that notification will pop up and they'll more likely see it than Instagram with a, an absolute barrage of messages coming in. It could be that you see that they're on Facebook or they could be on Twitter or whatever. It could be find a channel that they're not as popular on and send them a message there, it's more likely to get their attention. And if they miss that email, and if after email, after five days, once you go in the boomerang and all of that, if they haven't got by, move on. But hopefully 8 out of 10 times they will reach back to you and you can start that dialogue, you can arrange for them to come and see. But that next step is going to be another podcast episode. So this is like a part two coming up. If this is the first time that you've checked this out, then please make sure you hit the thumbs up button. You subscribe, download, do all that jazz. If you want more of this and if you want me to actually get, get an influencer on to do a live video interview where we can have a little back and forth and find out more about this, let me know. And if you want to check out part two, make sure you subscribe, turn on the notifications and I'll let you know when that video and that podcast is ready. Thank you so much for stopping by. My name is Mark Simpson. Let's stay proactive. Let's not be reactive. Let's go get some direct bookings.

Thank you so much for checking out today's podcast episode. Now, before you head and go anywhere else, before you click to the next episode, before you do that, do me one big favor and go check out boostly.co.uk trust IPRAC are the sponsors of all of the Boostly content and the reason why I work with them and the reason why we spread the message of IPRAC is that when a host or a company is looking to get more into direct bookings, the main question they have is around trust. As in will a guest trust that I am a true and real business? Will IPRAC take care of all of that? And they've got a special offer that is only available to Boostly people. But to do that you need to go to Boostly, which is b o o s tly.co.uk forward/trust. You can find out all the information there. You can book in a demo, book in a call, and then you will get your super special offer that is only available to Boostly peoples. Thank you again for tuning in. Do go check out Iprac. We'll be back again very shortly with another podcast episode, but until then, we'll see you all very soon.

Take care.