Viator is all about inspiring people to seize adventures that are available right at their fingertips. The key messaging pillars of the brand include wonder & spontaneity, five-star choices, and flexible options.
The brand was looking to deploy a multi-tiered influencer strategy to amplify Viator's diverse travel experiences, while effectively measuring the tangible impact of influencer marketing activity on brand awareness.
The perfect influencer partners would need to be those who embody the brand pillars, and have the ability to develop content that strategically weaves in the brands core messaging, while inspiring their followers to seize adventures available at their fingertips through Viator experiences.
Viator is a Tripadvisor company - I bet you didn’t know that :-). Why? Because Tripadvisor has significant brand awareness with travel consumers, but Viator as a brand does not have nearly as much awareness. Thus, The question becomes how to drive scaled awareness for a travel brand amongst passionate travel adventurers, aspirational travelers, outdoor travel enthusiasts, backyard vacationers, and do-it-for-me vacationers.
Under the theme “Do more with Viator,” Linqia strategically engaged ten influencers, a combination of celebrities who provided immediate credibility and scaled reach, with mega influencers who built their fame on social. Their task: create culturally relevant content on Instagram and TikTok to promote Viator's offerings, driving awareness, engagement, and ultimately brand favorability amongst consumers.
From river cruises to nightlife in the city, influencers captivated the most exciting summer adventures near and far, focusing on the three key brand messaging pillars of wonder & spontaneity, flexible options, and five-star choices.
Working with the right influencers was one of the biggest focuses of this campaign. Our celebrities needed to perfectly embody the brand, have an interest in travel, have the ability to create quality content, and all be within budget. We remarkably secured not one, not two, but three high-profile celebrities in Erin Andrews, Taylor Lautner, and Ian Somerhalder. All three produced beautiful content that performed incredibly well in both organic and paid media ads.
The addition of mega social influencers also provided surround sound to the celebrity posts, extending the reach and providing credibility amongst more niche audiences. The one-two punch of celebrities and mega creators was a homerun for engagement.
And let’s not forget about the value that all of this strong content had when brought into a paid media environment. Top creator videos were transformed into snappy paid media ads that were highly effective in moving consumers further down the funnel. The performance of the creator content beat category benchmarks, showing how valuable authentic, human-centric content is in a brand's paid media strategy.
All of this was wrapped in a brand lift study to ensure we could validate how influencers impacted brand favorability and awareness. The results of which beat even our wildest expectations.
Overall, the campaign garnered over 54K clicks and 56 million media impressions, exceeding campaign goals by over 40%. The top-performing organic influencers drove up to a 10.92% engagement rate on their travel videos, surpassing the TikTok engagement rate average by 2.7X.
The content was also turned into paid social ads, with the top-performing ad unit securing 15.6 million impressions with a 0.26% click-through rate, exceeding benchmarks for an impression-optimized campaign by 1.3X.
Linqia also ran a Brand Lift Study to determine influencers’ impact on brand lift. The results showed a +24.4 point increase in favorability and a +24 point increase in purchase intent, significantly above study benchmarks.
Overall, the influencer campaign not only met but exceeded business objectives, demonstrating how strong of a fit the influencers were to the brand's goals and how successful the content developed was at driving consumer action when brought into a paid media ecosystem.
