While 2020 threatened their businesses, travel bloggers and lifestyle influencers have found ways to carry on
By: Allison Weis
Tags: Influencer Marketing, Instagram, Bloggers, Influencers, Covid 19

Left to right: Maddie Winters, Lindsay Silberman, Madison Krigbaum | Courtesy of Maddie Winters, Lindsay Silberman and Madison Krigbaum

Before March, blogger Lindsay Silberman regularly posted travel content. But when things changed due to COVID-19, she made the shift from travel focused blog posts, guides and imagery to lifestyle content that would better serve people spending time at home.

She had always covered beauty and home decor in addition to travel, so it wasn’t a complete pivot to talk about lifestyle content instead.

“I completely pivoted and stopped covering travel and was really only focusing on things like beauty, skincare, loungewear, at home workouts — basically anything that people could do at home,” Silberman said.

When the COVID-19 pandemic uprooted the world, it left influencers in a uniquely tough spot. Their livelihoods are based on monetizing their content — content that can be difficult to create during a global pandemic. But even with shrinking marketing budgets, influencers found a way to make this year work for them — either by changing their content’s focus, engaging with their audiences in new ways, or diversifying their businesses.

“The ones that have really stayed successful and have continued to get deals during COVID are the ones that are really good at it,” Akshaya Sreenivasan, a social media marketing professor at Texas A&M University said. “People who really created something unique for themselves, and the content was original.”

Sreenivasan defines influencer marketing as, “a specialist area of intimate based communications,” where the consumer is easily able to recreate the creator’s experiences based on products that are accessible.

With social media, consumers are able to closely copy the experiences of those they follow as they’re seen as regular people. And this close relationship is lucrative, said Jenna Jacobson, an expert on social media marketing and assistant professor at Ryerson University. She said, “brands capitalize on influencers by collaborating to produce branded content, to gain visibility and brand awareness.”

Becoming an influencer is not an easy get-rich-quick scheme. While anyone can start a channel, Sreenivasan said that those that are most successful offer expert advice in specialized areas. And while content may seem easy to create, Jacobson said cultivating and maintaining influence requires constant work, energy and time.

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was an initial drop off of income for influencers. Sponsored posts on Instagram fell from representing 35% of influencers’ content in mid-February to 4% of their content in mid-April, according to the Launchmetrics report “The State of Influencer Marketing 2020.”

“I think that in the very beginning, brands were completely thrown off,” Silberman said. Silberman has 168,000 followers on Instagram and runs the blog Lindsay Silberman. She said that early in the pandemic, brands were hesitant to make decisions with their budgets, because the whole world was at a standstill. She also noted that this was a time where it felt in poor taste to be promoting something without addressing what was going on in the world.

But this shifted around early summer when brands started to realize that the situation wasn’t changing anytime soon, Silberman said. She said that there were a lot of people who were lucky to not have been negatively impacted financially by the pandemic, and these people were spending a lot of money shopping online.

When this became evident, these brands came back to people like Silberman who they knew could successfully move their product.

Silberman thinks that brands may be allocating their budgets more toward influencer marketing because they can’t do traditional photoshoots and campaigns to promote their products. She also noted that influencers can help brands promote products at a lower price point than traditional campaigns.

“This is my third holiday season being a full time influencer, but this is definitely my busiest holiday season. I’m working with more brands at higher budgets than I have ever done before.”

Courtesy of Lindsay Silberman

Silberman was also able to diversify her own income and brand this year. She said that a great way to help scale your brand beyond a single platform is to create your own product. She said that she had a lot of ideas over the years, but it wasn’t until COVID that she decided to start a candle line.

“There was such an emphasis put on making your space at home feel comfortable and like an escape,” Silberman said.

Hotel Lobby Candle was a huge success, and ended up selling out all of its stock before she had the chance to promote it outside of her own audience.

“I would say 99% of the sales came from my own people, because it had already sold out by the time anyone else had even heard of it,” Silberman said. “I knew people would be supportive, but I didn’t realize that it would be as many people as ended up happening.”

While Silberman was able to focus her content on things close to home, some travel bloggers didn’t want to have to change their whole brand.

“I know a lot of people who just completely jumped ship of travel and started talking about other things for the time being, which is fine, but I’m very much focused on travel and I wanted to spin it in a way where it would work for this year,” Maddie Winters said.

Winters is a travel blogger who runs the blog A One Way Ticket, and she has 27,400 Instagram followers. During the pandemic, she refocused her energy from Instagram to her blog.

Courtesy of Maddie Winters

She said the life of Instagram content is about 72 hours before the content falls off. Winters shifted her focus to blog posts because they are consumable for longer. This way she could talk about travel content that wasn’t affected by the pandemic, and it can stay on her blog long after the pandemic is over.

Winters said that she works with a lot of hotels. Rather than promoting products, she does promotions for hotels and tourism boards.

Winters is based in the U.S., and because international travel was difficult for most of the year, she shifted to talking about domestic travel. At the beginning of the pandemic, she only covered international locations as bucket list inspiration for those who were itching to travel again.

She has slowly turned to international travel again as these destinations increasingly opened up to American tourists. When the Caribbean reopened, Winters showed her followers how they could travel there. This was met with a very positive response from her followers. She said that people responded best to places they could feasibly travel to during the pandemic, not necessarily European or Asian travel inspiration.

In a typical year, brands and hotels host influencers for big brand trips to promote their product. This wasn’t an option this year. Instead, Winters noted that there were more individual trips where she would go on her own without other influencers.

But there are many difficulties for bloggers like Winters who reviews hotels for her audience. In September, Winters tried going to Aruba which had been open for a little over a month at that point. She reached out to hotels to see if any would partner with her, but found that many hotels were hesitant to host her because they weren’t ready to be reviewed yet. She said she also heard from a lot of places who just replied, talk to us in 2021 when the pandemic calms down.

But, places like French Polynesia which had been open for over 4 months by the time Winters visited in late November, were very eager to host Winters. Winters noted that many influencers visited French Polynesia this year.

Madison Krigbaum, a travel influencer, just started monetizing her travel content this year. She runs the blog Madison Footsteps and has about 8,400 Instagram followers. She is qualified as a micro influencer.

She said that she sees hotels are more open to working with micro influencers this year. “It’s a pretty high reward, low cost for them,” Krigbaum said. She visited a hotel in Colorado for a collaboration earlier this year.

Courtesy of Madison Krigbaum

When the pandemic forced her to lose her job, with the extra free time on her hands Krigbaum took an influencer class. She stopped posting pictures just for fun and created a schedule with more intentional and valuable captions. This led to her posts getting a lot of interest.

While her travel posts are mostly throwback pictures for the moment, Krigbaum is looking forward to 2021. She is planning on living in Honduras for one month early next year, as this is one of the places letting American tourists visit.

Overall, influencers are making 2020 work for them. Even with major shifts to the industry, people are able to adapt to the new landscape and continue to focus on the content they want to create.

“For a lot of my followers, they were able to see a side of my life that they didn’t typically see. Because for the past couple years, my content has always been me jet setting around the world,” Silberman said. “So I think I’ve really had the opportunity to connect with my audience on a more human personal level than I probably ever have before.”