Challenges of influencer marketing in tourism companies in Finland

Abstract

The role of influencer marketing in companies’ marketing practices keeps growing and the tourism industry is no exception. Influencers have become the leading inspiration for consumers, and travel decisions are made based on recommendations seen online. The goal of this thesis was to find out what challenges tourism companies in Finland have faced in influencer marketing, and to create recommendations on how companies can prepare for the identi-fied challenges. To understand the phenomenon, three research questions were asked, and they are 1) What challenges and difficulties tourism companies have faced in influencer marketing, 2) How have the challenges affected the company’s view on influencer marketing, and 3) How will companies take these challenges into account in the future. The empirical section of this thesis uses qualitative research method and semi-structured interviews were used as the data collection method. Employees from tourism companies that have used influ-encer marketing were interviewed for this research. The fragmentation of influencer marketing as an industry and the vast amount of lacking requests coming from influencers were found to be the most common challenges increasing the workload for companies. Anyone can become an influencer and as there are no clear guidelines, the prices and lev-els of expertise vary between each influencer and cannot be predicted based on the follower count. The difficulty of predicting results in influencer marketing was another challenge found in the re-search. Although companies have faced challenges in influencer marketing, the view on its importance in marketing practices hasn’t changed. Instead, companies have used the faced challenges as opportu-nities to learn and develop their strategies and policies. Influencer marketing is a good way to increase companies’ visibility online, but the results of this re-search indicate the importance of careful preparation and a clear strategy for influencer marketing before companies start to use it regularly. Even though challenges haven’t negatively affected compa-nies’ view on influencer marketing, knowing what to prepare for and how to avoid possible difficulties decreases their workload.