Working With Social Media Influencers

Influencer marketing is one of the fastest-growing tools to leverage sales and growth. Are you taking advantage of it? Let’s discuss why influencer marketing is a key strategy for reaching your target customers, specific dealership strategies for working with influencers and how to find these gold-mine partnerships.

Influencer Marketing Can Bring You Closer to Your Target Customers

Why is influencer marketing such a powerful strategy for growth? As full-time outdoor travel/RV influencers, we often explain to clients who are new to this marketing style exactly what makes influencer marketing so unique and effective.

Imagine with me if you will that there is a television channel with nothing but RV-themed shows all day, every day. Every viewer watching the channel went through the effort to add this channel to their lineup because they are RV travel enthusiasts. Also, imagine that every show on this channel has the same show host that viewers know, like and trust due to their expertise in RVing and helpful/educational show programming.

Can you imagine the advertising potential if this television channel existed? Not only are viewers already your target customers, but the audience also feels like they know/trust the host and their recommendations, providing a warm market for sales in the RV industry. While this channel doesn’t exist on television, it is a reality on RV influencer accounts across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube.

In fact, many of these channels get more viewers than most TV shows. The content created is not limited to just an influencer’s channel, but it can also be turned into social media ads to be shown to look-alike audiences across the platform for an even more significant reach/return. The advertising potential is limitless.

Intrigued? So, how can RV dealerships leverage influencer marketing? Here are some specific ideas you can use right away.

Influencer Marketing Campaign Ideas for RV Dealerships

Now that you realize the potential of leveraging a warm market of RVers through influencers/content creators, let’s go over some specific campaign ideas. We will start with the easiest to implement and move to more advanced strategies.

On-Site Content Creation: RV Tours, Sales & Other Promotions

Influencers can cover almost anything you have going on at your RV dealership to create a buzz. One of the easiest advertising methods is RV tours. This is a great way to showcase your inventory, promote sales and keep your dealership top of mind to potential customers.

An ideal partnership may be to have an influencer film multiple RV tours to post throughout the month for the greatest exposure. You can also use the tours or promotion videos could also be reused as content on your dealership’s channels and turned into social media ads to reach an even greater audience. This way, the content is shown to the influencer’s audience, reused for your business’s social accounts and receives an even larger impact when you repurpose it as an ad. This provides the biggest return on your investment.

Consistent, frequent content creation on multiple social media platforms will provide the most significant results. For example, choosing an influencer with audiences on multiple social platforms allows cross-posting the content for further exposure. This also gives you the ability to leverage videos as ads on those various platforms.

Social media ads can be run from your business’s social account, but a more effective way is to run the ads directly through the influencer’s social account. (This process is known as whitelisting.) This gives the ad a higher trust factor with the viewer versus being generated directly by the dealership.

Giveaways: A Great Tool to Generate Name Recognition

An RV dealership-sponsored giveaway is a great tool to get your name out there and generate a buzz. It’s not only about hosting a giveaway but how you host the giveaway. For example, having an influencer host a giveaway of a coveted RV camping product sponsored by your dealership is a great idea. But a more effective giveaway marketing strategy is to have a giveaway component that also involves visiting your dealership.

An example is running an RV influencer giveaway sponsored by your dealership of a YETI cooler (or other popular camping item) and a set of camping chairs with your dealership’s name printed on them (a branded item is key). This alone is effective name recognition. However, what if you run the same giveaway with a second YETI cooler and chairs to be given away to in-person customers who visit the dealership to take advantage of a big sale this weekend. This second strategy provides name recognition with an extra incentive to get customers in the door.

Giveaways can be great ways to increase followers to your dealership’s social accounts by asking customers to follow your business account and tag two friends for the contest entries. An alternative to this is to add people to your email list. If you would like to work with RV influencers not located in your area for filming, giveaways are a great way to tap into their audiences regardless of location.

Affiliate Marketing for RV Dealerships

Most people think of products when considering influencer affiliate marketing commissions. However, creating a program at your dealership that compensates influencers for referred customers who book a tour appointment or who visit the dealership can be an effective strategy to add to influencer partnerships.

RV Wraps & Custom RV Designs Promoting Your Dealership

Ready for a couple of outside-the-box influencer marketing strategies? RV influencers who travel full-time are rolling billboards 24/7 as they travel across the country. Not only are they showing the outside and inside of their RV consistently in most of their social media content creation, but they also are traveling major highways and staying at many different campgrounds as they go. A full-time RV influencer’s RV can be seen as a rolling billboard. Why not leverage this with marketing for your dealership?

The easiest way to work with influencers to get your dealership featured on an RV is to provide an RV wrap with your business name and a QR code to scan. People just can’t resist scanning a QR code they see while walking around at a campground, on the road or in a parking lot. Keystone RV recently partnered with a full-time RV travel influencer by providing a custom painted RV promoting their brand and the influencer.

A more advanced strategy is to have an RV custom-decorated to be the “ultimate RV” and have an influencer travel in the RV while creating consistent content promoting the RV and your dealership. Keystone RV created a similar marketing campaign for the Ultimate Fuzion toy hauler with the influencer The Flipping Nomad Cortni Armstrong.

Tips for Finding a Knowledgeable RV Influencer to Work With

Sizable RV Travel-Focused Audiences on More Than One Social Platform

Leverage your influencer partnerships by selecting a content creator/influencer who has audiences on multiple platforms. For example, our partnership content is cross-posted to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube for greater reach.

Account With Informational RV Content to Increase Audience Trust & Authority

Consider choosing an influencer who has been traveling for a long time and who posts helpful informational content. While entertaining content can be fun, choosing an influencer with increased audience trust can be beneficial. For example, we have traveled full-time for eight years, so our audience knows that the content we produce is trustworthy.

Look for RV Influencers Posting Tours

A simple Instagram hashtag search (#rvtours, #rvtour, #campertour) can help you locate influencers who are already creating RV tours and who have worked with RV brands or dealerships. Then, take a close look at their page’s content, audience size, and if they have audiences on other platforms to see if it is a good fit for your business.

Feel free to contact us for recommendations and with any questions. Not only are we full-time RVers/influencers who produce content for RV dealerships and brands, but we also network with other influencers who create similar content.

Will You Try Influencer Marketing?

There is no doubt that influencer marketing is emerging as a top strategy for tapping into your ideal customer base. Influencers have a unique trust built with viewers, and the content they create can span from their social audiences to ads that reach look-alike audiences across social platforms. From RV tours and dealership giveaways to rolling RV billboards with your dealership’s name, you are only limited by your creativity when it comes to RV influencer marketing partnerships.