26 Oct How To Get Further From Home: Influencer Marketing

The mission of our journey is simple: how far from home can we get? Literally, how far can we get from Johannesburg, South Africa; and figuratively how far can we push ourselves out of our comfort zones.

Since we released our honest reflection after six-months of travel, a.k.a. “the toilet-scrubbing post“, we’ve had incredible support from our ever-growing community, encouraging us to keep pushing, letting us know that we were inspiring them in more ways than we ever thought possible. This alone has had the most positive effect on our psyche, and it’s also motivated us to think of ways to get further. If we can keep inspiring a global community of wanderlusters, why wouldn’t we want to continue?

There is the issue of course, of how? In order to get further (both literally and figuratively) we’ll need to make some money (or rely on creativity, like we always have – creativity solves everything, remember?) Since departing in March, we have not made a single cent and have only had our savings and creative skills to assist us. We have, however, been lucky to hear from a number of way-more-business-savvy-than-us individuals who have come with a string of ideas of how we can make extra cash, so that we absolutely can get further from home.

As we quite literally have nothing to lose, we’re taking up the challenges and seeing how far we can get, using different methods to get us there.

The first example in this How-to Get Further From Home series, is Influencer Marketing.

Influencer marketing, for me, has always been an interesting concept. Before we departed on this journey, my previous role involved brainstorming and completing creative digital campaigns for my agency’s impressive pot of clients. Depending on the objectives and budget, influencer campaigns became a large portion of my work portfolio. From strategic partnerships with influencers from the desired target markets, to aligning social personalities with our clients’ brand values, it became a magical method of spreading our clients’ messages to the right people.

In Layman’s terms, influencer marketing involves:

1. A social media personality a.k.a. “Influencer” – someone with a large community (across one, or multiple social media platforms), with a clearly-defined niche (and could be identified as a “thought leader” in said niche); and
2. A Brand who wants to communicate to the target market in this niche, and wants to pay the Influencer (in physical product, service, or monetary compensation) to spread this message for them.

It’s an effective method, if the match between Brand and Influencer is spot on. The product or service that the Influencer is asked to promote and examine needs to align to what their readers and viewers normally see. If the Influencer doesn’t believe in the product or service the Brand is offering, then the viewers and readers will see straight through the BS, and either move on (making their interaction with the brand ineffective), or move on and unfollow the Influencer, because they no longer feel like the content is relevant to them.

We decided to dabble in some influencer marketing and are running a fun campaign with the guys from Webfluential. Their service is for social personalities such as ourselves, and they connect us with brands who have messages they want to spread to our niche of global wanderlusters. We needed to create a blog post and an Instagram post, in exchange for some cash to help us get further.

After doing some calculations, we figured out that this campaign can give us a number of options that will help us tick some items off our Wanderlist, and get us to see more of Sydney while we’re here. Check out our options below, and let us know in the comments what you think we should do:

*The price of each experience includes tickets / sessions for both of us.

If you want to chat to the awesome guys at Webfluential about a cool campaign for your community, and get deets about how to set-up a profile so you too can get further from home by partnering with some brands who resonate with your niche, check out their site or Twitter page.

If you have any other ideas for us, of how we can get further from home, pop them in the comments below or mail us at howfarfromhomeblog@gmail.com.

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