Tourlane is like the personal travel butler of your dreams. Based in Berlin, they plan tailor-made trips to some of the world’s most intriguing destinations. After some initial success with ad hoc influencer campaigns, Tourlane brought in influencer marketing veteran Georgia Humphries to take the channel to new heights.
Georgia Humphries
Senior Partnership & Influencer Manager, Tourlane
Tourlane’s offer is a dream. The company plans tailor-made trips around the world to destinations like Iceland, South Africa, Thailand, and the U.S.
These aren’t your run of the mill Ryanair flight, Booking.com hotel weekend getaways either. These are once-in-a-lifetime dream experiences planned with such insights & precision they could air on the Travel Channel.
It’s not surprising that Tourlane’s offer to influencers is coveted. They send their partners on an all-expenses paid (or partially-paid) trip to a destination of choice. These are usually week-long trips (or longer) and cost Tourlane thousands of euros per trip.
Senior Partnership & Influencer Manager Georgia Humphries faced a tough challenge. How do you build out a program based on such an enticing offer and make it manageable, scalable, and profitable?
“When I started, we were one of the first in the industry to attract influencers, so I had to figure out a way of working with them. It couldn’t be Please post a lovely photo of these new sneakers.
They had to experience our trips as one of our customers would. They had to rate them honestly and in a way that would promote Tourlane across other audiences we have not been able to reach yet.”
On top of the regular workflows Georgia had to set up (translating contracts from German to English, setting up payment processes) her top priorities were to understand:
“A lot of brands are doing like 400 collaborations per month, whereas we try to do 10 - 15 trips per month.
We need these to be very high performers because we're putting a lot in. We put thousands of euros into each trip to make sure our partners have a special experience. But for that, we need to scout the right influencers. "
When the cost of influencer marketing is this high, the pressure to see a positive ROI is immense. Georgia got to work.
The team at Tourlane was already using Modash when Georgia joined the company. As she was putting together her ideas of the kind of KPIs they’d need for vetting influencers, she saw that Modash had everything she was going to need.
“Modash covered all of our KPIs from the get-go. I was super, super happy to start with Modash and see how things go. A year and a half later, we're not even considering changing. It pulls the main data points we’re looking for to source the right influencers for Tourlane.”
To make confident data-backed decisions that’ll ultimately lead to high-performing campaigns, Georgia and her team use an internal scorecard. The scorecard includes both qualitative & quantitative data. Qualitative info is drawn from personal insights gleaned from interviewing prospective influencers.
With the help of Modash, Tourlane sources quantitative data like fake follower rate, engagement rate and audience demographics to choose influencers that have historically proven to be successful.
The genius of the scorecard is that it’s not prescriptive; Tourlane keeps it flexible.
“We try to keep the fake follower rate below 20%. But if we see that an influencer with 20% fake follower rate still performs as well as our best performers then we adjust the weight in our scorecard.”
Adjusting the weight of selection criteria as they get more information about what is working and what isn’t lets Tourlane consistently select the right influencers for their campaigns.
Modash also lets them do this at speed.
“Sometimes influences voluntarily send us insights. They send us a big zip file of 40 different screenshots! We don't need to look through them because we have Modash.
“Without Modash, it would be very, very time-consuming to ask for the exact insights we need. And of course, there are no insights on Fake Followers that influencers can pull from their own Instagram.”
Eighteen months and a few trials and errors later, Tourlane’s influencer marketing team has grown to 4 people who manage 150 influencers with an average of 8 -15 trips departing per month, depending on the season.
They’ve seen growth across the board from follower count on Instagram to revenue.
“Last week, we had one of our best influencer booking weeks of all time. 10% of bookings were due to influencer marketing.”
And if that’s not enough to keep the lights on and the influencer marketing budget filled, Georgia’s work also impacts brand building.
“18 months ago, our Instagram account was at 3,500 - 4,000 followers, and now we’re at 34K. We always see a big influx of followers coming in after influencers post. It’s amazing for both brand awareness and the business-sales side.”
And they’re not done yet.
With plans to expand to other markets in the next year, Georgia and her team are happy with the foundation they’re sitting on. The next challenge is to keep influencer marketing profitable as they scale the channel to even greater heights.
(Modash will be there cheering them on every step of the way.)
