Influencing Travel with Oneika Raymond

Oneika Raymond is a travel influencer with over 80,000 followers on Instagram, the host of the Travel Channel’s Big City, Little Budget, and a correspondent with NBC New York. A bona fide travel junkie, her adventures have taken her to more than 115 countries on six continents. She’s partnered with global brands including Hyundai, American Express, Coca-Cola, Sony, Dunkin Brands, Toyota, and Lowe’s. Raymond broke down the process of vetting and selecting brands to work with, the values and decision-making process behind those partnerships, lessons learned, and where she feels the influencer industry is headed.

Oneika Raymond defines herself as a millennial, or “someone who has a ton of jobs.” She’s a content creator, journalist, and host for the Travel Channel, and does a lot of on-air work for TV stations. In fact, she’s partnered with more than 100 travel and lifestyle brands, creating content with her own personal twist on behalf of companies.

Today the word influencer has many meanings and connotations. Despite the stigma and negative feelings that surround it, Raymond believes that partnering with influencers is positive and she seeks to show the other side of it, as well as the thought process behind how, when, and if she chooses to work with a brand.

Ninety-nine percent of Raymond’s partnerships today are inbound. She doesn’t reach out to brands, or pitch to anyone. She has also made the express decision to work with a brand because she believes in it; fit is essential. As an influencer, she curates a following and online presence above and beyond the journalism pieces she does. Raymond’s influencer work must curate content that will satisfy her audience. After all, the reason she has an audience is because she’s established a level of trust and has built a relationship with them over the years.

How did Raymond get started in the first place? She admits that she stumbled into influencing. When studying abroad in France, she had a blog chronicling her adventures. As a French teacher, she built a following based on people who wanted to tag along on her international experiences. When she moved to New York about four years ago, influencer marketing was slowly becoming popular. At that point Raymond had already been given offers to write blog posts and be paid for her content. She started off in an organic place — although her audience has increased today, there are many who were part of her audience back in the days before influencer marketing took off. To stay true to this audience, she only works with brands that are a great fit. She protects herself as an influencer as well as her audience by vetting brands for what they truly are. She likes to partner with large consumer brands such as Marriott, Hyundai, and American Express. These are not just travel brands but also lifestyle brands. When she partners and creates content, she also makes sure that the content will be valuable to her audience, whose opinion she trusts.

Raymond’s Brand Ethos

With 82,000 followers on Instagram and about 50,000 on Facebook, Raymond is a microinfluencer. In addition to the close relationship she has with those who follow her, Raymond has a strict set of rules for her brand. There are three tenets that she operates on, as well as guiding principles she employs when creating content and influencing. She ensures that all her partnerships fall into at least one of the three tenets. Raymond always want to empower, educate, and encourage her audience to explore. Although her blog is about travel, this philosophy extends to all parts of life.

She also considers the length and term of the partnership because it doesn’t serve her to do a one-off campaign with a brand. She prefers longer-term brand ambassadorships and believes that the one-off campaigns fall off the grid very quickly, especially if Instagram is the brand’s main platform. Typical consumers are not going through hashtags to find a brand. Rather, they are following their favorite personalities and moving with them from post to post. With a one-off, there isn’t longevity, but if an influencer is employed on a longer basis (such as a six- to 12-month term), then a brand can ensure that the influencer will keep the brand messaging going during the duration of the contract. Raymond ventures to say that it makes much more sense for a brand to employ 10 influencers who work with your brand over a six- to 12-month period than to employ 50 influencers who will work for a brand for two weeks. Although working with several influencers might get brands a spike or burst, the news cycle moves too quickly for the effect to be long-lasting. For a brand to be on the lips and minds of consumers, content must be enduring and occur at various touchpoints as opposed to one major push.

Influencer Partnerships

Raymond has many longer-term partnerships with brands, such as American Express. In addition, she has worked with Alamo Rent-a-Car for three years. Her audience today will ask her questions about Alamo, and Raymond can reach out to her contact to provide the correct information that she can then forward back to the consumer. When working with influencers for a longer term, they truly care. There is nothing worse than spending money on an influencer campaign and once the term is up, they’ve taken down all the posts and have archived them. In such a scenario, there is no personal investment. However, Raymond believes that when brands invest in influencers, the influencer will invest in them and the brand will reap the rewards.

Working with American Express has been one of Raymond’s most lucrative partnerships. Because of her connection to travel and lifestyle, she partners on the Marriott Bonvoy card (an American Express card). American Express has a number of great activations and Raymond partners on a number of different projects, such as an event at the New York Edition hotel to promote the Bonvoy card and celebrate women of color and art, or a fashion exhibit with Karlie Kloss. With American Express Raymond has the opportunity to go out and attend different events that educate, empower, and encourage a sense of exploring. She attended the U.S. Open thanks to American Express, bringing her followers along and showing them the benefits of the card as well as giving them access to a such prestigious event. The American Express partnership is organic and allows Raymond to fold in her life events and moments by using the card. Raymond and her husband went on a “babymoon” to Tunisia, and American Express suggested a partnership to highlight the benefits of the card as she progressed through her life transition. She used her card in Tunisia, reaping the benefits and creating content while there. The project felt organic and her audience was receptive — a win-win situation.

Raymond’s Audience

A lot of Raymond’s following is made up of women in the 30–34 age bracket, who have money, are educated, and are living their best lives. They like to follow Raymond because she is representative of them and brings them along on some of her adventures. She also has a large segment of women of color who follow her.

Another piece of Raymond’s advice for brands is that if working with influencers, try to work with those who are present on various platforms. Raymond’s partnerships typically don’t have a singular focus on Instagram. As mentioned earlier, content falls off the grid very quickly these days. By leveraging the power of other platforms, brands can have more staying power. Raymond has witnessed that her audience isn’t the same from platform to platform. Her Instagram demographic tends to be younger, has a shorter attention span, doesn’t want to read, and is there for pretty pictures and outfits. Those on Facebook fall closer to her age and cohort; they are more political, interested in reading longer-form content, will share posts from their feed, and are generally an older and more engaged audience. Lastly, those reading her blog have found her via SEO, and a number have migrated from Facebook or have followed Raymond for a long time. They are interested in travel tips, knowing what’s going on with Raymond’s life, and so forth.

Visit Savannah

Recently Raymond worked with Visit Savannah, which was leveraging multiple platforms and commissioned her to create two blog posts, four Instagram posts, and high-res imagery that they could use for their own channels. The imagery she provided Visit Savannah was photography of sites in the city. Raymond really appreciated the complete autonomy that the brand gave her. She had the freedom to go out and craft content that she knew her audience would like, and would resonate with them. The organization allowed her to bring a plus-one, which allowed her to create better content.

One blog post was called “A Weekend of Southern Hospitality — How to Spend Two Days in Savannah, Georgia.” She wrote the post for SEO purposes, which was above and beyond what Visit Savannah had asked for. The post links to the Visit Savannah website. The second blog post that she created was titled “For the culture: Exploring African-American History in Savannah George — Traveling While Black.” This was for her and her audience, who is interested in the African-American experience in Savannah. On Facebook it saw a lot of engagement, and on Pinterest it also got interest and engagement in comparison to the SEO post. In this partnership Raymond had autonomy and wanted to create content for her audience, as well as content that would be helpful for the Savannah tourism board in the long run with its inherent SEO value.

All of this goes to show that partnering with influencers can serve a variety of purposes. By thinking outside the box, brands can fulfill their various needs. Raymond appreciated working with Visit Savannah because when she visited the website, there was a whole section dedicated to the African-American experience and targeting this underserved and underrepresented demographic. In fact, only 2.6 percent of all advertising focuses on African-Americans, but 17 percent of African-Americans take one or more trips and travel more than six times per year. Many brands reach out to Raymond because she represents this lucrative but untapped demographic in travel. African-American travelers have long been neglected even though they’re spending billions of dollars on travel a year — $63 billion in 2018 was spent on U.S. travel alone. Raymond’s partnership with Visit Savannah brought value to both the brand and Raymond’s audience.

Mistakes Brands Make

Brands, on a continual basis, focus on numbers and not on engagement.

We are living in the era of the microinfluencer and the nanoinfluencer. We question authenticity of celebrity influencers and know that many won’t engage. Who are you forming a closer bond and relationship with? Typically, it’s someone like Raymond.
Brands, stop overbranding.

Brands must stop giving influencers so many things to do and so many details. Raymond was working with a beauty brand, creating content for them, and when she looked at the brief the brand wanted for every single Instagram story of hers to have a swipe up to their retailer, five different tags, a location where the item was purchased, and so forth. This is when a post begins to feel artificial and audiences click out of the story. Audiences like to be sold to, but not explicitly and not too much. Posts needs to be organic. When you overbrand and are overly prescriptive, you aren’t allowing influencers to work as they usually would — and they’re the ones who know their audience best.
You’re cheap and you don’t have a budget.

If you want influencers to care for and invest in your brand, you need to compensate them appropriately. Brands must buy their influence and get influencers to buy into their message. When influencers create quality content, it takes time, and brands must understand this. If a brand reaches out to Raymond without enough budget and there is no value in it for her, she won’t take her time to create another piece of “sponcon” to put on her feed. For her it is important to balance the number of brands that she works with, and doesn’t want every single post to be sponsored content.
When you don’t want to partner long-term.

It’s important for influencers to build lasting relationships with various brands, which creates authenticity. Also, it allows the influencer to do a better job and for brands to track performance better.
The biggest problem: You spend so much time marketing to the same people.

Most of the world today is black and brown, and Raymond asks why we aren’t marketing to those people, especially in the travel demographic. We don’t need to convince consumers who have been traveling forever to go anywhere. Today there is too much time spent talking to the exact same people, who would have purchased whatever it is a brand is selling anyway. Brands today should expand and focus on underrepresented demographics.

Raymond’s Mistakes

Raymond has also made mistakes herself, and today looks out for contract terms and exclusivity. Being exclusive to a brand is also an issue, and compensation and deliverables must be worth her time. If a brand isn’t willing to invest in Raymond, she’s not willing to invest in the brand — she believes there has to be some sort of inherent value in it for her. She also believes strongly in being compensated for the content she has created for brands. When brands hire Raymond today, she tries to educate them that she’s not only being hired for her influence, but also for her content creation as a photographer, on-air host, event MC, etc. Brands are buying into her reputation, experiences, talent, and audience, which all must be recognized in a holistic approach. It’s not just about the clicks and the likes and one or two posts a brand is commissioning her for; it’s about content licensing. In the past Raymond has given away her work: for instance, a campaign ended and the brand continued to use her art two years later. She couldn’t do anything about it. Today she is very aware of such details when considering brands to work with.

What Is the Future of Influencer Marketing?

Raymond doesn’t know what the future of influencer marketing holds. Hidden likes on Instagram, which is slowly being rolled out, will change the way brands partner with influencers and the way Raymond works with brands. Today she encourages brands to leverage all platforms, because we don’t know what will happen. Influencer marketing by and large is here to stay, but it will evolve as platforms evolve and the way consumers interact with their favorite influencers evolves. Raymond believes that the two elements of this whole game that will endure are personal recommendations and connections.

"Influencing Travel with Oneika Raymond." Oneika Raymond, Journalist and Influencer at The Travel Channel and NBC New York Live. ANA 2019 Influencer Marketing Conference Conference, 11/20/19.