Traveler demand for shoulder season is rising fast, but demand alone doesn’t fill hotel rooms or book tours. DMOs need a deliberate strategy built around how shoulder season travelers behave, not a copy of a peak season campaign. Here are five tactics to put to work for your next shoulder season push.
1. Choose Mid-Tier Creators Whose Audience Matches the Shoulder Season Traveler
Follower count isn’t the same thing as attention. Bigger creators reach a smaller share of their audience per post and cost more, often delivering fewer real impressions than the name suggests. Go too small, on the other hand, and the audience is often too thin to drive meaningful shoulder season travel. The sweet spot is mid-tier creators with highly engaged audiences. You’ll end up with more posts than a single macro partnership allows, higher engagement, and enough real reach to matter.
Audience fit matters as much as audience size. A creator’s followers might love your destination, but if their audience is dominated by parents locked into a school calendar, they’re unavailable for most shoulder season windows. Prioritize creators whose audience skews toward the travelers actually traveling this shoulder season. Shoulder season travel is most popular with couples without kids, remote workers and digital nomads with flexible schedules, luxury travelers seeking moderate weather and fewer crowds, and value-driven travelers drawn in by shoulder season pricing. Fully vet a creator’s audience for fit with those demographics.
2. Lead With Authentic, First-Person Content Over Polished, Aspirational Content
People want real content from real people. With the rise of AI content, the more polished content is, the more skeptical potential travelers are of it. Content built around “here’s what a trip here actually looks like” consistently outperforms scenic, wanderlust-style content when it comes to driving travel. One of the main reasons we use creators is to borrow the trusted relationship they have with their followers. Give creators guidelines and then let them do their thing; if you try to control the content too closely and it’s a departure from the creator’s usual content, it will likely flop.
Here are a few examples of authentic content built to drive travel.
3. Make Every Piece of Content Actionable
A great piece of creator content that ends on a pretty shot and nothing else is a missed opportunity. If the content ends with a request to save the content, you’ve also missed an opportunity. The strongest action-driving content pre-answers a traveler’s practical questions (cost, timing, how to get there) right inside the content, then gives an explicit next step, like requesting a guide or visiting a landing page, so a viewer can move from inspiration toward planning without having to go find that information elsewhere.
Actionable content allows you to capture that spark of inspiration and move people towards planning and booking a trip to your destination. Send people to a guide on the DMO website, an event page, a trip planner, etc. Tell them how they can take the next step and then retarget those who do. Tools like Steller Connect make this easy by linking influencer content directly to trip planning tools, marketing automation, and booking opportunities, so the campaign is measurable and drives travel.
4. Keep Content and Distribution Running Through the Season, Not Just Before It
Shoulder season travelers book differently than peak season travelers: closer to departure, often just one to three months out, with a meaningful share booking at the last minute to fill a suddenly open week or weekend. The DMOs winning shoulder season are the ones that stay visible and top of mind during shoulder season. That means if you aren’t live in travelers’ social media feeds, you’re missing the travelers most likely to book.
Retargeting matters here too. Most people need to see a destination again, and again, before they act, which is why keeping creator content, guides, and booking opportunities in front of travelers well into and through the season, not just in the run-up to it, is what drives travel. Steller Connect does this for you by retargeting travelers with creator content, itineraries and travel guides, and booking opportunities for 90-365 days after a traveler sees your destination content on social media.
5. Build a Connected Measurement System, Not a Guess
Attribution is the top challenge DMOs report in influencer marketing, and for good reason, as the path from inspiration to visit is fractured because a traveler’s decision typically blends creator content with search, paid social, and word of mouth before they ever book. But measurement tools have come a long way and it is possible track more than impressions and engagement. Rather than estimating impact through earned media value alone, you can now track what actually happens after someone views a piece of creator content: itinerary views and saves, trips planned, bookings, and economic impact.
Turning Tactics Into a Full Campaign
These five tactics work best as part of one connected strategy: the right creators, authentic content, a clear next step, sustained visibility through the season, and measurement that actually closes the loop back to bookings.
That’s the full framework we lay out in our Shoulder Season Influencer Marketing Playbook, including real campaign results from destinations that have already put it to work.
Want the complete playbook? Download the Shoulder Season Influencer Marketing Playbook to start building your campaign
