Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 119 - Leveraging Partnerships in Your Content Strategy
Transcript
- Rachel K: Good morning, it's day 119 of the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host Rachel K. Thanks for coming back. I enjoy every time I see listeners listening and streaming and all that fun stuff. Today's episode is leveraging partnerships in, I can't read my own handwriting, content strategy. There we go. How do you leverage partnerships for your content strategy? We kind of touched on this in Uh, day 116, the collab, where I made fun of myself for wanting to say collab when I'm in my 40s. I don't need to talk like I'm 20. I don't even... That's not even what a 20 year old would say. But it's in my brain, I think that they would. If you're under 30, please laugh at how ridiculous I am. I thoroughly enjoy it. Don't worry, I have a son in his 20s and he's just like, oh my god, mom. It's fine. All right, moving on. You're probably thinking, why would I even want to leverage partnerships in a content strategy? Great question. Everyone does it all the time. Why aren't you doing it? Almost every single webinar your host agency or your consortium sends to you or any organization you are a member of, they're leveraging a partnership. It's almost always like blah, blah, blah from XYZ brand. is going to talk to you about how you as a travel professional can change your life by booking their crap. They're leveraging the partnership. That's why you should do it. Okay, this is, making sure my notes aren't crazy because some of these episodes have been longer than they need to be. How can you do this? Again, you could host a webinar. You could host an in-person event potentially with your BDM. If you're trying to get people to book into like group space or a specific tour, whatever, you could reach out to the BDM for that organization. The niche that I'm going into, they create custom brochures for all of my tours that I can hand out. because I am doing more in-person marketing. And I just like, here's the QR code for the booking page. And they're like, great. Here's the hex codes for my branding. Here's my logo. Great. Everything else they design. But they would also be willing to come like help speak at any events if need be. So you can do the same thing. You can do the webinars. Now, if you're doing a webinar and you have like nobody signed up and you're just like, I have this idea, BDM is probably not going to have time for that unless you have proven you have a very good sales record. ⁓ But like in-person ones, they're more likely to maybe do it, especially if they're really close to where you live. Where I live, it's like they don't even fly into the airport here. They're like, can you meet me for lunch tomorrow? It's just a four hour drive each way. And I'm like, no, it's harder for me to do this. But there is the opportunity. Just know that it's there is that opportunity. If you're doing online or local businesses, local businesses, you can really, really do some like in-person stuff. Like events or meetings. Maybe at their place of business. online you could partner up to do a webinar. Okay, stitching content. ⁓ my computer just did something weird. Stitching content. You can stitch content. I've talked about this at length before. ⁓ You can repost each other's content. Whatevs. You can feature each other's guest speakers for individual events that you're hosting. And you can feature each other in your email newsletters. This is why it's really important to do your best to meet up with your preferred BDMs and potential preferred BDMs. Not necessarily to meet every single BDM of every company on the face of the planet that you could possibly partner with, but just be like, establish those preferred partnerships, stay in touch with those BDMs and be open to potential partnerships with other companies. And also like don't... I mean you can build a really good relationship with a particular BDM and if you've been in the industry as long as I have, you know that they bounce around from one company to the next every five years or so, like three to five years. That doesn't necessarily mean you need to follow them. Now if they are going from one company that you were like, love this company to something else that you're open to niching into, then you can be like, hey, let's keep doing this. But it doesn't hurt to stay in contact with them regardless. Conversely, if they're with a company you really, really love and then they're like, ⁓ I'm going to this crap brand that you have no interest in, just stay in touch with them because they might move to something else in a few years that might be more aligned with you, but just like wish them luck. And if there's another colleague that's like, ⁓ I really want to work with crap brand, then you'd be like, that BDM is awesome. Go contact them. And 90%, it just depends on their location that they represent. So hopefully that BDM can help them, you know? Okay, make sure that when you're using this strategy, that your audience is gonna find it helpful. Actually, we'll find it helpful when you're using the leveraging, like the partnerships for your content strategy. Make sure the partnership that you are leveraging for your content strategy, your ICA will actually find it to be helpful. Not just how you can be seen as an authority because you're like, I'm with this person, they made $5 last year or they're this big BDM. Don't just do it for that reason. You will be seen as an authority regardless, but don't do it for that main reason. Don't do it to sell yourself. It's got to be actually helpful if you haven't been listening. the what's in it for me, like make sure you're not approaching these partnerships and everything in your business is like, I just need to make money, I need this, I need this, me, me, me, me, me. You've got to make sure you're providing real value to the people you're serving. And so some partnerships may not necessarily work for leveraging for your content strategy. If they aren't really, really aligned with your ICA. ⁓ If what they have to offer isn't super helpful to your ICA or your current content strategy, what you are pushing out to offer, then maybe hold off on that, okay? If you don't do it that way and you're just like, hey, I have affiliate links for all this crap and you just keep pushing stuff out and you don't really find it to be helpful to your audience, they might not pick up on it right away, but they'll eventually be like, ⁓ this person is just conning us into making money, like conning us to make money off of us. You know what I mean? Okay. What are success metrics you should look out for when you're leveraging your partnerships for your content strategy? Referrals. Are you giving referrals to this partner? Are you getting referrals from said partner? Is that happening? Great success. Is there joint engagement? Like if you are sharing each other, like say you do host a webinar or do like record a podcast or whatever and you both share clips. from this webinar or podcast on your different socials, are you getting the same engagement? Are you getting the same people coming over from their following into yours and you into theirs? Are you a newer TA? Because you might be like, I'm brand new and I don't have an audience and this sucks and I can't leverage partnerships. So here's a tip. So a few days ago I mentioned possible partnerships, friends, families, colleagues could be potential partnerships, right? This is especially helpful for newer TAs because you don't have that client base. You might not be totally sure in what suppliers you want to work with for the type of travel you're niching into, so on and so forth. You're kind of like nervous to go to cold approach because you're like, I don't even know really what, I just know I kind of want to do this and I'm experimenting. Great. Ask a colleague, family member, close friend that you trust to at least engage with your content online if you do social media stuff. And any family or friends, just don't ask to do business with them, just ask like, hey, can you mention that I do this? and when you ask them specifically for social media stuff, like make sure if it is a colleague that they aren't following you with your travel agency profile, because when they do that and people are looking, they're going to be like, ⁓ they just work together. I don't trust this. Right. And I'm not saying like lie. I'm saying like help. This is for you to get help on improving your content and also kind of like boost your engagement a little bit. because they, I mentioned this a few days ago, they can look at your content, they can watch it and be like, you know, this is really helpful information and it's not really going viral and I think it's because of X, Y, and Z. You can totally repost all of this information, just tweak it here, here, and here. Also, they can like your stuff and watch your stuff. They can share it. ⁓ Especially if you are niching in something that they have no interest in niching. They can share your content and they can ask questions to help your content get kind of boosted in the algorithm. I do this for a lot of travel advisors. If I see their content on the platforms I'm on and it's not my travel agency profile, I will engage much more. But if it is my travel agency profile, I like for them and I will just put my phone down if it's a short form video. I will put my phone down and just let that thing roll through three or four times to boost their watch time so that it helps send that information out because... I said in past episodes because I use my algorithm to study content creation, not just to doom scroll endlessly for my own entertainment. My algorithm thinks that I am some advisor's ICA. so I'm like, and especially because I watch their content over and over again. Okay, anyway. It's something. If you want to comment, your handle, I am pretty much only on YouTube. Sorry. I could go look it up and follow you if you have a YouTube account. I have nothing else. Well, I do have Substack, but I don't really check Substack a whole lot. I'm trying to think where else I'm at. YouTube, Spotify, Substack, that's pretty much it. Okay, share this with somebody, tell them to drop their TA, their travel agency, social media handle, if it's YouTube, which I highly recommend, you should be posting on YouTube, it's 2026. Do it. Anyway, drop it in the comments. Thanks for stopping by. Tomorrow is day 120. Ooh, we're gonna get into some weird topics. All bye.