Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 266: Getting It On the Calendar - Travel Promotions in Your Content and Work Schedule
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency New Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. I'm a travel agency owner here to help you build a business that builds you up. Because I'm just like you. And we can all make multiple six-figure revenues. The goal here for all of us, I want to see us get to seven and eight-figure. Let's get full to Lulu. But it doesn't have to be Delulu. Anyway, if you want to see how I can help you, you can listen to this podcast. And then from there, go to elevatewithrachelk.com and decide if I actually can help you. Otherwise, this is just free entertainment. Today is day two hundred and sixty-six of three hundred and sixty-five episodes. We have ninety-nine episodes left. And then I gotta start a new podcast. It's not gonna be like this at all. But I'm gonna do it because I really enjoy doing this. Okay, getting everything on your calendar, promotions in your content, and for your work schedule. This is all part of wave season prep. This is part three of it. Starts of day 264. So this is gonna help you make your campaign actually real because you're putting deadlines on your work calendar. Ba ba ba! Because if a campaign plan only exists as an idea in your head, or like maybe in a spreadsheet, or maybe a notebook, or like a random Google document that you forgot to name, so it's just called untitled document. I have so many of those, by the way. And I'm like, what the heck is this? three years later, and I'm like, yeah, that was a really good idea. when you do stuff like that, it doesn't actually happen. Today, we're gonna put yesterday's campaign review directly into two working calendars for you. Okay. So yesterday was a campaign review, not a content calendar review. There is a difference. If you're like, what's the difference? Go listen to yesterday's episode as well. So your content calendar tracks what gets published and when. We all know this, right? The actual posts, the scheduling of the emails, any video content you have. There's like MetroCool and gosh, there's so many. MetriCool comes to mind first. There are so many out there. I actually just saw one today which I was like, I wish travel advisors could use this. I would use this in my business called Scaly Scale Creator, but it only sends affiliate links. From Amazon and TikTok shop, and I was like, ugh, I would totally use this if I could get it to send my own like consultation URL. But it looks cool, guys. It's called Scale Creator. If anyone knows how to figure out how to use it for travel agents instead of just like affiliate marketing, my gosh, let me know because. At the time of recording this, it doesn't allow you to do use any URL except the Amazon or TikTok shops. Anyway, so your content calendar tracks what gets published and when. Your work calendar tracks the time that you actually need to do everything in your travel agency. I also recommend for your work calendar putting anything like I like to merge all my calendars into one. and anything that you want done through the day. You don't have to follow it to a T with the schedule, but it's kind of like my running to-do list. So I have reminders to eat lunch because if you're like me, I will get super pumped about working on something and work straight through lunch and all of a sudden it's 4 15 p.m. and I'm like, I forgot to eat. Whoops, now I'm really hungry and I'm at the point of being hangry. So I have to put lunch in. I have to put like some sort of daily movement in for my own personal health benefit. and then on top of that, every task I do every day, even if it's only like a 15-minute block on my calendar, I put it on there because if I haven't done it that at that time block, then it's a reminder of like, I should stop what I'm doing, wrap up my task, I got 10 minutes, and then I gotta check my emails. Something like that. and I do that throughout the entire day. Obviously, I leave gaps open for consultations, but that's how I like to do my work calendar. So most travel advisors build the content calendar and then wonder why they're scrambling the weak promotion launches because the actual work of creating and managing all the new business was never blocked anywhere. So for each promotion or campaign from yesterday's review that you're working on for the next quarter slash wave season, start at the actual deadline or the launch date and then you wanna work backwards. If you know me You know I always say start at the finish and work backwards. Start at the big I want to have fifty trips booked by the end of this quarter, or I want a hundred trips booked by the end of wave season, whatever your crazy goals are, and then break it down. How much time do you have between now and roughly the end of wave season? How many weeks is that? Which means how much time do you have? How many consultations do you need to average a week? Do you have everything prepped and ready to go right now? Or do you still need three or four? weeks and I need compress time even more okay to get those consultations. Now you're three weeks out from getting your first consultations in this example. So between today and three and two or three weeks from now, what do you have done and what do you need to get done? What is the most urgent? And you can break it all the way down to today I need to create a social account. Or today I need to finalize my landing page. Or create a new consultation lake. Whatever. It's a little simple task. All right. For each promotion or campaign, start at the deadline. Work backwards. If it's if it's a launch date for something, work backwards from there as well. When does the announcement need to go out? When does the tease need to be posted? If you follow the arc from day two hundred and twenty-three in the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. When do you need to actually have filmed or written said content using the task-by-task batching system, which is easiest? Fight me, I don't care. From days two 10 through 213 of the Travel Agency New Year podcast. Yes, these episodes are short, but there's so much value. I don't want to overwhelm you. Could you imagine if I spent like four hours talking about everything in one episode? It's bad enough when I ramble on and it hits 20 minutes in my mind. We don't have time. Okay, each one of these becomes its own entry on your work calendar, not just your content calendar, not just having your content scheduled out. But if you do the task-by-task system for batching content, you need a day to like write out your ideas, another day, or time slot, whatever. You can do it day by day, you can do it multiple different time slots in the day, but you just focus on one task. And you need to have everything kind of written out. How do you want this to look? Take a look at it again. Revise the hooks. Revise the body of the content. Film the content or write the first draft. Schedule the content out or sit it, set it in your drafts and put on your little calendar a reminder. Post this TikTok. I don't care how you do it, but just do it task by task. Batch it all out. Okay? Whew if a promotion is likely to generate a real spike in inquiries, which you may not know it's coming for ya or not. which goes back to yesterday's like not yesterday's hmm two days ago, I believe. Hold on, let me check my notes. Yeah. Two days ago, where am I at? Sorry, I gotta check yep. Okay. Anyway, if you think you might get a lot of inquiries from your marketing and content strategy, do you have the capacity built in to take the consultations? Make sure you have on your work calendar time to handle that spike as well. Rather than just assuming it's gonna fit in and someone's just gonna want to book a consultation at 115 p.m. on a Thursday. Now, if your ideal client avatar loves to book consultations like this in the afternoons, that's fine. But if that's the only spot you have open all week and you want 10 consultations in that week, once that hour's gone, that's it, right? Or that 30 minutes. So make sure you have the capacity to take on the number of leads. Again, going back, let's say you have 20 weeks and you're like, I want one hundred bookings deposited within twenty weeks. That is five a week. Make sure you have at least five consultation spots available. The standard you need to close five consultations. The average close rate from consultations to bookings is roughly 60%. You will probably be higher if you are a newer travel advisor and you aren't used to your consultation flow yet, even if you're like I practice it and practice it, you're probably going to lean 60% or lower for a little bit. But let's take 60%. bookings that means you need to have let's see god rachel's doing math in her head i'm pulling up the calendar one second or calendar i'm pulling up the calendar the calculator okay i don't even know how to cross multiply who's a teacher Okay, it looks like you would need eight to nine consultations if you have a 60% close rate in order to get those five bookings a week. How long are your consultations and how much of a buffer time do you need in between? If your consultations are 30 minutes and you need a five or let's just do 15 minutes, 15-minute break in between consultations, and you have the rest of your life to live, right? that means you need roughly eight-ish hours open throughout the week, some of them back-to-back hours, for you to handle the volume of consultations to hit your goal. Which may mean temporarily opening up days you normally wouldn't take consultations to hit your goal. It is the sacrifice to build your business. It is not you're not worth it. It is I want my business to hit these goals so that my family and I can enjoy the prosperity. This isn't sacrificing your time for negative output, if that makes sense. All right. A successful promotion that does overwhelm your response capacity actually hurts your business. Because you're gonna slow down your response times. You may not answer to people at all. You may not, you may decide not to show up to consultations. I don't think that would happen, but it might happen. or you could take it out on your family, loved ones, get burnt out, be super tired, be grouchy and crabby. I don't know. It's not a good thing if you're like burning yourself out to hit these goals, which is why we're building in the capacity ahead of time in these episodes. or even just like you don't want to answer DMs and you're annoyed because you're like that's not my process. But if someone's highly interested and you're like I refuse to I refuse to bow down to these plebs, actually, no, your service-based business, people are your biggest asset. If you shit all over people because you think you're too good to work with them, you are not a service-based business owner. Anyway, that really makes me mad when people are like extreme with their boundaries. you could lose a lot of res revenue. You could lose a lead because of your hesitation, because of your refusal to have more capacity. It just doesn't really make sense. So, what do I like to do with my calendar? Simple. I like to color code things myself. Everything is color-coded because I like the color key. It's easy for me to see at a glance. So you can color code any like promotional related Items on both calendars. Like if you hold group space and you have a deposit deadline, put that on your calendar, make it a specific color for that type of group. I don't know if you're niche in resorts or cruises, whatever. but you can make that a specific color compared to all of your other tasks. So that way it pops up as a better reminder. You can even set, I think, depending on your calendar, multiple reminders, like, hey, this is coming up, hey, this is coming up. But you want them to stand out from your normal ongoing client work, admin work, content creation work on your calendar. That way at a glance, I like to pop up my calendar on a weekly basis and I'm like, here's what I've got. But if I see at a glance that there's something on my calendar that's a completely different color, like chartreuse. Tennis ball green, who's gonna miss that? Then I'm gonna be like, whoa, whoa, whoa! What is this? Do I need to follow up on some things? but you should be able to see exactly which weeks have real campaign pressure on them. So you're not accidentally stacking a big promotional push the same week as like your quarterly review or your planned rest period. Oof. Yeah, what if you what if you put. What if you put on your calendar a promo or intentionally held group space and the group space deposit final due date was at the same time that you had planned to take some time off and you forgot that the two dates are a thing, like the week that you want to have time off, and the final push date, and you've blocked off the final push dates that in that week, and you've blocked off the entire week from any consultations because you're out of office that week. How bad is that gonna look for all the last minute people trying to book? And then you don't want to respond to anything because you're like, this is my time off. That's why you need to do this, okay? Okay, build backwards. Recap time. Build backwards from the promotions that you want to put out. Their deadline on your Word Calendar, not just your content calendar. You need to integrate both calendars. Block real production time for the content itself tied to any promotions you wish to implement in your campaign strategy. And have real capacity to take on new client consultations for the inquiry spike it's likely going to be generating. Clearly label on your calendar any promotional deadlines. If like I don't know how far in advance you create your content, but if you're just one week ahead, like have a deadline on your calendar, like this promo ends, new promo begins. So that when you're doing your content creation, you don't keep rolling with a promotion that's run its course. Do it again in three months. I don't care. Okay. This way you're not gonna have overlapping pressure. It's not gonna become a problem. Let's calm down, everybody. tomorrow we're gonna shift how to message a winning offer for your specific travel niche. Getting clear in your messaging. Have a wonderful day. Bye.