Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 237: The Trust Economy: Why Travel Advisors Need More Than Followers
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I mumble through that every time. Travel agency in a year, not travel agency in year. I'm your host, Rachel K, and I'm a travel agency owner helping travel advisors become the CEO. And also, quick story. So I am obviously batching all this content. And I just started doing custom one-on-one mentoring for travel advisors. And I've been really reluctant to say this because I don't wanna get like negative feedback. So I've been on a big journey personally in the last few years. And I made the decision to go back to the Catholic Church and finally get confirmed 28 years later. And I was praying about the Elevate with Rachel K is the name of my company. And I used to be a partner in another business. So I was praying like same business, but it was a different entity and everything. And I was praying about this and my travel agency. And I was like, Lord, I feel like I was doing all of this in vain. And he came back and he said, Nope. I mean, yeah, yeah, you were. And also, don't get rid of this. Don't because I was like, should I just go get a regular job and give up? And he's like, No. And then there was this really weird time of like months. This is like over the last year of prayer, by the way. And He gave me the idea for this podcast. He gave me well, I don't know if it's him or the Holy Spirit. It could have been anybody. It could have been Rando Saint. I don't know. But I would just get like these messages. Could have been my guardian angel. And I was very confused. I was like, why am I doing all this? And he was like, Because you're helping women to become Proverbs 31 wives. Like you're you're helping women to come like I want you here to help women become Proverbs 31 women. This is a long story, and I don't care. So I've been mentoring this travel advisor. We don't really know each other that well. We kind of we get along very well. And I was teaching her how to do something with social media, and I was like, this is gonna help you get more views, and da-da-da-da-da, and just texting back and forth. And she was like, Really? And I was like, just do it, just do it. And then I was like, okay. This is another reason why I started my Instagram and my TikTok account because I know travel advisors are posting there. And I can't really help people with their content if I don't have accounts myself, you know? So I was like, I saw this post and da-da-da-da-da. And you could do this and this and this. And I can be a little overwhelming. I am the eldest daughter. And I was like, just do it, just do it, just do it. And she was like, fine. And I was like, cool. And I was like, I'm gonna let it roll. Here on my phone, get you some view, you know what I mean? Like I'm gonna support you and she's like, I feel like God sent like God sent you to me. And I was like, Maybe, maybe not, but I'm God told me that I'm supposed to, you know, help women become Proverbs 31 women and wives. And then she sent me a picture of her daily affirmations and it said Proverbs 31 woman. And I like this literally just happened. And I'm just like, my goodness. Cause I didn't know, like I I suspected she was probably Christian, but I didn't know. And I think that's crazy. anyway. Today is day two hundred and thirty-seven of the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. and yes, sorry, I'm just really excited about that. If you would like to apply for one on one custom mentoring with me, I only work with five agents at a time. I'm gonna put the link in the notes. Okay. I need to write that down so I don't forget. That that's what the purpose of this episode will be in the notes. Not the purpose. That's what I'm selling to you in this episode. Okay, day two thirty-seven. Let me write this down. Okay, the attraction economy is dead and the trust economy is rising. There is a real shift being talked about across the marketing industry just in like the last two weeks, I would say. Because if you're a business owner or if you want this to be a business, I highly recommend not just listening to the people in the travel industry, but listening to the people in the marketing industry, operations, finances, entrepreneurs. Okay? Like listen to all of that. Have your feed curated to support you becoming an entrepreneur, okay? Anyway, this new shift. is one of the best pieces of news for travel advisors who felt so much pressure to look a certain way online. the move from an attraction economy to a trust economy. Okay. So I do kind of coach and mentor advisors. I've mentored other advisors, right? And I only do a handful at a time. And almost every single advisor has been afraid when they first start. To post content that's actually them because they're afraid someone's not gonna like them and say something nasty in the comments. And I have been telling them nobody wants to see the same stuff from everyone all the time. They want to see the actual person that's gonna do the job for them, right? So for a long time, the social media strategy was built around attraction. Your follower counts. How polished is your grid? How viral are you going? the goal of getting as many eyes as possible as fast as possible, often through like highly produced or focusing on the algorithm, optimizing the algorithm content. Attention itself was treated as the primary currency. Okay? Now, marketing researchers and platforms this year have increasingly pointed to a different currency taking over, and that is to rust. Rather than optimizing purely for reach or follower count, and I'll talk about this in a second. Current data points to the conversion rate, which I've been shouting from the rooftops for five years, people. I'm like, the rest of the world's just now catching up with me. Repeat engagement and audience retention. Those are the metrics that actually predict your business results. A smaller, more engaged, more trusting audience consistently outperforming the larger, more passive one. One analysis this year put it very plainly: the trust economy rewards creators and brands who are reliably consistent over ones who are occasionally brilliant but erratic. Okay. And I've said this before, your your messaging doesn't even have to be like mind-blowingly good copy or anything. It's been I think it was MIT. And I mentioned this, I don't know, sometime in this podcast. I think it was MIT did this. businesses will do better if they just spam everywhere, regardless of the content. that's what it used to be, versus like highly curated. And Highly curated, highly personalized, not AI slop. It didn't matter. They're just now figuring this out. And I was like, no, be highly curated, be highly genuine, be highly yourself. Because and I've said this in past episodes, you are you. No one can replace you. Even if they are in the same niche and have almost identical offers and serve almost identical people, nothing will ever be identical. And it's like finding a husband or a wife, you're not gonna have n there's not gonna be like like your husband or your wife is one person, okay? There's not gonna be anyone else like that person. You could find people like similar enough, but when you're doing a service based business and you're doing travel, which is like usually very important to people. It's very tied it's tied like emotionally and a sensory experience and it's gonna create the memories for them. They're gonna be much more discerning with who they choose to work with. Now, if they just want a random trip and they're like, I just need to get away and get drunk, yeah, they're gonna go for the freaking travel agencies that are just like, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye. Here's a deal, here's a deal. You know? But anyway, I've been saying this for years. My content was this for way for years. I had so many of my own competition and colleagues be like, How do you even get this many weddings when you only have a few hundred followers? Because my content converts. And I'm only speaking to my ICA and I don't need a huge follower count. I don't need to go viral. With that being said, I will say if you are brand new to social media and you aren't quite sure how well your content converts. Which if you're just focusing on speaking to your ICA and exactly what they want to hear and you're doing it authentically, it's gonna convert, right? but if you are unsure, do a quick Google search on and you can or you can go into Quad or Chat GPT or Gemini, whatever, and list the platforms you are marketing on and list how many leads you want to get per month. And l like if you have a lead magnet, which your social media content is a lead magnet, by the way. and also list how many clients you want to close each month. I gotta write this down. I'm also gonna if you don't know how many clients you need to close, go grab my free guide, know your numbers for travel advisors. Now I gotta put two links in the description. It'll be in the description. It's also on my profile. All this stuff's on my profile. except I don't think I've added the mentoring one yet because I'm not quite done with adding the success stories and the case stories on that page. I'll add the whole website and then you can critique the fact that I haven't finished a page yet. I got I got I gotta talk to you. That's more important. what was I saying? yeah. Tell AI whatever platform you use to talk to, what platforms you're promoting your content on, how many lead magnets you want downloaded, how many clients you want signed each month. I did this, I told Gemini to build me a spreadsheet to track all of this. And then I asked Gemini, I think it was Gemini, it may have been Claude, I don't remember, somebody, how many views I needed to get per month across all platforms to hit my goals. Okay. And it was specifically for I also shared this with some agents that I'm mentoring as well to hit them their goals because they're kind of new to social media and they're like, I'm just not getting any leads. Okay. So that is kind of a goal to get. However, I was following those metrics back in twenty one, twenty two, twenty-three, I think in even into twenty twenty four. Twenty twenty four my life was turned upside down. It's it so those three years I learned I had a goal of converting so many views into clients. But then I learned the correlation inside my little TikTok. Every ten followers got me one wedding. It was really weird correlation. So that's more what I followed. I o I didn't look at how viral my content went. I didn't look at engagement. I didn't look at any of that. I just watched my followers. And I'd be like, Okay, I got four followers this week. I got one follower that follower the next week. Okay, I'm halfway to Getting a wedding consultation and it pretty well averaged out every 10 followers I got a wedding. And I don't even think I I might have a thousand followers on that account that I've abandoned. But I need to go check. I don't want to delete it because it's such a good username. But also I my ICA is no longer on that account. Anyway, so you do need to have an idea of the average number of impressions. And views you need across all of your platforms that should realistically convert. If you are posting enough content, there's no way you cannot get new business, right? If you're posting once a week, that's not gonna happen. But if you're posting every day, or if you've had the account long enough to where you can post two or three times a day, there's no way you can't get business. But eventually you should see if you're really speaking to your ICA and you're really focusing on that niche that you want to promote, that your conversion rate should be a lot higher than what the standard metrics are. Okay, so if you gosh, maybe I should share this spreadsheet. Comment if you want me to share this spreadsheet with you guys. yeah. I guess. That's about the only thing I can think of. Also, I'm really bad at checking comments on YouTube. I'm do I'm doing my best over here. All right, back to it, the actual episode. Episode. This isn't just for small businesses, by the way. Larger brands are visibly shifting to the trust economy versus attraction economy, leaning into radical transparency about their incentives, sponsorships, responding to consumer backlash against the undisclosed AI content. And in some industries, entire deinfluencing movements have emerged. If you haven't seen that content on any short form platforms, de influencing has been a thing for about, I'd say fifteen months, twelve months, something something like that. But that's where creators build trust specifically by being honest about what isn't worth buying rather than only promoting. If you want to leverage this and your marketing content as a travel advisor, you could be like, let's talk about de-influencing destination weddings. Everyone that you talk to is telling you to go get married at Hard Rock. Why? If you want a more personalized cultural experience, you should look into blah blah blah property, whatever property, right? Let's talk about de-influencing your destination wedding decor. You do not need. five, ten, twenty thousand dollars of flowers if you have a beautiful ocean backdrop. Let's save that money for your house or for your future children or whatever goals you and your spouse have, right? That's kind of how you can apply de influencing to travel. Another way you could do it, you could like think about your niche. I go to destination weddings because that was my my primo thing for years. But just think about your niche and how can you apply the de-influencing to it? Okay. Like you can like I did a whole series of like the best and worst destination wedding resorts based on the ones I had booked. And I'd be like, this one's garbage tier. Yeah, they got pretty pictures and stuff, but terrible service, right? Like you could do the same thing. Like this ship is terrible in their fleet. I love this brand. But that no. Okay, so the brands that are adapting fastest are treating trust itself as a real measurable business asset, not just a nice to have value statement. You can totally trust me, and then they don't deliver what they promise. You're already breaking trust, okay? Like don't if you are that's another thing you need to be careful about. When you are marketing, please be sure. anything that you state in your marketing of I will do this for you, if you state anything like that, you better deliver that to your clients. Every single one of regardless of how well that relationship is, 'cause sometimes you're gonna get weird clients that aren't really that aligned. Yeah, you better continue delivering. If the entire social media industry is shifting away from polish and virality and towards consistency and trust, that's a shift squarely in anyone who's listening to this, in your favor. Okay. You don't need a huge following. You don't need to go viral. You don't need perfectly produced content to build a trust-based following. You need to show up consistently, be honest, and be recognizably, specifically, sincerely yourself. And this is something I've been teaching all year in the success circle. I'm not linking that in the description. I've already got two, I promised. No. And the success circle is tied to this podcast. So there are many, many episodes here where it's like, just be yourself. Everyone, somebody out there wants to work with who you are exactly as you are. And that's the whole thing that we've built with the founder story, the brand story, your story bank, your genuine outreach points, your genuine service points. Not buying someone else's templates. Like It's gotta stop, people. If you've been holding back part of your personality, like your sense of humor, your opinions and your quirks, you can keep it a little bit of it back. You don't to go all in. out of fear that it wasn't professional enough, go to my TikTok account at Easydestination Weddings dot com. Nope. At Easy Destination Weddings. And look at my terrible, terribly produced content. From years ago and I logged in maybe a month ago and I had hundreds of notifications that and I was like, Nope. And I don't wanna delete that count 'cause easy destination weddings, what a username. That was back before anyone was on TikTok. anyway, go to that account, watch the content. I don't care. I'm not making any new content over there. Get inspired by how terrible that content is. Because that is the shift moving forward, and it's your permission slip. The trust economy doesn't reward sanitized generic versions of you, a fake AI generated personality. That you have to keep up online. It rewards the real person, shown consistently over time. Okay, please subscribe if you haven't already. So many call to actions in this episode. Probably confused all y'all. All y'all Tomorrow we're gonna talk about the four golden rules of the personal outreach. I kinda went out of order, it's fine. But it's gonna put everything that we've been talking about since day 232 into practice. And have a wonderful day. See you around. I don't know. Ooh, this episode went long. Bye.