Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 131 - The Travel Advisor's Visibility Assessment
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. We are on day 131. I'm your host, Rachel K. If you don't know who I am, head over to elevatewithrachelk.com. I am also a travel agency owner. I have a lot of resources to help you build your business, including this free 99 podcast. Okay, the Travel Advisors Visibility Assessment. Where do people even see you? or find you, let's do a visibility assessment. Now, these last few days, it's a lot of assessment stuff, and it's kind of like putting these thoughts in your brain of maybe on a monthly review or a quarterly review, you should ⁓ take a look at little of this information to help your business. The visibility assessment, you should be able to do this without an extensive amount of time set aside. You might come up with this while you're listening to this podcast and just pause it and do some voice notes. I don't care what you do. And then put on your calendar. like a 15 minute thing where it's like finish the visibility assessment or something so that you actually have this plan in place, okay? ⁓ Where do people find you or see you? Do you pop up on like Google search or Bing search? I don't know anyone that uses Bing, but maybe, maybe they use Bing. ⁓ Do you pop up in perplexity search or chat GPT search or quad search? or any kind of AI search overview? Are you in people's inboxes? Like, is your lead magnet or just like asking to sign up for your newsletter working? Do they find you on social media via your feed or your stories? Do they find you on social media because people are talking and speaking well of you? . Hopefully you're somewhere like that. Maybe people or mentions can be in person. Like, ⁓ my friend Marjorie's a travel advisor. Here's your number. Maybe that's happening. Now, if you don't really show up anywhere, this is probably a huge reason, say you aren't showing up anywhere and you're not getting any business, that's probably why. Nobody knows you exist. They might think you've gone out of business. They might think you aren't doing anything but working a regular nine to five job. Now, if you are trying all these things and you're just like, feeling like it's throwing spaghetti at the wall and you're getting some lead generation, not great, not high quality ones, let's talk about the visibility gap. Which is, maybe a place that your ICA is that you aren't showing up at. So. I'm trying to think of an ICA example. Let's say you put all your focus because everyone's saying video is trending which it is video content is king and Right now I think it's like I've got it written down for another episode. I think it's tomorrow's episode I don't know 82 % of all internet content is now video content That's a lot or being created whatever I wrote it down. That's not accurate, but something like that So maybe you're like, I'm gonna create all this video content, but your ICA, you're not promoting it where your ICA is. So now you're like, I'm confused. And I'm doing what's supposed to be showing up, but maybe you aren't showing up where they are. So let's say you're doing a lot of reels. and your ICA, you should know if that's a platform your ICA would go for solving pain points. But maybe you haven't done a thorough ICA profile. It is not just demographics. It needs to be an imaginary friend, a visible person that you fully create, okay? But maybe you're like, oh, they're between the ages of 28 and 32, and they're female, so therefore they're going to be on Reels. That's not an ICA. That's demographics, and that's kind of throwing speed at the wall. Then you're doing the video content, but they might be on ChapsNet. If you haven't listened to past episodes, that's what I call Snapchat now, ChapsNet. Even though I don't think that's a viable platform to be on as a travel advisor. I am ⁓ trademarking ChapStat so that I can create an app. Anyway, but maybe there is somewhere that you aren't showing up. Maybe I do get in the live Q &As questions like, what do you think about this platform? What do you think about this platform? It's not about what I think. It's about what you're at. Like, I need to really understand who your ICA is before I'd even like say anything. ⁓ So you can have that video content posted on various platforms is what I'm saying. And you might not be showing up where your ICA is moving. So a few days ago, we did one on, I think lead generation assessment. so you can spot emerging trends and changes in specifically social media because email, email newsletters, that's just like a steady thing, right? That's just like the newsletters we used to get in the mail. We sign up for a newsletter. ⁓ So that's not anything to really concern yourself with. It's more of like social media, in-person networking, where's your ICA, where are they going? and maybe you aren't showing up there. So if you're doing a regular lead generation analysis about once a month or once a quarter, you can see, especially if you do it on monthly basis, your ICAs trends kind of emerging if they're changing platforms. That's what I'm saying. And you would be able to find the visibility gap if you're losing leads and you're like, wait a minute, you can pivot. without peril. Ooh, trademark. I'm just gonna be Taylor Swift and trademark everything. Taylor Swift slash Disney. Kim Kardashian. It's fine. It's probably already a trademark phrase. Pivot without peril. Where was I? I'm just being weird over here. Okay. Now how do you want to increase your reach, like expand your reach because of that visibility gap? ⁓ Maybe, here's another reason. What if your posting times are just not aligned with the time of day your audience is typically online? This is another reason why you need to do weekly analysis of the data on your different platforms and just take a look, see, loo, because that can change, you know? In your first year, it could change even based on holiday seasons. They might not be online at the same time of day the week of Hanukkah or Christmas because they're celebrating with family and have to put their phone away for a second versus the weeks before and after that holiday season. So your posting frequency can vary a little bit. And you won't really know until you have a full year, but you can at least note. as you're tracking weekly. But if you're consistently posting to what time in your brain you think works, which you're like, I'm gonna post 6 22 a.m. Or maybe you're really into angel numbers. That might work. I don't know. But it's always 11 11 a.m. I will post every single day. that might not be aligned with the time that your audience and your ICA is actually on the platform. And it could be after they're on the platform and they've moved on to other things, so you're not getting as much exposure, hence the visibility gap. Or they're just not on it yet because they come on at like 12.30 p.m. instead of 11.11 a.m. and... It pushes out to people and nobody pays attention to it because nobody's there in your audience. So then it just dies and you don't get any reach. So you really need to understand part of the visibility gap is also monitoring the times that your ideal client avatar and your audience in general is online. Now I'm posting these daily at 6 a.m. because I schedule these out so far in advance. I don't know. This is the first year I'm doing this, so I have no idea. I can't really understand the analytics. I just am like, if they're getting daily notifications and they their phone on, I do not want a beep, beep, beep at midnight. So I feel like 6 a.m. safe. Okay. Reach expansion tips. Maybe up your posting frequency and or change the times aligned with your audience's average time that they're on that platform a little bit before. So it's like fresh content for them. ⁓ You could also maybe tweak your content to actually answer your ICA's questions. Not just be like, look at this beautiful da da. Like, have the question in your captions and also answer it. And you can have an in-depth, huge caption description because guess what? That's what AI search results is gonna pull, not your hashtags. Anyway, show up in new places. Like I said, maybe you are seeing the emerging trend of your ICAs going from one platform to the next, so maybe go check out a new platform temporarily. You can also show up in new places by leveraging another person's audience. Don't be creepy. Make sure it's a company or an account that you have a legitimate established partnership with. You can engage and support their platform. They can engage and support your platform. You can backlink each other's stuff on your webpages. You can host webinars together. You can duet or stitch content together. Share each other's content. I don't know why I do this weird hand thing if you're watching on YouTube. That kind of thing. Based on that information, this is what I was saying in the beginning, give yourself 15 minutes. You should be able to, off the top of your head, even if you don't look at your metrics, you might not know the why, but you should be able to be like, well, this is where people find me. And if you're a brand newbie or you're like, I don't get any clients, are you showing up anywhere to be found? Hmm, question mark. So if you want to expand your reach, create an expansion plan to start 30 days out. This can be a goal to increase your email signups, your number of followers. Again, not causation for more business. Followers going viral are more vanity metrics. They're not causation for bringing in revenue. There is a strong correlation, especially with building followers. Science! ⁓ Anyway, ⁓ is your reach like do you want to actually increase your reach, have higher engagement, so on and so forth. Woo, all right, that is day 131. I need to eat lunch. ⁓ Tomorrow we're gonna talk about individual growth tactics. So today, for your visibility. And it's gonna go over like followers, what else do I got over here? Email list growth, reach growth. There's another one, but I can't figure it out. I don't know why I can't read my own handwriting. But that's tomorrow's episode. If you like this episode, please comment or share with a TA who's... Maybe he needs a wake up call. Nobody finds me anywhere. Well, are you showing up anywhere? So I need to eat because I'm like hunched over big time. All right, have a great day everyone.