Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 183: Building the Travel Advisor's Marketing Gameplan
Transcript
- Rachel: Day 183 of the Travel Agency in the Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. And like I said yesterday, we're about halfway through the year. And here's what nobody tells you when you started a travel agency. The trips are the easy part. Getting people to even know you exist, that's the job. I know, I know I've said this in the success circle. And Other courses, I don't even remember if I've mentioned this in the podcast because this is the 183rd episode. The bulk of the travel agent position is sales and marketing. Today we're gonna be kicking off a full week of marketing, pipeline, numbers, mindset. Four things that separate advisors who are busy from advisors who are booked. Do you know what the difference is? Hopefully you do. Okay. I've talked about the quarterly review at length because I think it's very important. I think you should think it's very important too to do monthly, quarterly, and annual reviews. And if you aren't a member of this success circle, I will tell you it's good to have a marketing strategy that's not just, well, I'm gonna do this this month or I'm gonna do this this week. Like plan further out when you're doing your annual review, like when we're like week one of the success circle, by the way, we go in and plan out your content strategy for the next year. ⁓ and that's important to do. You should be doing this on a quarterly basis, checking it on a monthly, and implementing on a weekly. Okay. since we only got six months left for the year, it's quarter planning time. Maybe you've already done this, maybe you haven't. Don't fret, my pet. Please, let's get out of the mindset of I'll post when I feel inspired. We need to do actual planning. So Don't base it off of vibes. Here's mistakes I've made. ⁓ I have treated marketing like a mood way back in the day, and then in recent years I had a very difficult personal event that really disrupted my life. And I was even afraid to even do any marketing at all until January of this year. So it was like eighteen months of even just like putting myself out there. I was like, nope. And back before I started putting a plan in place, I would treat it like my mood. Sometimes I post it every single day and I was like, I'm gonna do this so well. Some weeks I disappeared because I was Dealing with an itinerary or a destination wedding, or focusing on something else and wasn't taking that time. Okay. So my audience and therefore potential clients had zero idea what to expect from me. Inconsistency is the fastest way to become forgettable. Okay? And a quarterly marketing plan fixes that. You're not planning every single post three months out. That's a recipe for burnout. Like maybe if you get a wild hair up your behind and you're like, I'm just gonna do all this now, great. But don't try and like have we're doing a theme, a theme. You're deciding once a quarter what's my theme each month? What's my one big offer or push that I want to do, and what's my minimum. viable rhythm across whatever channels I use for marketing. So you gotta think of it in three layers. There's the anchor There's the amplifier and there's the relationship layer. So the anchor is one piece of long form content a week that does like the heavy lifting. This could be a very well written blog post or video that's like 10 plus minutes, probably around the 20 minute mark. The amplifiers is the short form. videos and little clips of the post like take a little bit like if it's a long form video cut it up into shorts or reels or whatever and post that right if it's a big blog post take sections of that and kind of reword it a little bit repurpose that anchor on other platforms and then there's the relationship layer which is the newsletter and direct outreach Which nurture all the people that are already warm. If they're on your email list, they're already like somewhat interested in booking something with you. And if they are in your direct outreach, they're also pretty warm, you know? So let's talk about that relationship layer, starting with the newsletters, which is your most underrated asset. And I know everyone's like, ⁓ I hate writing newsletters. A lot of agents tell me that. I know, I get it. And I want you to understand social media is rented land. It is not yours. The algorithm decides who sees you. They can shut down your platform. In fact, I have students who are like totally banned from all meta. Forever, like can't get back in and have given up. So like private Facebook groups, yes, they're great. And also if you don't have an email and you're banned forever, you just lost those thousands of people. The app gets shut down, you've lost all of your followers on any social media. Okay. But your email list, you own that because they have given you that email list. If Instagram disappears tomorrow, your newsletter subscribers are still yours. Your followers on Instagram are gone. And a lot of advisors like Don't really focus on the newsletter or avoid it altogether because they think, well, I don't have any news. You don't need news, you need a rhythm and a reason. So here is a simple monthly newsletter structure that works for pretty much any niche or travel like in travel, right? And this is like the structure for all marketing content you're gonna create. It's so easy. There's the hook. When you're doing a newsletter, a quick personal note. Something that's like, where have you been lately? What are you planning right now? What's a win that a client had? Just two or three sentences. That's it. The value, one genuinely useful thing. Like a packing tip for like a destination you're promoting, low-key. A destination that's having a moment because you're promoting it. A book by this date to get whatever heads up. Like all the suppliers do to us, by the way. Pay attention to what the suppliers are doing to you. You can do it to your clients. Okay? And then a softer CTA. If you don't know what a CTA is, it is a call to action. So just one clear next step. Hit reply and tell me where you're dreaming of going next summer or whatever. Or I have three spots left this month for Christmas market cruises. I hear so many advisors pushing Christmas market cruises. So it's on my brain. That's it. Three sections. Fifteen minutes to write. You can use Claude or ChatGPT to help you whatever AI you're using. It's fine. Refine it. Make sure it's in your branding voice. Send it twice a month. I would recommend twice a month minimum. Don't like you aren't pushing a product or service that requires you to email people every single day. Most people aren't, but you you see the emails. I see the emails in my inbox. I'm just like delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, right? And if you are on my email list, you know I do Tuesdays and Thursdays every week. Sometimes I miss one, but that's okay. Sometimes I have to sprinkle in a little extra. But my goal is Tuesdays and Thursdays, if you care. but that's it. So before you s touch any platforms or Flowdesk, Mail or Lite, whatever you're using for your newsletter, answer these three questions for the next 90 days. First, question number one: What's my seasonal hook for the next three sub like three months? What is my seasonal hook? If it's late summer, when you are hearing this episode heading into fall. That could be a time to start planning Christmas market, Kareer River Christmas no no. Ski t sorry, ski travel. Christmas vacations. Like that's or beat the January booking rush type of content. Your calendar should follow your booking calendar and your niche and how your ideal client avatar like moves through their process of deciding to book a trip, not just the travel calendar. The second maybe I should back up. That's a little complicated what I just said. So reverse. That's not how a car reverses. But that's how it reverses in this episode. When you are planning this strategy, I highly recommend focus on a specific niche. You I do recommend niching down to like one niche. You can have more than one niche, and that's okay, right? This is your business. And you should have an ideal client avatar or an ICA for every niche that you offer, which is an imaginary avatar that You understand who they are, where they shop, why they shop where they shop, what they prefer to consume, how they prefer to live their day-to-day lives, not just the demographics, but like you're in their head, right? You're like, no, I don't have any of this information. Alright, it's fine. and then from there, once you have an ICA and your niche, let's say it's Christmas Market cruises. I don't freaking know what you're niching in, but that's the theme for this episode today, because it keeps coming up in my head. So you have an idea of when final payment is for those Christmas markets, right? Because you specialize in this and you've done the training and you're like, I'm ready to promote this. You know who, the type of person you want to get on those ships. And you kind of know how to speak to them, but where are they in the planning process? if it's like on Christmas, it might be a little bit too late, right? But if you're like in July And let's pretend I don't know anything about river cruises or Christmas markets. So this is a terrible example. But let's say for example, the Christmas market's final payment is in October. I don't freaking know. So in July, that's when you would start kind of promoting because they would be like, most likely the ICA for a Christmas market river cruise is gonna be someone, you know, multiple six figure house h household, like over six figure household. And they probably Have two kids that are like teens, late high school, maybe one's already off to college, and the mother is not the primary income earner, but they're gonna be the ones planning all the Christmas shopping, and sh they've worked their butts off to save money, get their student loans paid off, get their mortgage paid down. Like they are debt-free, they're on track to re to retiring slightly early. She might only have to work part time and she's the type of person because she's like scrimped and saved. She does her Christmas shopping in the summertime. So also plant the seed of like don't buy gifts this year, buy an experience. Get on the Christmas market cruise bandwagon. Like that's the journey. So about July, it would be the latest you would wanna start getting that type of ICA to booking the Christmas market cruises because that type of mom is already gonna be like, Well, I spent the Christmas budget already, maybe next year. So you might be able to get it for the following year, but You'll wanna start promoting that in like end of May, June. Even though it sounds insane. Like, school's out, let's plan for Christmas presents now. We that would not be the messaging you're going for. But you kinda get an idea of what I'm talking about. Alright, now back to second. What is your biggest offer that you want to offer this quarter? Maybe you've got some group space held and you're trying to fill it. Maybe you want to promote a referral incentive to see if you can like increase your number of clients 20%. Or maybe if you're listening to this in July, it's time to start booking your 2027 vacations. Everything that you create, whatever your one offer is for the quarter, should tie back to that without being pushy about it. Okay. Thirdly, what's realistic? If you can only commit to one newsletter and three social posts a week, plan for that. A smaller plan that you can actually execute beats something that's super ambitious that you abandon by week two. And I know there's a lot of advice. You gotta post three times a day if you want people to see your content. I hear people saying that. I gotta post, I gotta post, I gotta post. And also that puts a lot of advisors that I work with kind of in a free state. Like it's just too much, so why bother even trying? You don't have to post three times a day. You don't have to send an email letter, newsletter, twice a week, even, right? Just do what you can manage, okay? All right, tomorrow we're gonna talk a little bit more about content. Hopefully I can help you understand how to use the short form and long form Vidia without wanting to throw your phone into the ocean or lake or whatever the pool in your backyard. I don't know what kind of body of water is closest to you. Because I promise you it does get easier. Oof. My first short form video took three and a half hours. I'm so embarrassed by that. But it did. But if you take one thing from today, the action that you could do today, just block off 30 minutes this week, open a blank doc, write down your seasonal hook, your quarters offer, and your realistic posting rhythm. Put it on a sticky note and put it on your monitor. And that's your base plan. Everything else from there is just execution. Alright? Good. Get it. Get it. Got it. Good. That was day one eighty-three of the Travel Agency in the Year podcast. I hope you have a wonderful day and I'll see you tomorrow.