Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 230: Understanding Inbound vs. Outbound Outreach for travel advisors
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency New Year podcast. I am your host, Rachel K with elevate with Rachel K.com. I also own a travel agency, and this podcast is for travel advisors who are like, How do I run a business? How do I market? How do I how do I do all this stuff? head over to elevate with Rachel K dot com and you can check out our courses, coaching, one-on-one little mini coaching sessions, and then full 12-week mentoring programs. Because I really want to help build the business that builds you up. Okay. Today is day 230. Eight ways you can market. We're gonna talk about this. It's like marketing 101. Actually, I may have learned this in a high school marketing class. But we're gonna talk about it because I don't think it's taught maybe anywhere else. I don't know. I don't know what anybody else is teaching. We're talking about it today. So we've covered, gosh, different ways you can like beyond the social feed. Let me look at my notes over here for the last few days. content isn't intellectual property. you don't have to have perfection to launch something. Anyway, we've talked a lot about different stuff. My notes are kind of all over the place. So today we're gonna talk about eight distinct ways to market your travel agency, organized into like four categories that'll make it easier to see where your current efforts are concentrated and where you might have gaps or what works best for you. And we're gonna talk about what's gonna be like the most cost effective as well, because they're different. Things. marketing generally splits into two lines. If you've ever been my age and had to read classified ads for jobs or just browsed them, you'd often see these inbound sales versus outbound sales. Whether someone comes to you or you go to them. And then there's warm versus cold. whether there's an existing relationship or not. There there's four combos there. And we're gonna do two examples within each. so warm inbound. I should like make a grid. It's fine. You're probably just listening to this in the car. This is people who already know you and they come to you. It tends to convert the best of any category because the trust is already established. A referral could be considered a warm inbound because a past client sends a friend your way. That is the highest converting, one of the highest converting sources of new business. And this entire list we're going through. I mentioned it yesterday. Word of mouth advertising is the best for service-based businesses. Especially if you want to get into luxury, by the way, because the really, really luxury clients. They don't pay attention to anything on social media. They go to the people that they trust. Anyway, the trust transfers before you've even said a word with referrals. Then there's repeat bookings. This is another example of a warm inbound. A past client returns to book their trip directly without you needing to do anything beyond the relationship you've already built. Okay, so those are like two examples of warm inbound. And you're probably like, but I'm brand new, I don't have any of this. You will. By God, you will. Next is cold inbound. This is the Stranger Dangers discovering you on their own with no prior relationship. This converts maybe a little more slowly, but scales further than warm inbound can ever do on its own. This is why you need to have like more than one of these going on. So what does that look like? your organic content discovery. Not running ads, but just like It's war or no, we're doing cold inbound. but they find your content through search or hashtags or just being in your algorithm. but despite never following you before, that's cold inbound and then they make a choice to come along. your SEO AEO and blog traffic. Someone's searching a specific destination or travel question. I don't know why everyone's typing on a giant keyboard when everyone's doing it on their phone, but I'm like miming typing on a keyboard. Anyway. It lands them going to your website, blog content, maybe some short form video or long form video because that pulls up in searches as well, without any relationship to you beforehand. So those are two examples of cold inbound. They in both cases the referrals, the repeaters. Stranger Dangers, scheduling a call, or finding your stuff, your website. Those are all coming into you. So they are inbound. Okay? Now we have warm outbound. This is you reaching out to people first. People that already know you. This tends to convert pretty well since it's already built on anything warm is existing trusts, right? But it requires you to be proactive rather than waiting. So past client check-ins can be considered warm outbound. The kind of like periodic, genuine outreach that we discussed weeks ago, not the automated happy anniversary or happy birthday email. just checking in, like, hey, how's the baby? Da-da-da. The nineteen nineties Rolodex. Bust that out. Pull out that card. How many kids do they have? What are their kids doing? Call and see how they're doing. You don't get that reference, but you might. Anyway, that often surfaces a new trip need. Then there's like engaged follower kind of DMs, reaching out directly to someone who's been consistently like engaging with your content, but hasn't inquired yet. So if they're like liking everything and commenting so much and it's been like a week and they follow you, but they haven't booked a call, you could reach out to them via DM, be like, hey, thank you so much for supporting my page. Do you have any questions about how I work? That's a warm outbound. Cold outbound is complete stranger danger. You're reaching out to them with no existing relationship. It typically converts the slowest of the four and requires the most volume and patience. But it's also the category that most travel advisors are afraid to do. So cold outbound, you could reach out for partnerships like a photographer or a local business owner. You gotta offer value first. Not just be like, hey, do you want to do this? Like have something valuable to offer. Then there's targeted cold outreach or ads. These are the ads that you're presented when you're doom scrolling. but you could do it too. A specific thoughtful message to corporate content contact or like a group travel organizer that could be or you could do paid ads reaching people who've never even encountered your brand and then your general content like if they aren't even searching that you're posting all of that is like cold outreach you're just putting it out in the world now you well it's not cold outreach because not really cold outreach it's kind of I don't know Let me think about this. Social media posting, they have to find it in a search first for it to be warm or cold inbound. But you putting it out there is cold outbound. Hmm. Interesting. If you're one of my students, let's talk about this one of the live Q<unk>A's coming up or the hot seats. Anyway, most advisors are just concentrated on a couple of these because they're afraid they're gonna get rejected or maybe they don't want to show up on social or one reason or another. usually cold inbound is gonna be your social content. Asking for referrals is a one people are often afraid of. but you can always ask. And just mention that you accept referrals. the advisors with the steadiest pipelines tend to have at least some activity in all four categories because each one brings in a different kind of lead at a different pace. And leaning on only one gives you far more, like leaves you super exposed if that single channel starts to slow down. Okay. We got one episode left in my batch and I'm starting to get really tired. But I'm gonna do it. Drink my water. Staying consistent with your marketing when it feels like nothing is working and why pivoting your niche too fast is rarely the fix. Okay. Please stick with it. It will pay off. you might have to tweak it. You might have to look at yourself and be like, Whoa, that's some terrible content. That's not even a valuable message. And like right now in this batch, by the way, of recording, I'm dealing with a this thing called MCAS. And I can't like Use any beauty products at all. So my hair is like crazy frizz because I might react to my leave-in conditioner or my hair oil. I can't wear makeup. I just gotta be. So I probably look like a crazy four-year-old because my hair is just like, you're frizzy today. Anyway, that was day 230 of the Travel Agents in your podcast. Have a wonderful day. I will see you tomorrow.