Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 222: The Travel Advisor's Guide to A Soft Launch
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency New Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner. I'm gonna get this right someday. Helping other travel advisors, like be a CEO, okay? You're this isn't a side hustle. Day 222. If you're new, subscribe. You get daily episodes dropped the first year at least. I don't know how to work after that. But We are 222 days into the year. Ooh, the case for soft launching. New offers, new niches, all that fun stuff for travel advisors. So you got an idea. You listened to yesterday's episode. If you haven't, pause, go download it, listen to whatever, and then come back. Yesterday's episode is all about filtering those awesome new ideas that you're either coming up with on your own, maybe you're getting it via social media. Before you announce it to your entire audience, let's talk about why Qieter First Step, aka the Soft Launch. This is all I do with Elevate. I'm like, hey, five people I know I'm doing this now. Just why you're like, what do you mean we're 222 days in? I've just found you. I'm a big fan of the soft launch. Anyway, the soft launch will save you from a much bigger, more public mistake. My throat. If you don't know, I was recently diagnosed with MCAS, so my body is like deciding I'm allergic to everything. and right now my body is like annoyed with something in my environment. Last night it was a faux fur blanket I was curled up with was causing me to just like cough like crazy. Don't worry. Hopefully in six to twelve months I'll be fine. But yeah, it's so if you hear me coughing a lot in this series of episodes, because I'm batching about 10 episodes today. I don't know what's going on. I can't get enough hydration. And I feel like my shirt's on backwards. I'm good. Alright. Sorry. Alright, a soft launch. means offering something new to a smaller low-stakes audience before your full public rollup. It could be, I like to use this method, a handful of existing clients. Your warmest email subscribers is like another one, like the ones you know, like when you are reviewing your analytics for your email, you should be able to see who consistently opens and clicks. I wouldn't imagine your email list is tens of thousands of people, so it should be pretty easy to see. Or even a small group you trust to give you honest feedback. So over at elevate with rachelk.com, if you are in our courses, you get to come to the live Q<unk>A's. You don't have to come, but we're there for two hours every Monday, unless it's a holiday. And you're welcome to pitch your ideas if you feel comfortable enough. I like it to be a nice safe space for people and see if there's gonna be honest like I'll give honest feedback and other people can chime in too and some people might have ways to tweak your idea. So that's another way. If you aren't you don't have to buy my courses, I'm just saying it's there. If you already know some colleagues in the industry that you can trust, then present it to them too. the goal isn't sales volume, it's just the information. Does this actually work how you imagined? Does it land the way you hoped with your audience? Before you jump into building an entire campaign around it. So any change in your business, a new niche. Service packages I'm a fan of, so maybe new restructuring of your service packages, a new digital product you're offering, maybe a new little mini course that consumers can just purchase as like a small cost lead magnet. Any of that comes with the assumptions that you haven't actually tested it yet. Maybe your pricing is off. Maybe the messaging that made sense in your head doesn't land the way you expected with your audience. especially if it's a new niche, every niche should have its own individual ICA ideal client avatar. So like family vacations, you're gonna have a different avatar from honeymoons and destination weddings. And even destination weddings and honeymoons, you're gonna have different avatars versus adventure travel. So you can have those multiple niches and add them to your business. Just know you're speaking to completely different people. Like why would you want to speak to retired people about their honeymoon. Like a retired married couple about their honeymoon. It's gonna you need to speak more maybe about their anniversary or just like enjoying the twilight of their years or whatever it is. Anyway Maybe the process of actually delivering this new offer reveals a huge gap that you did not anticipate until a real client walked through it. A soft launch surfaces all of this while the stakes are still really small and the audience is still forgiving because it is a warm, warm audience because they already know they're getting and they already know they're getting like the early evolved version. Especially if you like talk to colleagues that you trust in the industry and you're like, hey I'm thinking this, what do you think? And you can like show them the landing page and like have go through the process. If you have a funnel set up, like ask or show Like here's the funnel steps I have, here's the copy, does this align with this lead magnet? Da-da-da-da-da. And see how they respond. So practical tips for a soft launch. What does that involve? A warm audience. Like I said, like your repeat clients if you have them. If you don't have repeat clients, trusted colleagues, or a good friend that can pretend to be your client to go through this experience or family member, family member. You want to make sure they're as close to your ideal client avatar as possible. Because like if you I remember I was going through my consultation script for destination weddings because I was like, something's off, I gotta ni nail this down years ago. And my ex was the person that I was doing the script with and they were just like and I was like, I'm not speaking to a forty plus year old balding potato of a man in my content. I'm speaking to a twenty eight year old woman so it was really hard to like get through and it was it was an interesting experience because there were some things that he was very helpful on with his input but there was a lot of things where I was like sir you do not get it and you can't even pretend very well. sorry. No offense but also Okay. Anyway, tell your soft launch group that it is a soft launch, that it's something you're working on. Let them know explicitly they're getting early access and that their feedback genuinely shapes the final version. This does two things for you. It lowers the pressure on you to have it be perfect, because you shouldn't make everything be absolutely perfect. You need to just sell and Fix it later. For them start now, get perfect later. It's a book. Go read it. And it makes your early group feel like valued collaborators, not just test subjects. I did this recently with a referral program that I've instituted and I've had to tweak it a few times and I'm still kind of like debating on how it's gonna go. But I did show it to my absolute biggest referrals and loyal clients. And I was like, what do you think of this copy? Does this is this confusing to people? Da da da da da. And so far they're happy with it. Keep your group small and specific. Five to twenty people is usually plenty. You're not trying to reach scale yet. You're just trying to learn quickly. Also, you want to ask for feedback directly, not just wait for it. A short follow-up, what worked, what didn't, what would you change, gets you far more useful information than hoping people volunteer their thoughts unprompted. If you were given, let's say you're like an influencer. Think about it like this. Let's say you're an influencer and you were just shipped a box of clothing. And they're like, all it says in there is just like, enjoy these clothes. That isn't implying, I mean you probably will, but that isn't necessarily implying that you're gonna provide them your feedback. You might provide other people your feedback if you want to like get views or whatever. But they aren't asking specifically for feedback. You and so you're just not gonna care. You can be like, thanks for the free stuff. You're not gonna do the whole unboxing thing. Usually, when you see those unboxings, it's gonna be some kind of a partnership, maybe a brand deal, and you're gonna wanna provide your feedback directly to them. Okay, actually be willing to change things based on what you hear and your feedback. Don't be, well, this is how I read it in a book, how they did it, or whatever. If you are like using a standard method, don't be that person and then call your soft launch test group a bunch of morons. No, you need to listen to their feedback, especially if they're like your repeat, warm, warm, happy, happy clients. A soft launch only works if you treat the feedback as real data, not just a formality on the way to launch that you'd already planned regardless. So, back to me. I'm loving the soft launching right now because A, I've had some things going on in my personal life that completely changed it, everything. And so I had to kind of rebuild everything. And then Janet wanted to retire so TA Toolbox had to dissolve. And I had to rebuild this agency. And so now I'm like starting fresh. And so I'm in a soft launchy mode right now. That's why you don't find me all over social media. Because I want to get real feedback from the people who have been in my courses for a while. To see what needs to tweak. And I'm getting such good feedback on how I can like integrate multiple things and level it up. And I have it noted, it's on my to-do list. It's on the to-do list. I gotta take care of finishing up some projects first. But it's amazing how much better things will be for the Elevate with Rachel K students just based on the feedback. that I'm getting from the current students. And they're happy, don't get me wrong. But then it's like, and also you can level up this way, Rachel. And I'm like, my gosh, that's a brilliant idea. Alright, so this isn't just for entirely new offers. Any meaningful change to your business, like a new service package, or maybe you are restructuring your current tiered service packages, a new niche focus, a new way of communicating your services. Maybe it's just as simple as a new CRM. And the workflows are gonna look maybe a little bit different. I don't know. All of this benefits from The same quiety quieter like testing phase. It's far easier and less costly to adjust something that's only been seen by 20 people than something that you've already announced to your full audience and you don't see those little gaps that you were missing, and then they start signing up and working with you as travelers, and then there's issues down the road. So that's that. There is no such thing as failure only feedback. Please take feedback feedback very seriously. Tomorrow, once the soft lunch has done its job and you've made your adjustments, we talk about how to actually roll out your new offer to everyone. Or announce maybe, maybe you've been like listening to this and you're like, I've got things kind of in place and I kind of have an idea, but I haven't told the world I'm a travel advisor yet. So maybe you need some help announcing that, just getting the confidence. to do that because it can change your life in a good way, hopefully. This is the Travel Agency to your podcast. Have a wonderful day. I will see you tomorrow.