Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 117 - Strategy Adjustments & Content Analysis for Travel Advisors
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. Today's 1-17 and welcome back. Like I said, thanks for joining me today. We're gonna do something completely different compared to the last two days if you listen daily. I know a lot of the audience does listen daily. And if you want those daily notifications, just click the subscribe button. That's all you gotta do. If you're like, who the heck is this crazy lady rambling on? with her super nasally voice. It's my allergies. I live in a part of the world that my body does not like at the time of recording this. I'll just say it's my allergies. I don't know. Anyway, head over to elevatewithrachelk.com to see how I can help your travel agency. We got courses, we got one-on-one phone calls, we got one-on-one consulting, lots of mentoring. The courses are not just like... crap me reading slideshows and be like, and that's it. Like there's weekly live Q &As forever and ever and ever and ever. Okay, cause I know you can't build a business and you can't make dramatic changes in your business over the course of like four to six weeks. Like, no, I'm here to help you. All right. 117 is the day. Content Analyzation and Strategy Adjustments. We're going to talk about that. So if you haven't listened to the podcast at all, this is kind of coincides with Elevate with Rachel K's Success Circle, which is a 52 week program and it's becoming the CEO of your travel agency. It's not tens of thousands of dollars, it's $35 a month. Anyhoodle, this kind of coincides with the trajectory of that program. So you're kind of getting a little sneaky preview. If you are already a student, know a lot of current students listen to this podcast. This is kind of supplement to it. They kind of coincide with each other. So at beginning of the podcast, beginning of the success circle, we started with the big annual review. And I've broken down over time. So recently in the 80s, we talk about the quarterly review, like day 80-ish. And now I'm going to talk about the monthly review throughout the next few episodes. I'm not going to go in depth and like, here's how you do your monthly review. That is in the success circle. However, it is imperative to constantly be reviewing your own work and how your business is doing. It's just kind of like if you had a garden. You're not just going to throw seeds out there and be like, I the sprinklers on timer. We'll see how it goes. Like you're, you're going to check and be like, are the seedlings sprouting? ⁓ do they got their true leaves yet? Uh-oh. They're really growing now. Fruit is, it's flowering. Fruit's going to come. I'm so excited. You want to do the same thing in your business. You want to check on what's going on because Just because you do something that someone's like, this is what you need to do to really do well in your business doesn't mean it necessarily will work for you. So it's important to track all the data and be like, is this actually working for me or do I need to tweak it? Okay. So today is the content analysis strategy adjustment. The KPIs. In past episodes, I think it was in the day 60s or 70s, I have every episode noted here. Maybe it was in the 70s with the fear. I discussed ⁓ KPIs, key performance indicators, specifically with social media, and success, not success, vanity metrics. There it is, day 73. Choosing the right data metrics is day 73. So they should be actionable, accessible, and auditable. Real quick overview. Vanity metrics are gonna be views, going viral. Be very wary of anyone selling the idea to you. Like, just pay for my program and you'll go viral and you'll be a millionaire. That's not how travel agents make money. ⁓ Followers is another vanity metrics, but it can be helpful. for that, when I was doing a lot of destination weddings and a lot of social media marketing, I focused primarily on TikTok and I knew over time every 10 followers I gained on TikTok would equal one wedding booked. Like it just kind of like. flowed that way. So if I went from 50 to 60 followers, I probably had booked one wedding in that time. If I went from 60 to 100 over a course of two weeks, I probably gained four or booked four weddings in that time period. So there is like a small correlation, but even now I still have my account. I've never deleted it. I'm just not active on it anymore. ⁓ but even now, like, The number of followers strongly correlates to 10 times more the number of weddings that I have. I haven't checked my followers, but the last time I checked, it was like, yep, this is still about 10x how many weddings I've done. so KPIs are gonna be more not just views, not just followers, but do you have specific links tied to that platform? for people to book consultations. Do you have specific lead magnets? You're only dropping in the description on your content on specific platforms so you can identify who's signing up for what where more easily. ⁓ When you do your consultations, do you ask how did they find you? That was another thing that I would do. I'm being like, how did you hear about me? And they would say, ⁓ TikTok. You had this specific TikTok blah blah blah post that really drew me in because I wanted to get married at this resort and you just laid it all out in front of me exactly how it works and then I looked at other content and it's funny and educational and blah blah blah so I had to work with you because I know you know your stuff. You're not just selling me the idea of a destination wedding. And that's another, ⁓ that was like another kind of KPI on how to understand what type of content was performing best for me because my consultations that would hire me, they may not remember exactly the piece of content but they just remember it was about this property that I wanted to get married at and I can't find any information about it anywhere else. You seem to be the only travel advisor who knows how weddings work at this property. And then I would know, okay, well that's from this series I did four months ago, right? So, other KPIs can be like comments. Some people do follow, they warm up, but some of my clients never follow me. They just found me they're like, I need to book a call immediately. Are you reviewing content performance weekly, monthly, and then adjusting quarterly? You should. You should be. is just like an idea of like what content, weekly and monthly is like an idea of what content is performing best for your audience. So what did perform best when you're doing these weekly, monthly reviews? What underperformed and why? When you are reviewing the top pieces of content and the least popular pieces of content, if you can get that data from whatever platform, I want you to get into the mind of your ICA and watch that content yourself and then be like, ⁓ I'm not even making eye contact. It's probably why no one wants to watch this video when it's like underperforming. Or I'm just rambling on. Or I look like I didn't even brush my hair or something like. Or the lighting isn't that great so people can't really see me. Or I have too much makeup on if we wear makeup. ⁓ whatever the case may be. And then the same thing with the content that performs well. What's the watch time? And you can see when they're underperforming, specifically if it's video content, you can see the watch time. And I know some platforms like YouTube just have bots crawling constantly, so that's really hard to determine the actual watch time, because they'll watch like half a second and really mess with your algorithm, like your... ⁓ review your analytics. There we go. And then others will and you need to factor that in too. But if the average fall off time is at the beginning, then you aren't bringing them in. Like they're like boring. And that's not that's not a you problem. I mean, that's something you can fix easily. If it's like a three minute video, let's make it a 60 second video. If they're like 30 seconds in and they fall off. Maybe you're droning on. Like I know when I'm recording too much content at once, I go from like, hey everybody, I'm super excited to, and this is the thing, and I don't really, like. So sometimes I have to redo content because I learned that that stuff doesn't perform because I'm just like falling asleep in front of the camera. So review your content as an outsider, preferably of the mind of your ICA or the personality of your trying to work with. Not trying to work with, but the personality of your typical client, even if you're new. Ask for feedback specifically on the content that's underperforming from a colleague, friends, family, people that you can trust to be honest with you and not fake to give you feedback because it could just be, ⁓ this content's very informative and you're really, really knowledgeable on this, whatever. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with you though. Do I follow you? Do I book a consultation with you? Like there's no call to action. Or, again, this is very, very knowledgeable. Like you clearly know what you're talking about and I can tell you're reading a teleprompter. So then it makes me question how much do you actually know? Or at the very beginning, you paused too long. Like the millennial pause they call it. where you're like, clearly I'm new to being on video content and you're like, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you might be fine, but that first second could be causing that. And if you don't, excuse me, if you don't have like a big caption for them to read, whoops, I just hit my mic. They're gonna be like, what is this silence? What is this dead air? need the dopamine, give me stimulation. Think about that. It's not that you are bad at sales. It's not that you are terrible at marketing. You are learning how to do content. Social media content's a little bit different than just walking up to someone and be like, hi, I'm a travel advisor. Well, that's also kind of weird. Don't do that to strangers in public. I mean, maybe. Okay, can you say right now on your top platform the day slash time that your audience engages with your content the most? Can you just be like, ⁓ it's Wednesdays at 11 a.m. It's fascinating. So if you have that information and you're batch creating content, you have an idea of when they're going to come live and start watching your content, right? And you can schedule that content to be pushed out. 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, shortly before those high times of engagement. And then you have a better understanding of your ICA as well. If you have high, high engagement around 11 a.m. your time, and it'll show you too, is it mostly women following you, mostly men, how old are these people, where do they live in the U.S. And let's say you're me in your central time zone. So 11 a.m. is peak engagement on Wednesdays. Yeah, Wednesdays and then again Fridays at like 10 p.m. Okay, so now your ICA on Wednesdays is getting through hump day middle of the week by scrolling and enjoying your content, fantasizing about the trip they wanna take, okay? So they are like. kind of in a burnout mode. So you have a better idea of what their profession is. It's probably a nine to five Monday through Friday thing. You should already have an idea developed for your ICA of what their profession is. And now you know, ⁓ this is a consistent thing every week. My audience feels the burnout on Wednesdays at lunchtime. And then again, at 10 p.m. on like Fridays, that means that they aren't going out. on Friday nights. They might go out on Saturday nights, but they aren't going out on Friday nights and they're probably going to your content for reassurance that what they're doing with that type of travel is a payoff. Maybe they're like trying to settle down from the week and they're like, I can't sleep. I'm going to just do a little doomy scrolly and ⁓ here's Rachel with XYZ travel. telling me it's okay for me to take this trip. Maybe I should take this trip. Now, then from there you can look at the analytics and if you're central time zone and they're all East Coast then you definitely know they're doing lunch and late nights on Fridays and you can kind of infer why they might be doing that which can help you with your messaging and your content down the road. Okay, sorry that was long. Okay, do you track what content leads to consultations? I've already discussed that. Now adjusting your content, once you have all this information, you're like, I need to make some adjustments. When I post this, the type of content that's really performing, I need to make more in that same vein. It can be the content I've already planned out, the topics, but maybe I need to spin it a little bit. Using this information can help you adjust your calendar to include what is actually working. Because when you create your content strategy and your marketing strategy, even if you hire some guru to do it for you, unless you're paying thousands of dollars a month, which most of us new TAs especially don't necessarily have, you're kind of testing your own hypothesis. ⁓ But as you go, you'll be able to see what content performs better so you can further test, right? It's a good idea to spend some time on your preferred platforms to strictly, or your ICA's preferred platforms, to strictly understand trends and how they apply to your niche and how your ICA is interpreting them. Not what you like necessarily. There could be things that you resonate with that you could be like, ⁓ man, I could use this sound and it will appeal to my ICA. ⁓ So when you do that also, it's going to screw up your algorithm in a big time way. Big time way. My algorithm had no idea who I was because they thought I was planning a destination wedding myself. And they wanted, they were like, here's all the wedding gown trends and here's like sounds and you'll see complimentary businesses online and you can pull from their sounds or get inspiration, right? And be like, how can I apply this to my niche? and how can, like this is hilarious content and this can relate to my ICA in this way and I can use the same sound. Because it's not like sounds are limited to only special people, right? you are also, please understand, constantly being marketed to on social media. I call it the QVC of the 2020s. Just constant bombardment. When I decided to redo my daughter's bedroom, I chose Glidden's poop brown color, but now my daughter didn't like it. So I've repainted with this special roller and this exact paint color, Lincoln Bio, like you were constantly being marketed to. So, understand that and if there's anything that pulls you in, stop and pause. Don't go buy it. Analyze, how are they convincing me that I want this? How are they convincing me that I need this? What is this strategy going on? Study that content as well because it could give you inspiration on how to improve your campaigns. Okay, good, we made it. We made it! Over 10 minutes, under 20, perfect. Perfect episode. Alright, so those are... how to kind of like adjust your strategy, tips and tricks you can use if you're like, all of my content sucks. Go to Inspirate, like Realtors for travel advisors. Realtors and travel advisors, very, very similar in terms of how we serve. Financial advisors, very similar in how we serve. You could look at those different industries and their social media platforms just to see what they're doing. Think how can this resonate with my ICA and how can this ⁓ be pivoted in a way that is for my business and my services offered. So real estate is a good one if you're into romance travel, destination weddings and honeymoons because there are a lot of first time home buyers typically around the same time that they're getting married, right? So that's like. You could lean into what content you're seeing there and get inspiration from that. Financial advisors, they're good for like more middle-aged nearing retirement. If that is the age group of your ICA, what are they doing? And look for like bigger creators, not like the biggest ones out there, but just like ones that tend to go a little more virally and see how you can change their message to apply to your ICA. if you need to do any adjustment in your strategy. But if your content's doing great, who cares? Keep it up. I'm kidding, but I'm not really. ⁓ Yeah, that was day 117 of Travel Agency in a Year podcast and I will see you tomorrow. Thanks for stopping by. Bye.