Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 228: General Marketing vs. the "Push": creating a solid travel agency marketing strategy
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in your podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. I'm a travel agency agency owner. Gosh, sometimes I speak too fast. It's fine. And I help travel advisors become the CEO of their business. Today is day 228. Marketing push versus general marketing. What's the difference? Not all of your marketing is doing the same job. Even if it can feel that way when you're just trying to keep up with posting. This is why I like the annual review, the quarterly, and the monthly reviews, because you can have your marketing and your content strategy. So we're gonna define two different modes: general marketing and a marketing push. General marketing is your steady, ongoing presence, the consistent newsletter, the regular content rhythm, the everyday brand building. We've been working a lot throughout the year in this podcast. Its job isn't to generate an immediate spike in bookings. It's just like, hey, I'm here and this is what I do. And hey, guess what? I'm still in business. This is what I do. It's to keep you visible, familiar, and trusted over time so that when somebody is ready to book, you're already the obvious choice. Think of like Coca-Cola. they have year-round advertising. It isn't trying to sell a can of soda. On any specific Tuesday. It's maintaining broad familiarity and positive association steadily all the time. The marketing push is different. It's focused. it's a time-bound campaign around a specific goal. Filling those last spots on a group trip, or launching your new offer or niche, or closing out your I don't know what kind of niche you are in, closing out your summer bookings or your fall bookings or your weddings or honeymoons for the year. It has a clear start and clear end date, a specific call to action, and often it's more frequent and direct messaging to your avatars than your general content. Think of how like a real t retailer treats Black Friday sales or like how a company could build real urgency in anticipation around a specific product launch event. Ooh, like Apple and like I don't buy any Apple products, but Apple and like their latest iPhone. It's concentrated, it's time-limited, it's unmistakably pointing toward one action in contrast to their steady ongoing advertising the rest of the year. So when you're like, wait a minute. You always the constant steady showing up presence thing, that's gonna be more like your engagement posts, education education on your niche in general, and then your marketing strategy based on what you want to offer, you go a full quarter, 12 weeks. with a strategy of additional content of like this is what we're focusing on and you need to start before you need to understand your avatars buying cycle as well. Especially if you need to get new leads. If you have like if you're a new travel agent, you want to go with the pacing of the decision making process of that avatar to book the exact trip that you want to book. So if someone is engaged Everyone's like, You need to be posting like crazy during engagement season. My best wedding clients always came around March or April. And they come back around like September, August, September. It's really weird. Like those summer ones. And what I've found, because I always ask them like how they found me, I ask them a lot of questions about like why do you even want to work with me? And they would tell me their experience, like they would they got engaged at Christmas. Go okay, a lot of people get engaged at Christmas. And they were moving forward with a venue in their city, and it wasn't until February that they realized this wedding's gonna cost $150,000. And so end of February they started looking into destination weddings, and then they found me, consumed my content, booked a call. Okay. But the content that I was making I don't even know. I don't even I couldn't tell you. I could not tell you exactly what they found off the top of my head, because this was dozens and dozens of couples, okay? but that's an example of it. If you are a new travel advisor and you want to do weddings and romance travel, don't fret if you haven't started posting your content right before Christmas. You should, and also it's okay, keep going. Anyway, when you're coming up with your annual marketing strategy, if romance travel is part of your deal, over time you will understand my best clients book with me around this time. So I should probably start marketing what I want to offer the honeymooners or wedding couples two to three months in advance. So the quarter prior, I'm gonna really, really push that kind of thing. And then close it out and then start your next campaign. And you could do your campaigns based on if you are highly, highly niched into one thing. You could do your campaigns based on I'm gonna use weddings again, sorry. You could do your campaign based on the resorts or if you do wet weddings on cruise ships, the cruise ships that you like to offer and like the sailings that you do. And what time of year they should do, like a European cruise wedding is probably gonna take place over the summer. in my experience, I don't even like book booking resort weddings through the bulk of hurricane season. So if I were to do that, I could be like, Hey, you know, it's summer to avoid hurricane season out in the Caribbean, you can get so much more value booking da da da da, Mediterranean cruise weddings. Something like that. And you could focus on that. And if you want them to be booking, like my wedding couples I know are fifteen-ish, eighteen months out. Almost all of them are about on that timeline when I work with them. so you could start posting that the spring before for like summer next year clients, like late winter, early spring to get those next year summer cruise wedding in the Mediterranean clients. Alright, anyway, if everything that you post reads like just general steady brand content, you might struggle to create any urgency when you genuinely need it. Like if you need to to fill up that group trip. If everything reads like an urgent push, constant fire drill, your audience will experience fatigue and start tuning you out because not everything can be a five alarm event without losing its impact. So your newsletter, your everyday social content, your ongoing story bank content, that's just general marketing running quietly in the background all year. When you have like a group trip that's gonna close with a deposit deadline, or you're gonna roll out a new niche or a new offer, that's when you shift into a genuine marketing push for that one thing. More frequent touch points, more direct calls to action for that one thing, more urgency, real urgency for a defined window of time, then back to your steady baseline once it closes. So we're gonna look tomorrow beyond the social media entirely, how to build visibility for your agency in places most advisors never even think to look. This is travel agency to year, day 228.