Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 188: The Numbers That Matter - Marketing & Financial Tracking
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, and it is day 188. And here's an uncomfortable truth from probably like two or three months in before everything really took off for my travel agency when I went out on my own. I had no idea which one of my marketing efforts were actually bringing in the leads. I was posting on the old tic-tac-toe app. I was in the Facebook groups. I had Pinterest. I had YouTube videos. I had a lead magnet. I had landing pages. I was also responding to DMs. I was busy but I was blind. I don't want that happening to you, so let's fix that today. You don't need to track everything. I know I talk about like monitoring your data and glancing it and like glancing at it on a weekly basis and having the understanding of what's working and what's not. But there are the vanity metrics, which we've gone over in previous episodes regarding like the follower count, the likes, and my gosh. It feels so good. But it tells you nothing about your revenue. So we're gonna talk more about what actually matters with marketing and finances. ⁓ the lead source, marketing. Number one, for every new inquiry, you want to ask them, how did you hear about me? You can have it on your form when they schedule a call. How did you hear about us? What made you decide to like, you know, you've seen it. How did you hear about us? Google. LinkedIn, whatever your major platforms are, friends and family, have them select one of them. After a quarter of that information, you'll know exactly where to spend your limited time if you are posting everywhere right now because everyone's like, ⁓ you need to try this. ⁓ you need to do this, ⁓ you need to do that. I don't recommend doing more than like three platforms. especially in the beginning, like one to three is good until you really, really get an understanding of what of your content performs best, where online your content performs best, and you should narrow it down. But you can also like build upon that. So for example If you're like, ⁓ all my leads come from video content and they come from TikTok or reels, then you know you can also start posting on YouTube shorts. It may not perform as well or the identically the same, but your messaging is reaching and it's converting. And that's all that really matters. You don't have to worry about views or followers. Those are vanity metrics. If your blog does pretty well. you might consider like a subreddit or just posting on Reddit or some other platform that you can have longer form written content. Then you need to do conversion rate by the source. Not just how many leads a channel brings into you. You also want to know how many of those leads actually book with you. So I you can have it on your consultation form, right? But the ones that actually book with you, you need to note that as well in the consultation. I realized very quickly when I started tracking this that TikTok was where all of my leads were coming from for a very, very long time. So I didn't have to focus on anything but TikTok because Pinterest wasn't bringing me any leads. They might glance over at it, but Pinterest wasn't bringing me leads. YouTube at the time was not bringing me leads. ⁓ I wasn't on any written stuff other than like Facebook because this was a long time ago now that I'm looking at what year it is. If anyone did DM me, it's because someone else was referring me on Facebook, you know? So a channel that brings you fewer higher converting leads beats any other sort of platform or marketing strategy that just brings you a flood of tire kickers. Another thing that matters is your newsletter engagement, your open rate and your click rate. Not how many people are on your newsletter, although that does factor in. To the conversions. Obviously, if you have 10,000 people on your email list versus a hundred people, you're gonna be booking a lot more trips through your email newsletter, right? You want to really look at your open rate. If it's dropping month over month, it's an early signal before it shows up in your revenue revenue, okay? If you are focusing, you don't have a newsletter and you're like, I'm just doing social media, I don't need a newsletter. I disagree wholeheartedly on that. And also, if you are you want to keep your content fresh on that channel that works, and you want to make sure like Trust me, I did this. I stopped posting. I think I've talked about this in past episodes as well, but I stopped posting because I was like, I don't even know if I want to do this niche anymore. And I did get business and they were not aligned leads at all. So you can do this with a simple spreadsheet, one row per lead. You can just like make a note of it on your consultation notes. That's what I like to do. But that's going to tell you more about your marketing than any of the analytics dashboard. In terms of the analytics dashboard, I know what you're thinking, like we talk about conversion rates. There is the funnel, okay? So if you see these numbers and you know a specific channel is bringing in the high converting leads, obviously you want to focus on creating more content on that channel. And I remember I got to a point where every 10 followers I gained was I knew another destination wedding was getting booked. It w it may not have even been one of those ten followers, but for some reason the second I got like on average about ten more followers, I'd get another wedding. Okay. It's weird. And you will see that as well. So if you have your goals in place of like, I want 35 river cruises booked next year, and you've narrowed it down to your channel, and you know that your analytics shows that you get so many thousands of views and you get so many followers, and from those numbers, you know you're gonna get roughly one river cruise. Then you know how much more you need to increase your output. Or at least make your content a little bit more engaging, but don't change your strategy too much because then you're gonna start getting the wrong people. Okay. Alright, now on to the financing side. The numbers that actually pay your bills, these three figures, every travel advisor should know. Cold off the top of their head every single month. The revenue booked, the total value of trips deposited that month. Okay. So I talk about if you want to make a hundred thousand a year, real quick math, after like If you want to bring in $100,000 a year as a travel advisor in commissions, you need to average over the course of a year $100,000 a month in bookings. So you should be able to look on your dashboard. How many, how much trip, whatever value you've booked. If it's 30,000 that month and last month was 200,000, you're still plenty of you're averaging it. That's fine. But if you're 30,000 every single month for the last three months, there's less of a chance of you hitting that $100,000 goal. Because that's starting to play out like you're only gonna make $30,000 this year. Okay. The commission earned what you actually take home, how much have you made this year? Because that's completely different from the trips you have booked in the future. And we all need to understand, just because a trip's booked in the future, it doesn't technically pay out until you get that commission in your bank account, right? I've had advisors get like so upset because a trip canceled for one reason or another and I'm like, why are you this upset about it? Well they had overspent their budget and they were just like banking on this happening. They were so sure that this big ticket trip was happening and then it got canceled and then they were like, I want to charge all these cancellation fees and they didn't have it in their terms and conditions. I'm like, you can't. You're gonna look like a jerk face. I mean you can, but they're never gonna it's not gonna end well for you. And that was money you hadn't even earned yet. Why did you already spend it? So, do you have your commission earned for the year so far in your head? You should be looking at these numbers on a weekly basis. I highly recommend looking into the profit first method. It is a book you can order, and I think they have a whole other program along with it. Books all you need. If you can read, you got it. And then the third number. That you need to have in your head ready to spit out because you are highly niched, because you know exactly what you're offering, the average trip value. This tells you whether you're trending towards your higher value clients or if you need to adjust who you're targeting based on your goals. So back to that hundred thousand dollar. revenue goal, commission goal. We'll call it the commission goal. Okay. You want to make a hundred thousand dollars next year and you're averaging forty-fifty thousand dollars a month in bookings like total trip spend okay And your average trip value is only three thousand dollars, that means you're booking maybe fifteen trips a month, and you need to book thirty trips a month to guarantee at that value of the trip a hundred thousand dollars in annual commissions. So then you need to take a step back and look at that three thousand dollars and be like, should I maybe focus on over the course of the next year changing my marketing messaging messaging tweaking it a little bit and getting into those high value trips or should I focus on spreading the word even more and do I want to have do I have the capacity for it and do I really want to manage that many trips per month? If you're tracking these, like glance at it weekly and really look at it monthly, and then have the overview, especially when you're like testing a new marketing channel or a new offer, you're not gonna have a proper amount of data over the course of one month. You need to track it over several months, right? And you need to compare it against your goals. So If your average trip value is dropping, because there's a number of reasons why it could be dropping, and it doesn't have anything to do with you in every case. Like if the economy is crazy and people are switching to cheaper trips, that's gonna happen and it just ebbs and flows. Anyway, if your average trip value is dropping and your workload is climbing. That's is a problem with your business model, even if the economy is affecting people's trip spend. So then it's like, what else can you do to bring in more revenue with less work? No amount of extra outreach or extra marketing is gonna fix that. You need to look at a strategy shift. The system that you're building, whether it's a spreadsheet, your CRM workflows, Your notebook. I'm a big fan of the notebooks. The habit is like fifteen minutes every Friday. I do CFO time on Wednesdays, it's like fifteen minutes. Fifteen unless I'm like paying out a sub agent for some reason something's weird with their commission and I gotta look into it. Whoopd, now it's 30 minutes, you know. That's me. I have subagents. It's fine. And then The analytics is like a 15-minute review. And you just write those numbers down. Where did your leads come from this week? Who actually booked? And what's the running monthly number against your goals? So if at the end of the month you consistently see $110,000 in trip bookings, trip value booked, then you're gonna clear $100,000 next year. s in many cases if you're hosted even after expenses because we typically it's it it kind of depends on your split. And they typically have better negotiated commissions than someone starting out on their own with zero experience or relationship with the various suppliers. Okay. Like if you're on your own, your commissions are gonna be a lot lower than if you're with a larger host agency that's been around for years and has shown to the suppliers we know how to book this, we do produce this volume of bookings for you, you're gonna have like a five percent difference. Okay. In many cases, there are some where it's just like too bad, so sad, it's this no matter what. And 15 minutes a week is nothing comparing to finding out the end of a quarter at the end of a year that you have no idea where your time actually went and what's actually working. Okay. So just a little friendly reminder, those are the most important numbers to look at with your marketing and your finances. It doesn't take very long. It's a small, tiny task. And it helps you make decisions better over the course of your monthly and your quarterly and annual reviews. Tomorrow we're going to talk about the side of the business nobody puts on a vision board. Analyzing your operations, your response times, task tracking, and the unglamorous side of the travel agency that quietly determines whether you can actually scale your business. So if you have a goal of 100,000, 200,000, 500,000, a million, two million, however big or small your goals are, they're all fine. Let's see if we can actually scale this tomorrow, okay? All right, thanks for joining me, and I hope you have a wonderful day, and I will see you tomorrow.