Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 213: Why Travel Advisors need to repeat their message in marketing
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency New Year Podcast. I am your host, Rachel K. I'm a travel agency owner helping travel advisors become the CEO of their business. Head over to elevate with RachelK.com to see how I can help you. If you're like, wait a minute, you can help me? Or you can just subscribe to this podcast. Today is day 213. Say it again. Why repeating your message actually works with marketing? If you've ever felt weird about posting a similar idea more than once, worried that people are gonna think that you're repeating yourself, today's episode should put that worry to rest, Masot or Monfreau. That's a little bit of French I remember. With actual research behind it. Okay. There is a long-standing marketing principle called the rule of seven. It comes from a simple, well-supported idea. Most people need to encounter a message multiple times before they act on it. The exact number floats it used to be seven. But with social media and everyone's attention spans being shortened from the doomy scrollies. Considerably more if you're posting on social media. In person, seven, rule of seven, typically works. And this is why back in the 70s, 80s, 90s, early 2000s, radio ads and TV ads worked, and being on TV segments, you gotta show up multiple times in front of your ideal audience. And that's why certain ads were on certain radio stations, if you're old enough to remember. You know, because they were trying to appeal to certain markets in the area to go do business with them. And then you'd get the jingles stuck in your head. Like I still have JG Wentworth stuck in my head occasionally. Like and I don't even need to I don't even need that. But apparently I was watching a lot of late night syndicated TV, not via cable, so I got the JG Wentworth commercials. It's my money and I want it now. Alright. The underlying point being a single exposure to your content rarely moves someone to actually book or follow, subscribe, whatever, or reach out. It's the accumulated exposure over time that does the work. And it's not even the quality of the content, it's the accumulated exposure. Okay? The reason that this happens comes down to a psychological finding called the Mirror Exposure Effect. This was demonstrated in the 60s. I'm not gonna pronounce the dude's name, because I will get it, I will butcher it, and I don't want to offend if he's still around him or his bloodline. people tend to develop more positive feelings towards something simply through repeated exposure to it. Even when nothing about it changes. Like nothing else has to change about it. Familiarity builds comfort, and comfort builds trust. This is why it's okay to say the same thing over and over again. This is why I struggle with my intro message, but this is why when you listen to podcasts, they all have generally like for certain followers or for certain podcasts, they all we all have our own intro that's repeated over and over and over again because we are building familiarity. It that's why everyone's like, welcome to the blah blah blah show. I'm your host, do to do-da. And that's why they're always it's just something we have to do. Like, it's annoying, I get it. Cause I hear it too when I listen to podcasts. I'm like, yeah, I get it. I'm not subscribing. I don't care. Cause everyone's like, Did you know most of our followers don't subscribe or most of our listeners don't subscribe? I hear that so many times. Anyway. But that builds trust, that builds f comfort, 'cause you know and like consistency and I'm just using podcasts as an example or sitcoms. certain authors, if you like to read, they have the same kind of like thing going on and everything that's produced because that builds familiarity. You know how it's kind of gonna go, and when you know how something's gonna go, you feel safer and more comfortable, and then you trust like this will consistently entertain me or whatever. a likening to fast food. The fast food weird stuff, like they're set operations that can be repeated across the country and maybe in different parts of the world. You know your Big Mac is always going to have the same Big Mac sauce. It's the same recipe. Your fries are going to be made the same way. We're talking about McDonald's if you don't know. You know, regardless of the McDonald's location you go to, it's gonna be basically the same level of quality. And because it's familiar and you're hungry and you're on a road trip or whatever, or you're in an airport, and you are like, nothing seems familiar except those golden arches, and I trust that they're gonna make my food the same way they do at the drive-thru near my house or whatever. Science! The science proves it! So, the direct implication all this has on your content strategy, the person scrolling past your post today likely will not remember it by next week. Let alone even act on it. That's not a failure of your content. It's just how attention and memory actually works in crowded feeds. You are going essentially into a giant arena when you post on social media with millions, if not billions, of people all shouting at the top of their lungs. Not all of them. I'd say like at least a third. let's say a third of users on a platform in general are regularly posting. The other two thirds are just like, well what do I even pay attention to? So the fact that you even get a single like, or maybe someone like really like follows you, or they comment, like, you have to consider If you were in this arena of hundreds of millions or billions of people, and you're just like, hi, I'm a travel advisor and I specialize in this and da-da-da. And some rando's walking by and stops and looks, and then they're like, Wow, that's really good. Like, that's amazing that you pulled their attention away from the other millions of people in that space also trying to get their attention. And you're not gonna get everyone's attention all at once. So You might get one person's attention almost right out of the gate and you just have to keep talking, like, yeah, this is what I do, this is how I do things, and da da da. Imagine social media is an arena again. And people will walk by and be like, Why are they talking to each other? And then they walk back and they're like, Well, they're still talking to each other. Well, they're still talking about the same stuff, and eventually they'll be like, Okay, I want to hear more because I hear things and now you've piqued my interest. The advisor who just says something once, if you were in this arena and you're just like, here's a really valuable tip, go register with the STEP program with the US travel department before you travel internationally, and here's why. You say that once. Anybody who walks by that wasn't interested is never gonna come back, and they're not gonna remember who said that in this giant arena of social media. Anyone who might need that information that was on the other side of the arena, and you just say it once and they come around, they're never gonna hear it. So why aren't you repeating yourself, okay? You're working against basic psychology. The advisor who repeats their core themes, their core messages in slightly different ways across weeks and months is what's working with psychology. This is exactly why the transcript workflow from yesterday matters so much because one video sliced into several pieces, delivered across different days and formats, is you naturally applying the rule of seven without having to manufacture entirely new ideas every single time. And like I said yesterday, keep that transcript. In like a Google folder, something that you can easily access from anywhere. So when you are in your next batch system and you're promoting a similar thing, because you should have a solid marketing strategy. So if your campaign is going back to in your marketing strategy cycle, something that you've done this month and it's been a few quarters, and it's time to bring that phase back, take that transcript, redo it all. Easy peasy, you have that. you have that. Okay. So the big question is how do I repeat without feeling repetitive? The key distinction is you're not posting the identical, you're not copy-pasting the same caption. That is not how you need to repurpose content and repeat your messaging. If anyone sees that and anyone's interested, let's say you post the same video over and over again for some reason or the same exact post. in like your Facebook group or whatever and they join your Facebook group because they're like, I really like this post and they had a call to action to join my Facebook group. And then they join your Facebook group and it's the same freaking post. Like every single week. Like there can be like similar like th posts, but if it's word for word the same, they're gonna be like, is this person a robot? What is going on here? You want to return to the same core idea from different angles. Okay. And you can do that with a longer video caught up into short form videos. Take the transcript, write a post with a personal story attached, a newsletter section that goes a little deeper on something you mentioned in your video. And you can even backlink the video in your newsletter, by the way. It's the same underlying message. It's different entry points. Spread out over time, someone would need to be following you extremely closely to even notice the repetition. And if they do notice, it usually reads as consistency and expertise, not redundancy. Okay? I feel like I'm shouting. Tomorrow we shift into the mindset specifically from I don't have the time thinking that quietly sabotages even the best systems that we've been talking about this week. This is Travel Agency The Year, day 213. Thanks for listening and have a great day.