The Engagement’s Over
– Start Selling!
The word engagement is everywhere in retail travel magazines and newsletters and it’s
employing the talents of many social media teams in large travel trade companies. These same
companies with their social media teams are working for you, their IC, OSR and Home Based
member. Whether you participate in your host agency’s engagement campaigns or not, here’s
what you must do to pay the rent and make some money.
Social media campaign success depends on who
is doing the calculation. The social media team
at HQ are very interested in measuring such
things as share of voice and retweets. Here’s a
few other forms of measurement they get
excited about on your behalf:
What’s most important to the marketing team is
engagement at all levels. The challenge is,
engagement is not sales, it’s engagement which
in the context of selling travel means be it old
style or social style, the campaign has caused a
consumer to take notice. No sales yet.
Click, Call or Come In
Potential reach. The numbers of fans, followers,
or “eyeballs.”
Mentions per time period. How many times your
agency host’s brand is talked about online during
a given time period = overall awareness and
chatter about your host agency.
Inbound links = people are aware of your host
agency and are telling others about you.
This is the true measurement of any and all
advertising and promotion, old style or social.
There is no other measurement that matters to
YOU the home based agent other than how
many consumers knock on your digital door to
book their trip. The next measurement then is
based on you converting that prospect to a sale
and eventually a long term customer.
Share of voice = how much your host agency
brand is mentioned in comparison to others.
The Engagement is OFF!
As an independent travel entrepreneur, you
need to generate sales that produce money, fees
& commissions to you. A Facebook page with
900 Likes does not a sale make. A thousand
mentions via social networks does not a sale
make. What makes a sale is YOU when you
connect one-on-one with a prospect driven to
meet you. Here’s the challenge: there is so much
engaging going that sales are secondary. It’s time
to sell and you can do that by simply advertising
that YOU are the person to BOOK that tour or
cruise featured in the engagement campaign. It’s
a matter of you attracting the interested parties
to seek you out first.
Share of conversation = how often your agency
brand is mentioned in context of the
conversations that are most relevant to you.
Marketing Team versus Sales Team
As you well know, the sales team is usually the
last group to hear about the new marketing
campaign that was launched yesterday before
the sales team were prepared to handle the calls,
sell and close. The marketing team congratulates
themselves for a campaign well launched with
little interest at that time in your sales.
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