Agency’s Online Strategy Resonates With Clients, Young Employees

Cathy Moore, general manager of The Travel Group in Vancouver, British Columbia, has worked to make blogging and social media an integral part of her agents’ routine. 

A focus on new technology has benefited the agency in a number of ways – including helping the 25-year-old firm to attract younger employees.

The Travel Group currently employs 17 fulltime staff members and six outside salespeople. It grosses about $9 million in annual sales, with about 60% of that in corporate travel.

Moore, who has a blog about her own travels, told Travel Market Report about her experience developing a social media strategy for her agency.

Evolving with the times
“The first thing we really saw as a useful tool was blogging back in the early 2000s. I blog about food and wine when I travel. Then we encouraged our agents to blog about their trips. That feeds into our site, and now our social media presence.

“Then everybody was on Facebook, and we couldn’t ignore that, so we developed a following.

“A lot of energy goes into our blogs and into our Linked In and Twitter accounts. We use Hootsuite to go across everything.”

Getting staff onboard
“There has been more resistance from agents than from us as owner-managers. They just didn’t see the sense and point, which I can kind of understand it because it’s such an intangible. I think they quickly got the point of the blogging once they began, however.”

Reaping the (intangible) benefits
“We don’t see Facebook as a sales generator, but really as a way of staying in touch with our clients.

“When we’re hiring, we want to be really transparent so anybody can look at what we’re up to. It also shows our experience, so people can really have a look at us.

“I specialize in wine tasting and markets. On vacation, I find wineries in the afternoon and write about them. There’s a huge amount of interest and it’s surprising who looks at the blog – people in Russia are even looking at it.

“You can really connect with the restaurants as well. They see my posts and respond. It develops a relationship that you never could have before.”

Bridging the generation gap
“We have a lot of people of my age, between 45 and 60, who are very experienced, so our focus has been on mentoring young people and they have more experience than us in social media. We help them define what is appropriate, and they definitely know how to do it.

“The combination of our wisdom and experience with their tech savvy works, and we’re grooming those people to take over for us one day.”

Keeping it simple
“There have been a lot of obstacles to overcome. Connecting all the bits with a program like Hootsuite is an enormous task. When we’re putting so much effort in, it’s really about simplifying the overall process.”

Learning to write
“None of us ever had to do anything like that before. Writing is an enormous learning curve. We’ve all become much better writers.”

Staying focused
“You can’t tell how successful your blog is by followers, but you can look at your statistics. We can’t really quantify it at all – that’s kind of a leap of faith for us. You just have to do it.

“We don’t sell on the Internet, it’s not what we do, but people need to be able to go and look at us online. We decided to pretty well abandon Pinterest. We don’t need everything, and you don’t need to be the new kid on the block for everything.”