How LinkedIn Became a $3.5 Million Sales Tool for One Travel Advisor

The first group Aaron Coalson, a travel advisor with Travelmation, ever put together was thanks to a referral from a connection he met on LinkedIn. That group client is, today, his longest-standing and most profitable client to date, with more than half a million on the books over the past two years and into next year.

“Anybody that is interested in corporate MICE or any type of group sales, I don’t know why you would be anywhere else,” Coalson said of using LinkedIn as a sales and marketing tool for his business.

Coalson, who joined the industry as an advisor three years ago after he was fired from his job in software sales, began his journey on LinkedIn from day one. But even he didn’t know how good a decision that would prove to be.

“The last 26, 27 months, 100% of my business has been on LinkedIn and I have sold to date 3.5 million in sales,” he told TMR. “I absolutely love LinkedIn.”

False Start: From Personal Travel to Group Expert

Coalson didn’t achieve immediate success on LinkedIn.

“Originally I was in the professional vacation space, trying to help folks use their PTO,” he said. “When I was starting, the ideal client I had in mid was a busy professional.”

While he had some success booking personal travel, it wasn’t until his first group booking that he truly realized the potential of both groups and LinkedIn. In the months leading up to his first group booking, he told TMR he’d sold between 10 and 20 thousand in personal travel. His first group booking was for 50 thousand.

“I booked my first group and quickly realized I don’t want to be booking individual trips… This is where the money’s at. If you’ve got a group that is 50 times the amount of guests going and you’re getting 50 times the amount of commission, you think, this is going to be 50 times the amount of work. It’s not. It might be double the work. It could be triple the amount of work, but I’ll do triple the amount of work for 50 times commission.”

Today, his business consists almost entirely of President’s Clubs, and corporate, leadership, and wellness retreats. Personal trips account for only 5% of his business and he’s very selective about which trips he’s willing to plan.

Brand Building + Relationships for the Win

Coalson told TMR it took him about six months of playing around on LinkedIn to find his voice. He knew it made the most sense to post about travel, but figuring out what worked took time. So, too, did building relationships – something that is critically important on LinkedIn.

“LinkedIn is a long game. LinkedIn is not a place where you’re going to snatch up a quick win out of the gate, because it’s all about brand building and building trust,” he explained.

That first group booking? That came from a connection he made on LinkedIn simply building up a network of people. The connection wasn’t even the client. It was someone who referred Coalson to someone else who needed help planning a corporate group event.

“He was a follower on LinkedIn who had connected with me and given me some encouragement and constructive criticism, so he had built some trust with me,” Coalson said.

First Steps

TMR asked Coalson for his advice for travel advisors thinking about using LinkedIn.

The first two steps he recommends have nothing to do with what to post.

Step one: “The first thing they need to do is learn how to use the tool that they have set out to use. People jump to questions prematurely when it comes to content – that’s really important and you need to know the answer to that – but most important thing you’ve got to learn is how to use the tool… You need to understand the algorithm. You need to understand what kind of content other people are writing. You need to understand how important relationships are.”

Coalson recommends advisors find a course on using LinkedIn. He, himself offers such a course, but there are others out there as well. (The course he took to learn how to use LinkedIn was Darren McKee’s “LinkedIn & Social Selling” course.)

Additionally, advisors can use A.I. to teach them what to do. His prompt: “Teach me why LinkedIn is different and how to use LinkedIn for my travel business.”

Step two: Find your people and build your algorithm.

“You’ve got to build your algorithm around what you’re interested in,” he said.

That means liking and interacting with the content you want to be seeing, including the content of the people you’re hoping to reach.

“Some of my biggest business come from referrals [on LinkedIn]. It really speaks to the culture on LinkedIn. It’s very reciprocal. It’s very oriented around trust and generosity… everyone shows up with a sense of I want to learn and win and I want you to win.”

Part of building this network and these relationships is focusing on commenting on other people’s posts.

“It’s as important, if not more important [than your own posts]. I have seen some creators say, I only post a couple times a week, but I get far more business from my comments,” he explained. “The algorithm really rewards investment.”

In fact, one comment on someone else’s successful post could receive more views than your own posts.

“You could get 10,000 views on just this comment,” Coalson said.

That’s why it’s so important that advisors don’t “post and ghost.”

Finally, Content

As to the content Coalson posts, he told TMR it’s a mix of personal content and professional posts showing potential clients what he does for his current clients.

Professional posts should focus on an advisor’s ideal customer profile (ICP). For Coalson, it’s executives and leaders in any particular field who want to build retreats or President’s Club trips into their portfolios.

“You don’t want to step in and say, ‘I book everything for everyone. That works when it’s your friends and family on Facebook. It is not appealing to strangers who don’t know anything about you. They want to know that you’re a professional and that you have an expertise.”

For instance, for an upcoming women’s wellness retreat, Coalson will arrive ahead of time to go grocery shopping and stock up every participant’s room with gift baskets full of snacks, fancy water, and green juices. His content might therefore be a photo of the gift basket with a caption about running out to the store to grab ginger shots for his client’s clients so when they arrive they can feel refreshed.

Other posts might be about promoting a property he likes to use or spotlighting dinner options at a resort he sends clients to.

He did admit that he could probably be doing a better job dispensing free information, something that is highly valued on LinkedIn.

“Like how to start your first President’s Club [trip] or how to kick off your first retreat,” he said.

His most successful posts, however, are the personal ones where we writes about his life, his kids, what interests him. These are the relationship building posts that get the most reach. His biggest post of all time was a meme he put up reminiscing about Pizza Hut’s 1990s book club “BOOK IT!” (He attributed the success of that post to the overwhelming number of Millennials on LinkedIn finding it relatable.)

“The reach that these non-work-related posts give me, I’m hopefully able to leverage that for the follow-up posts about an event I have coming up.”

A Few Dos & Don’ts

Don’t: Treat LinkedIn like a backup social media channel, where you dump the same thing you’ve posted on Facebook.  

Do: Write unique content that doesn’t appear anywhere else and highlights your professionalism. Professionals use LinkedIn and they want to meet and connect with other professionals.  

Don’t: Spend just five minutes on LinkedIn a day.

Don’t: Spread yourself to thin.

Do: Spend at least 30 to 60 minutes every day cultivating your network. Coalson told TMR he spends two to three hours a day on LinkedIn, something he’s able to do because it’s his only social media channel.

If an advisor is not going to put in the required time and effort to using LinkedIn, Coalson said it’s not worth the bother. Their algorithm will “tank” and they won’t get anywhere.

“LinkedIn is set up for you to build your own community but you have to invest in that. There’s no free lunches,” he said.