This year, we’ve been inviting you into our workspace, so that you can experience the great companies we have the pleasure of working with.  This month, we’re excited to share with you how we work virtually with a specialized travel agency. Of course, to protect their privacy, we’re mashing up client stories, their industries, and their challenges. The stories remain real, even if we’ve changed names and some details that would make it obvious who we’re talking about. So far you’ve met:

 and we can’t wait to share this agency’s story. 

You may be wondering what a travel agency is doing during 2020, and if a team like ours can even help. The answer is, of course: YES. 

Introducing Take Off, Eh! A Travel Agency

“Take Off, Eh” is a Canadian Adventure Travel Company with a quirky sense of humour and truly unique service offering. In recent years, travel agencies have had to double-down on excellent service, since customers are able to book their own trips online. The team at Take Off, Eh has stepped up with truly one-of-a-kind private travel packages that require thoughtful consultations and the deep expertise of the team. 

With five extremely experienced agents, who have each travelled to more than 50 countries worldwide, they have more than 150 years years of combined exploration experience. Their rare knowledge of world-class locations and activities, gems from around the world, as well as the close relationships they’ve built with local service providers, ensures that every special trip their clients take is life-changing, rich with experience, luxurious, and free of difficulty. 

Challenge: 

When Roberta and Diane, the owners, first came to Admin Slayer, they were looking for social media support. They wanted to actively target very particular clientele who were looking for the exclusive, personalized travel experience that Take Off, Eh provides. 

They already had a strong, professional brand, with an excellent strategy for engaging with their audience, but the actual implementation was falling by the wayside. Roberta was trying to find and create all the content they wanted to share, and Diane was trying to stay on top of postings and community engagement - all off the side of their desks, while they were also running their company. They knew exactly what they wanted to happen, they just needed someone else to do it. Could Admin Slayer help?

Why yes, yes we could. 

Results: 

Using the professional written strategy and branding guidelines Take Off, Eh had on hand, we mapped out their actual implementation with a curation and content calendar. This demonstrates where to find the content, who will provide it, where and when it will be posted, and deadlines for all. 

From there, an online system that allows for social media scheduling in advance (both Buffer and Hootsuite have been used for our various social media clients) was implemented. This allows all of the important posts to be released on time without someone having to manually enter them at exactly 10 AM on a Tuesday. This system also gives Diane the opportunity to approve or edit posts before they’re scheduled. 

Take Off Eh always wanted an Instagram account, but getting started just seemed too daunting to manage, on top of their existing LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. We got this set up, and helped locate images from their own clientele, their team of agents, professional photographers, and copyright-free online photos. 

Another part of their marketing and branding strategy that had stopped and started, and stopped and started again, was the creation of their own content - their blog and newsletter. At first, writing a newsletter and providing supporting articles was easy, but after a while, it was hard to come up with new ideas. Even more stressful was the time it would  take to write, edit, proofread, locate accompanying images, and post articles on their website. Taking it from there to a newsletter that might go out with any regularity, and sharing on social media seemed like a long-lost dream. 

Their marketing agency had told them that consistency really wins the race when it comes to social media and content provision, and if that consistency is matched with quality, they have a winning formula. Roberta and Diane had no difficulty with content - Diane was a thoughtful and enjoyable writer, and they had a huge collection of imagery from their many travels. They just struggled to get everything out and in order. Project management skills were deeply required to get this system up and running. 

Using the content and curation calendar, and since we were taking over team calendar management anyway, we went to work. They had lots of article ideas, and it took us only an hour to get those out of their heads and into the spreadsheet we created for them. We detailed the timing of each article, and then blocked off time in their calendars to review the summary and make any changes. They moved the release dates of a few articles around so that they coincided with the different types of travel people start to think about at certain times of the year, and then we put a system in place. 

Taking an article from idea to completion means it passes through a couple of hands. Sometimes the person with the article idea and information isn’t the greatest writer, and the team at Take Off, Eh had been struggling with that for a while. Diane is a great writer and can happily take poorly written information and turn it into something engaging, and she knew just how long it would take her. We set up Google Documents for each article, and then started booking time for the work in their calendars. The first booking goes to the person with all the information. That team member then provides bullet points for the article, and any useful links and photos. The second booking, a few days later (just in case the first person missed their deadline a bit), ends up in Diane’s calendar, and Diane massages the piece into a great article. Our team then proofreads it, provides any additional images, and puts it in Roberta’s calendar for a final review. Once she approves the piece, we post it to their website, add it to the newsletter, and start throwing the links into Buffer (the social media posting system they chose) so it would go out on social media. 

The articles are also tagged using an internal system so that we know which articles are “evergreen” and could be reposted on social media and shared again in a newsletter in another year around the same time. Why not reuse great content? 

The same system is in place for writing the newsletter. Now that we had a group of great articles to share with the world, we just needed Diane to write the introduction for the newsletter. That’s set up in advance, with links to all the articles, the monthly theme they’ve decided on, and more, all in a linked document that’s right in her calendar. This means Diane has everything she needs right at her fingertips.

Once she’s done and it’s been proofread and approved, we take their newsletter system (they like MailChimp). We then get that set up for sending, with accompanying articles, images, and their professional introduction. They also like to share links to trends they’ve been seeing and external articles that they want their readers to check out in relation to specialized travel. All of this is compiled, flipped back to Diane and Roberta for final approval, and then sent out. They’ve had their newsletter going out steadily, reliably every month for well over a year. 

At the same time, we’ve been helping this travel agency coordinate the logistics of travel bookings, so their team can pay attention to what they do best: provide expertise to their customers. Take Off, Eh has a great in-house system for keeping track of all the tasks involved in booking clients excursions, so they can feel confident that they can personally check in on every piece, manage the big picture, but hand off tasks that take time and not their unique abilities. 

We also help manage their email inboxes. We:

  • Organize email into folders

  • Flag emails in need of urgent response

  • Respond ourselves on their behalf when it’s appropriate for us to do so

  • Follow up with team members to ensure every communication that should be addressed is

  • Remove anything that needs to be swept away 

Invoicing, bookkeeping, and reporting is all managed by our bookkeeping team, who took a system that was a bit haphazard and turned it into a clean, running operation. The team doesn’t have to worry about any of it - and they love it. 

Do You See Yourself in Diane and Roberta?

While the travel industry has taken a bit of a dip in 2020, the unique services that Take Off, Eh provides has kept them in business despite everything. They know that marketing, social media, and consistent communication will be the way they stay top of mind when the industry returns to normal. This means we’re spending even more time helping them remain consistent in their approach to building and maintaining relationships with their clients and online community. 

Are you struggling to keep up with your excellent marketing plan? Let us do the heavy lifting. Contact us here.