S4/E6 Preparing Your Digital Marketing Playbook for 2025: Propellic CEO, Brennen Bliss
Unlock the power of digital marketing to elevate your travel business with our expert guest, Brennen Bliss, CEO of Propellic. Have you ever wondered how to build a strategic digital marketing plan that truly delivers results? Brennen’s journey, from a young web developer to a leading authority in SEO and paid media, provides a wealth of knowledge for both large corporations and smaller travel brands. Discover how to effectively use SEO and paid media, and why learning from past successes is key to shaping future strategies.
Explore the complexities of creating varied digital marketing approaches designed specifically for travel companies. Brennen discusses essential services like SEO, digital advertising, and creative content, and points out common errors such as ignoring the traveler's research stage and over-relying on single marketing channels. Gain valuable advice on assessing a new client's online presence, smart resource allocation, and the importance of strategically balancing third-party and direct distribution channels for lasting growth.
Discover the crucial role of local SEO, especially for tour and activity providers, and why complete and accurate Google Business Profiles are essential. Brennen highlights the vast world of paid media, covering platforms from Google Ads to TikTok, and stresses the need for compelling and engaging creative content. Finally, we discuss key digital marketing trends for 2025, the significant return of travel advisors, and practical tips for making the most of marketing budgets during tough times. This episode is your comprehensive guide to increasing bookings and strengthening brand awareness in the travel industry.
Don't forget to show your support by hitting the like button and subscribing to the Travel Trends Podcast for a wealth of industry knowledge and expert guidance on your favourite Podcast App!
Connect with Our Guest: www.propellic.com
🔥 Season 4 Title Sponsors: Stay 22, TravelAI, Propellic and Northern Soul by Landsby
Speaker 1: 0:15
Hello everyone and welcome to Travel Trends. This is your host, dan Christian, and I'm thrilled that you've joined us for this special season where we've been doing deep dives into the most important topics in travel. Today, we've just wrapped up our series on adventure travel and we're soon moving into our deep dive into the role of the travel advisor in 2025 and beyond. In between each of these deep dives, we're doing one-off episodes with particularly fascinating people on the most compelling topics that our listeners want to know more about, and the topic that couldn't be more relevant and timely, given Q4 of 2024, is planning your digital marketing playbook for 2025. And I have the privilege today to introduce you to one of our sponsors and also one of our partners and an old friend of mine, brennan Bliss, who's the CEO of Propelec.
Speaker 1: 1:06
Many of you have heard his ads.
Speaker 1: 1:07
He kindly came on to sponsor season three. He was a key part of our AI Summit, gave an amazing keynote that you have to check out on our YouTube channel, and he came today to have this conversation with us to highlight the many ways that our listeners can benefit from SEO, from paid media and improving your content strategy. I've had the privilege to work with many talented digital marketers over my career, and Brennan is one of those rare individuals that has incredible insights, really understands the travel industry and is a true expert in SEO and paid media. Him and his team have worked closely with many travel companies I'm familiar with and had extraordinary results, which is why I can proudly vouch for him as being a sponsor, and I'm always keen to record his ads because I genuinely believe in the services they provide, and so today it was a real pleasure for me to actually have the chance to sit down and speak to Brennan, and I look forward to introducing him to you all now. Brennan, great to have you here. Thanks for joining us on Travel Trends.
Speaker 2: 2:09
I'm super, super honored to be here with you, Dan.
Speaker 1: 2:13
Awesome. Thanks, Brennan. I think everyone got a good sense from the introduction the fact we've worked together now for an extended period of time. We've known each other for years. I had a great respect for you before we started to collaborate on this journey and I think so highly of you and the team and there's no one better, as far as I'm concerned, to be able to sit down and have this conversation with at this time to talk about the future of travel marketing and how to be successful in 2025. As you know from our conversations, we've talked about the need to have a digital playbook and that I would be typically working on a playbook across 40 brands at this time of the year, with an idea of getting the insights from our global teams on what worked in the previous year and then incorporating all of that into our plan to roll out across the brands to drive more bookings and brand awareness. But ultimately, as you well know from your clients, it's all about the ROI that they can drive from their booking activity.
Speaker 2: 3:06
So there's a lot we're going to cover today, but I was just going to say it's really funny that it was 40 brands for you, which wow wild, but also that's roughly the number of travel clients we have too. So we're also planning for 40 brands right now. It's kind of fun. It's a bit of an undertaking, right?
Speaker 1: 3:22
brands right now it's kind of fun.
Speaker 2: 3:22
It's a bit of an undertaking right.
Speaker 1: 3:25
No, it definitely is, but it will give our listeners the scale that you're working across and the fact you actually. What's also interesting, too, is that you're working across organizations of various sizes. You have large enterprise clients, you have smaller travel brands, and each of those, as you well know and we'll talk about, require their own strategic approach based on their spend, based on their goals. So, no, thanks for sharing that, but let's give everyone a bit of background to yourself and Propellex. Sure, we know each other and we go back and I think people will quickly realize you are an SEO expert that's really mastered the travel industry, but tell us how you got into digital marketing and SEO specifically.
Speaker 2: 4:06
Okay. So digital marketing came from. I grew up with no friends. I was bullied for various reasons, but that wasn't totally a negative thing. It gave me the opportunity to spend time on things that were not trying to be, with people that I wanted to impress or things of that nature. Very different situation now, but at the time I just started building websites.
Speaker 2: 4:31
I built some fun websites and then I you know, I was 14 or 15 and my mom she owns a speech pathology practice. I built her a website for that. I think she paid me $1,300 for that entire summer, which I am certain is some sort of child labor law. It gets broken by that. But uh, she's still my mother. I owe it to her, um, but uh, she.
Speaker 2: 4:50
That's where I got my start. And then I, I, I just wanted more websites, so I started. There were a couple of business owners, um, that were the parents of students that went to my school that I went in and did the same thing for them and then finally taught myself SEO and got ranked for the web for the search term best web design company in Dallas, position one. Um, and then that's when things started to happen. I mean, I was 16. College football playoff foundation called me to build their website. Um, it's like uh, it was. It was crazy how quickly things started escalating. But everything I kept coming back to is SEO is so fun. You have the ability to just do something and see an impact at a global scale, which is incredible. So I honed that craft, dug deeper into that narrowed down, stopped doing everything else and then built.
Speaker 2: 5:33
At the time the company was called Pixel Cut Labs, but continued to build the company to about a million in annual revenue. And then we kind of got stuck and I said you know what I'm sick of this. I don't want to keep doing this for everybody. I really love this one company we're working with. It's called Thrifty Traveler. They're the travel industry. We have a US Search Award from doing work with them on best travel and tourism campaign of the year.
Speaker 2: 5:53
And I said why don't we just go work with this incredible industry? And the reason was is that there's no other industry that has the ability to impact the diversity of a human and the way that travel does. And you, you, you come and you see, um, look at intrepid. You had intrepid on your podcast, right? Like, look at what they're doing in terms of creating diversity in the world. It's actually incredible. It's they're putting people in destinations that give them a whole new worldview when they come home, or even a small difference in their worldview, and make them more diverse humans, and that's the type of companies we want to work with. So we said right during the pandemic we're going to start only working with travel companies. So it became SEO for Travel and then we grew that brand. I hired some exceptional, creative and ads people and started building that side of the business, and that brings us to today.
Speaker 1: 6:44
That's really exciting, brennan, and obviously I'm glad that you chose the travel industry to really hone your expertise, and I feel much the same way as you, which is that if there's any area that I comply my digital marketing expertise, it was the idea of sending people traveling and having the best experiences their lives, and, interestingly, some of the people we used to hire into our digital team were often doing paid media for other brands. The best example was one of our team members was selling printer ink, and my view to him was if you can successfully sell printer ink online, you can sell travel. You can find people that have deep expertise in paid media, but once they apply it to travel, like you have, you can see how successful you can be. You are also an avid traveler, so you recently just got married. You just did this epic honeymoon trip so tell us a little bit about your travel experience and how you decided beyond just having the one client.
Speaker 1: 7:43
You obviously genuinely love this industry as well. That comes across incredibly clear in all of your presentations and talks. So tell us how you realized that you loved to travel. Was it simply always a passion for you or is it something that you started to take a few trips and realized, wait a second. If I could combine these two, this could be a great life.
Speaker 2: 8:02
Yes, I was, if we got there, if I can combine them and write them off too. No, I'm kidding, um, but uh, I I look at it and say so. Last year, I mean last year, I went on 120 flights, um, which is a lot, uh, and I would say 80% of that was work, 20% was vacation. This year it's been a little bit more on the vacation side, the family side. I just got back from Iceland, which was incredible, absolutely incredible, and we went to Champagne right before that. And then you mentioned the honeymoon in Asia. I would say that there's just something special about seeing the world that I can't stop doing. I get bored at home. I get really bored at home. I mean, I love it. I have a great, great life here, got two incredible dogs married to an incredible person, but we travel together, right, so I got to bring that with me and see incredible places. That's something I can't, I can't stop doing.
Speaker 1: 8:56
For sure, and when you say home, just for all of our listeners, you're based in Austin.
Speaker 2: 9:00
Austin.
Speaker 1: 9:16
Texas yes, land of cowboys and unlicensed guns business that you've built. So yeah, pixel Cut Labs obviously was the original name, and the money your mom gave you I'm sure actually now is, in retrospect, more seed money. She kind of gave you the opportunity to learn and prove yourself. I'll back her up on that. I'll back up your mom because she clearly got you on this journey and I'm sure she had a master plan when she gave you that summer job, but tell us about Propellic, then, and specifically.
Speaker 1: 9:45
Many of our listeners are going to know you from the ads that run throughout our season three and season four, and so many people know what I've told them about Propellic and why I'm such a big proponent of you and the team. But this is the first time for our listeners to actually hear it from you. So why don't you tell everybody what Propellic does and what you're particularly good at?
Speaker 2: 10:05
Okay, so, just at a very high level, the two services that we're well, it's three, because one is integrated with another.
Speaker 2: 10:15
It's SEO, digital advertising across platforms, whether it's programmatic, whether it's Google ads, whether it's meta or Tik TOK, and then the creative services that underlie that. So video, photo and um and graphic, um, that's, that's the what really, in terms of like, the the why and the how, um, there's, there's these five key areas where we see travel companies just do a really poor job of um, of targeting travelers. Frankly, Um, they don't look at what stage of research the travelers in, they don't track the right things. They don't leverage data from third parties. They rely on what's in the platform to target the right people. Um, they don't leverage performance, creative, which is this concept of making sure that you're always testing it creative, in the same way you're testing your landing pages and, um, the locks in visual strategy, and then they become over-reliant on single channels. So those are the kind of five key issues we see and by fixing those we can generally get them on the right track, have a sustainable, healthy, strategic growth track.
Speaker 1: 11:15
We'll be right back. Hey, listeners, I'm excited to welcome back our two amazing title sponsors for this season Propelec and Travel AI. First up, Propellic. If you're in the travel industry and looking for a digital marketing partner, look no further. Propellic is the go-to expert for SEO and paid media, helping travel businesses achieve remarkable growth. Their CEO is a good friend of ours and a true expert in driving results. Mention Travel Trends for a free marketing audit. Visit them at Propelliccom. That's P-R-O-P-E-L-L-I-Ccom and we're thrilled to have John and the Travel AI team back as sponsors for season four as well. Travel AI actually uses Propellic's top-notch SEO solutions to scale their own businesses in the travel sector. Travel AI knows that AI is transforming every industry on the planet and they're leading the way in integrating this technology into travel sector. Travel AI knows that AI is transforming every industry on the planet and they're leading the way in integrating this technology into travel processes. Their mission is to make travel more efficient through the effective use of AI. For some incredible examples, check out travelaicom slash trends to see their latest projects, initiatives and valuable resources. Big thanks to Propelec and Travel AI for their continued support. Now let's get back to the show.
Speaker 1: 12:28
The SEO element, obviously, was the foundation of the business. You moved into paid media, you do content marketing and so I want to have a holistic conversation today, of course, about digital marketing. We'll spend time on SEO and paid to start, but in terms of the overall digital strategy for a travel brand, because one of the things that stood out to me in your pivot and shift is clearly you do SEO. You applied that to travel. You had your one client, Thrifty Traveler, who was obviously still a happy client, and you've got now 39 more and a number of clients that I know at Grand European. Of course you did work with them and some of their SEO optimization was best in class across the group and credit to the work that you did with Ryan and the team there at Grand European. So you clearly had an SEO expertise.
Speaker 1: 13:12
But the one thing that is unique about travel is the complexity of what you're trying to describe there of the booking process of a traveler. You've got the higher order value, so it's called a considered purchase or a high touch purchase, which may involve offline touch points as well Leads converting over the phone, for example. You also have longer lead that people are doing research at different times of the year and they may not be booking for six to 12 months. So there are a number of factors at play here. You've got repeat customers versus prospects.
Speaker 1: 13:44
That's common in many businesses, but with travel obviously you're really trying to optimize towards repeat and return guests. So I guess that's kind of laying a bit of the landscape for the complexities and nuances in travel. And so I wanted to ask you to start is that when you are taking on a new client and you're looking at their overall digital health and trying to figure out where best to optimize their marketing strategy, how do you look at a new client to determine where you're going to invest your time and energy or recommend that they utilize your services to get the best return?
Speaker 2: 14:21
I'd say from an allocation standpoint and this is a conversation on allocation, right. So when we look at that, the question is, first off, are you over-reliant on a specific channel? And if the answer is yes, that needs to be fixed immediately. I like to point out TripAdvisor right, recent, very clear and poignant example of over-reliance on a single channel, in their case organic search, right. Or you look at even Expedia and Booking. I mean spending billions of dollars on paid media. 50% of their income, of their top line revenue, goes to marketing. That's outrageous, that's so substantial.
Speaker 2: 14:59
But really the goal is, with resource allocation, with bucketing of marketing spend, you want to have a diversified strategy that integrates both third party and direct distribution channels and then, furthermore, within those, you need to have sub channels. So, on the direct side, you want to make sure that you have affiliates. You want to make sure that you have a paid strategy, an organic strategy, a brand strategy layered on top, and the mix just depends on where you're currently lacking and it's what stage you want to target in the research process, cause I mean, if you're doing nothing, obviously just go for the booking right now. Go for the booking Cause you don't have enough money to spend on brand. But if you've already got all the bottom of the funnel the booking you have to climb up that ladder, you have to climb up the research process, you have to climb up the inspiration process. So it's very much dependent. As you said, we work with businesses at all different stages. It's very much dependent on the stage.
Speaker 1: 15:45
So, when you're ingesting a new client or onboarding a new client and trying to do your diagnostics to determine exactly what you just described, which, if there's an over-reliance, obviously you can look at their Google Analytics data, you can look at their previous conversion history. But walk us through some of those steps because I'm sure from this, many clients have reached out to you from the show, and many clients more so, especially as they get to understand who you are, what you guys do, all the benefits and many things we'll discuss. But take us through some of those initial things that you're going to be asking clients for and looking at to be able to make your recommendations.
Speaker 2: 16:24
So when we talk about channel diversity again, the five key questions are number one are 35% or more of your bookings coming from a single channel? If the answer is yes, that becomes a risk point. That's not a problem at that point. Once it crosses 50%, it becomes a problem. 35 is when we want to start looking at it Generally. That channel is Google ads Like that's the. That's the one that's basically like the. That's the casino that people well, it's, I mean, it's pretty reliable casino. It generally prints money, but it's the one that's hard to get off of, um but the.
Speaker 2: 16:55
The second question is are you retargeting your organic audiences? Um, and if the answer is no, that's the next step is retarget the organic audiences you're driving. And then the question is are there both paid and organic distribution channels? That's the third one. We've mentioned that earlier. You want to make sure that you're not overly relying on a single type of distribution. It just makes a healthier company. The other one that we mentioned was is it direct and via third parties? If you're a travel product seller, do you have a diversified distribution strategy that both leans on external third parties Viator, expedia, get your Guide, et cetera Right, and then the most important one, the most important one, are what are you doing to unlock new channels?
Speaker 2: 17:37
That is the thing that we see so frequently in the industry is people get so comfortable when something works and that's how. That's how companies got a business. You get too comfortable and you're not innovating and finding new ways. If you're not testing, if you're not spending five, 10, 20% of your marketing budget on new initiatives, you're going to have your margins squeezed and you're not innovating and finding new ways. If you're not testing, if you're not spending 5%, 10%, 20% of your marketing budget on new initiatives, you're going to have your margins squeezed and you're not going to have options when you run out of time.
Speaker 1: 17:58
For sure. There's a number of valuable points there, and I know, when I see you present, the number of people that are scribbling down notes. The good thing about this is that people can rewind and they can also watch your keynote on keyword conversion from the SEO AI summit earlier this year. But let's dive into that, because what I want to then get into is kind of the three areas of focus. I want to talk about SEO, I want to talk about paid media and I want to talk about content, but you just gave a really good example of one.
Speaker 1: 18:28
There was two things that stood out to me in what you just shared there. One is the over-reliance, which I know we had already talked about, but clearly getting a sense of where you're over-indexing. But the other one you just mentioned is the need for what I'd refer to as an experimental budget, of taking 10% of your marketing budget and testing out new channels, because oftentimes, especially travel brands if you're experimenting with new platforms and testing out whether it be a TikTok or a LinkedIn, or even if, as you just described, making sure you're remarketing for organic activity, identifying what core aspects of your digital marketing strategy you're missing, but specifically always being ready to test and jump on emerging new opportunities if you can get really good conversions out of them.
Speaker 2: 19:12
This is that key point, right there, before we jump in. I learned this from a coach and friend of mine. His name is Garrett and it's this concept of alpha. When you're in a, when you're in a financial market, the alpha is the excess return that you're getting over the baseline or the index right. The only way to create alpha and marketing is to try new things right. You're either otherwise you're going to get the same or worse performance than everybody else, so you always want to be looking and seeking that opportunity to create alpha yeah, yeah, that's a really good point.
Speaker 1: 19:37
And you and your point about the uh paid media and the.
Speaker 1: 19:41
You know there was a point where there was alpha when it came to paid search and two cent clicks exactly there was a time it was a glorious time, and the more people that figured out the crowd or the market got, the more prices drove up. And then you had players like the big OTAs that are spending an absolute fortune and pricing a lot of other travel companies out of the market. They just can't get in and compete in that space, so they have to be more clever, resourceful and find other avenues, like organic social, as one example. So let's walk through the three different areas.
Speaker 1: 20:15
I want to start on SEO, because every time you and I sit down together and someone else joins us, a restaurant or people are always trying to pick your brain on SEO, and so I'd love to start there, because it certainly is the case that SEO remains a vital part of digital marketing, and one of the questions you get hit with is now, in the face of AI, what does it mean for indexing and what is the future of Google? And obviously we'll touch on some of those things today, but the reality is that SEO still drives significant volume. It's a risk for those that over-ind this when they're thinking about SEO in 2025, what is your view about the importance of that in your overall digital marketing activity?
Speaker 2: 21:01
It is still the highest referrer of converting traffic that exists. So SEO, strong, strong, strong channel. That's likely to change over time, but not next year, definitely not next year, definitely not the year after that, maybe in years, tailing forward but the notion that SEO is gone. I think people have kind of come to grips that that's not accurate because they probably still use organic search to find answers. It's a better search experience. I mean, I use chat GPT for certain things. I use cloud, for we use cloud at Propeller, but use that for certain things.
Speaker 2: 21:34
Um, but honestly, um, search is still a goldmine, um, there's a lot of changes that are happening in it. For instance, like we're not necessarily just optimizing for blue links. Now there's a lot of additional search features, from Google things to do on the on the tourism activity side to AI overviews, um. And then obviously you want to always be focusing on developing topical authority in your destination so you can achieve visibility for those types of search features. But as a channel, I wouldn't say anything's changed, but the strategies within the channel have changed significantly.
Speaker 1: 22:06
What have you seen typically? So I appreciate mentioning some of the new avenues, because I think this is where it is difficult for some people to keep up. Some of it remains the same, as you highlighted, but there's constantly new algorithm updates, and so having the right SEO partner has always been critical to launching a new website, launching a new business, staying optimized. So you've mentioned a few, but what are some of the most common SEO mistakes you see travel companies making, and I guess what could they do to avoid those?
Speaker 2: 22:37
Honestly, I try to do everything as one person show there's multiple different strategic angles not strategic angles, but rather like skill sets within SEO. There's a huge need for technical SEO expertise in travel because most travel sites that are of scale are multi-destination and the changes you make on a technical level are far more impactful than a single piece of content. Like all the TTC companies you were working with, those are multi-destination, or most of them, and you're making a change that's affecting 4,000 products, not a change that affects one blog post. So I'll see a lot of travel companies hire a content strategist but give them an SEO title and that is not a full scoped SEO role. And then I'll see them hire that person and then not give them budget to build links and that link building role has nothing to do with content strategy.
Speaker 2: 23:27
Well, it does a little bit with attraction of links, but I see just a very, very easy like let's add headcount decision in the travel industry that went away for a couple of years, post-pandemic, but it's back. It's like let's hire an SEO person, but that's not a full scope person. It's multiple different areas of expertise. And then the other one is changing product too frequently, specifically with the travel startups. When they change strategy, the entire SEO strategy has to reset. So a lot of these AI trip planners, a lot of these new niche OTAs they keep changing their product strategy and they basically have to start over. Those are the two core issues I see happening most frequently.
Speaker 1: 24:05
Yeah, no, I appreciate mentioning those, the ones I just add to that too, from my experience, as you mentioned, is that we put together a checklist and I'm sure you have exactly this for your clients because you're running through all of the risk or issues list so we had a template for all of the brands to be able to follow to make sure, if they're launching a new website, that they had taken all of these fundamental steps Obvious ones, like submitting a sitemap, of course, and making sure that sitemap is submitted correctly and the new sites indexing properly.
Speaker 1: 24:33
But in certain instances, when you have large websites that have regional variations, we had seen issues where brands had launched new websites and I don't want to call it specifically the brand because it was a major issue but essentially it led Google to think there was duplication of content and they were penalized and they lost about 20% of their site traffic, and the worst part was that it was high converting site traffic as well. And so is there anything else that stands out to you as far as the most advantageous things that companies should be doing when it comes to approaching SEO?
Speaker 2: 25:13
Definitely don't do a website migration without a technical SEO looking at it. That's the first one. Honestly, the losing 20% of your traffic in a site migration that wasn't managed is not a horrible outcome compared to what could have happened. I would say yeah, just lacking on the technical SEO side. And then, just as a huge opportunity, these multi-destination sites. If they just optimize their internal linking structure, like you can see Airbnb has been doing and TripAdvisor have, they're going to be in such a good place. That's one of the things we see with OTAs is just a bunch of low-hanging fruit that they're not implementing. So any major changes, though, need a technical to look at them.
Speaker 1: 25:50
Now, what about local SEO? Given that a number of your clients, like you, were in the arrival space. I know your partners with Focusrite and a number of the different conferences, and you also manage their paid media as well. So it's another thing that not only are you there speaking, you're also actively managing their paid media accounts or SEO. So there's many things you bring to the table to be able to showcase proven results and how you got there, and I guess one of the ones for tours and activities providers is this concept of local SEO, especially when people are booking travel in destinations. So I know there's been a huge focus on creating your Google my Business profile. Tell us a little bit about what you see is important for local SEO.
Speaker 2: 26:33
Local SEO is such an interesting thing. So that was my background. We were working with multi-unit, multi-location companies and we still work with a number of them, everything from, like, kinder care to removery, to heal logics, like 600 to 2000 location businesses. So we did a lot of local SEO. It is so different in travel Because in most cases, like you just mentioned, tour operators I'll come back to that but in most cases you don't need local SEO profiles.
Speaker 2: 26:58
You're targeting trips to Spain, you don't need to have presence in Spain, you need to have well optimized technical and contents and on-page structure, whereas if you are a tour company, you absolutely do need to optimize this. Google business profiles because that's exactly what people are going to see when they search with near me terms. So, reviews, photos, fully completed profile, accurate name, address, phone number Um, we don't see a citation profile building to be incredibly impactful anymore. Um, a little bit, a little bit specifically, like with some medical angle stuff, which is interesting, but in travel I have not seen citation building to make it a meaningful impact anytime recently, but definitely Google business profiles for companies that are single destination Got it.
Speaker 1: 27:44
Yeah, good, great point. And that's where we're not going to be able to cover everything. We'd need multiple hours and episodes to do that. And obviously people can reach out to you after this when they have more questions, because one of the things you offer all of our travel trends listeners is a free marketing audit. So I encourage everyone listening to this, make notes and we'll keep going through everything, but feel free to reach out to Brendan and the team afterwards. So the last thing on SEO, before we shift over to paid media. You mentioned the idea of the health of your business. So, for those people keeping score at home and looking at their Google Analytics data and trying to see how they stack up, what would you say is a healthy percentage of their business that they should be generating through traffic and, ideally, bookings and conversions? What percentage of their business should be coming from SEO daily?
Speaker 2: 28:31
bookings and conversions. What percentage of their business should be coming from SEO? So I must say one of our key pillars is bookings of the North Star. So I'm never going to look at traffic as an indicator of success unless you're a DMO or a CPP. And in some rare other cases, like travel media for instance, we work with a lot of media brands like Frommer Media, 10x Travel, still Thrifty Traveler that I mentioned. So here's the deal. That 35% number is just where I start getting uncomfortable. For any single channel SEO I'm the happiest with for one reason it doesn't cost substantial. It doesn't cost substantial dollars to drive that traffic in the long run, but it's also the most volatile channel. So note that if you're doing really well from an SEO standpoint, enjoy that. While you have it, take advantage of it. Don't build your internal infrastructure to necessarily rely on that if it's your only channel driving traffic. I don't want to see a company become reliant on organic traffic as a single channel.
Speaker 1: 29:29
Cool, okay, that's helpful. So let's go on to paid media now. Now, paid media to many people is going to be search engine marketing. Of course, for the uninitiated search engine optimization, organic search engine marketing paid. But when we think about paid, google and search marketing is only one component. Of course, you have paid social, and you and I were looking at various campaigns and talking about different travel companies last year and exploring multiple different avenues of paid media, and so I guess, how would you define paid media in terms of what specific channels do you group under paid media and which do you see as being the most important for a client that's coming into you? Putting SEO aside, they need to launch a new brand or a new product and they need to get up to speed fast, and they need to use paid media strategies to do that. What would be your recommendations to them in terms of the platforms that they should use?
Speaker 2: 30:25
Are you ready for the data dump?
Speaker 1: 30:26
Let's go for it.
Speaker 2: 30:27
Let's do it, okay. So paid media is a very, very broad spectrum. So, in travel, at the very highest level in any industry Google ads, bing ads, meta, linkedin, tiktok, snapchat, all those right. It's even Spotify, things like that. But then we go to the next layer, which is things like programmatic display ads showing up in users browsing experiences or wherever they may be programmatic display ads showing up in users browsing experiences or wherever they may be. And then, beyond and above that, you've got CTV, ooh DOOH, all the different channels, and I would categorize paid media to cover anywhere someone can pay to get their brand visibility. And then the second part of your question is which ones would you recommend it?
Speaker 2: 31:09
If it's a new travel brand and it's something there's demand for, I'm going to go straight for Google ads, straight for search, because that's bottom of funnel, booking intent. I want to see if we can actually convert that, tap that out and then try to drive demand and move up the funnel using visuals. So that's going to be all of the social platforms TikTok, meta, which is Facebook, and Instagram, snapchat, et cetera, right. And then, above and beyond that, if you're trying to inspire someone to go to a destination, that's when you start looking at out of home. That's when you start looking at connected television, whatever it may be. So really, it's depending on which part of the travel research process you're trying to start at, what your maturity is, what your budget is, because you can't do all of that with a $10,000 a month budget. Right Media budgets need to go and be used first to drive an outcome and then to increase the people that are interested in that outcome.
Speaker 1: 31:57
Absolutely, and this is very insightful, and I think that's why I want to make sure that everyone has a full comprehension of the available opportunities to them. Because rewind 10 or 12 years when I was managing all the paid media for G Adventures, which is one of the largest adventure travel companies. We were spending a million dollars in our paid search and we were one of Google's larger advertisers and it was a huge amount of money for the business at the time, but it was all heavily optimized search marketing based on what you're describing on destination, what people are searching for, what seasonality, booking patterns, and trying to make sure that you are converting for that low funnel, high intent, immediate signals of booking now, and it's incredibly effective, but it's only one in many companies that have been doing that. That's table stakes now and they're doing multiple things and oftentimes that's kicking the goal, but there's many other paid media that is doing an assist. So so tell us a little bit about when you think about the most effective.
Speaker 1: 33:01
So you've talked about Google, but one of the things I'd love for you to speak to is the importance of creative in all of this, because whether you're going to run ads for search terms or you're going to run ads on meta, as you just described.
Speaker 1: 33:15
One of the most important things that I think people I've seen, anyway in my experience people overlook is the messaging and the creative and what they're actually going to say and get in front of people to intercept them. We had this idea that we intercepted travel attenders rather than try to generate brand awareness because that was going to drive a higher ROI is that if people are looking for tours to Europe, we need to intercept those people and we would do conquesting campaigns to target if they were looking at other brands to be able to bring them across. So tell us that would be. For example, I would index as highly as possible on intent, I would index on conquesting and then I would look at other available opportunities and compare the ROI. But yeah, tell us from your vantage point, what are some of the more effective paid media strategies that you look to employ, based on what's available?
Speaker 2: 34:03
You're running travel media. Stop being so lazy. Like I said at the beginning of this, like whoever's listening to this, y'all are lazy. Stop it. Creative sucks in the travel industry across the board. It's like picture. I've seen so many stock photos of destinations I kind of want to hurl myself off a bridge. It's horrible. I mean, we at Propellic have this concept of performance.
Speaker 2: 34:23
Creative. It's a concept of generate a lot of incredibly compelling visual content and then continuously test it against itself. So never go stale with your visual strategy. Whether that's stills, whether that's graphic, whether that's um, whether that's motion visual, um, specifically vertical motion visual gets very stale very quickly. So stop being lazy with creative. That's the first quote unquote strategy I can say is that's the core of what you're selling. Like people don't understand. They think it's the media buying. How you buy the media is important. The audience you build is incredibly important and we'll talk about that in a second. But what you're selling them is that visual, it's the creative of the ad, it's what takes up the space. That's all they see and I am sick of seeing lazy travel visuals. It's unbelievable. So that's the first part.
Speaker 2: 35:10
Second part is people are too reliant on the platform data for audiences Like let's pretend we have a client that's a Hawaii based tour operator and they do like big Island tours, right, and they have Kilauea tours on the big Island, and those are private tours that cost $1,200 minimum for a day. Facebook has a great audience. He said sarcastically. That audience is called travelers to Hawaii, and then maybe you can layer on top 10% income. Maybe you can layer on, you know, a woman in their 27 to 45 year old range, someone who's planning a family trip, um, but you know what. That's really lazy, too. So here's the way that we approach it, like. Here are the strategies that you can use.
Speaker 2: 36:00
The things that you need to be using is you need to go out and look for external data. You need second-party data, not third-party data. You need second-party data from the likes of kayak, from bookingcom, whoever you can get it from, and we leverage some data partnerships with with middlemen to make that happen for our clients. But there's many ways to get that data, um. And you need to build an audience that says this is a person who searched for flights to Hawaii, to um, in the last 30 days, who has a confirmed booking of a flight, cause nobody purchases their tours and activities before they have a confirmed flight booking.
Speaker 2: 36:32
And you need someone that has a hotel in the Island that you're targeting and you need that person to be traveling in a specific month, maybe 10 days away from when the actual advertisement is shown, cause that's how far in advance these people tend to book their tours right. So there's a lack of of creativity on the audiences. People are too heavily reliant on what's in Facebook, on what's in Google and what's in stackAdapt or DB360 or whatever you're using, and you just got to be more creative and look for better data on who to target, because otherwise you're going to again. You're not reaching alpha. You're hitting the returns that everybody else is hitting.
Speaker 1: 37:06
For sure. That's great advice and I want to pack this session with as many valuable tips for people as possible. And the one thing I'll add to that, with your point about the second-party data, is that we utilized TravelZoo quite extensively in our paid media mix, that we'd also do TravelZoo. We'd do some pay-per-click advertising not their top 20, but we would then also it's one of the offerings that you can target people that visited TravelZoo so that you can actually and those are obviously people that are high intent for travel booking. I'm not trying to give a call out to Travel Zoo, so much as just to reemphasize your point about that was the way that we actually applied that and it was incredibly successful. The other thing that I would highlight too and I'm keen to get your take on audiences is that when we would start a campaign, if you're selling tours and you're focusing on launching them in September and October but you know peak booking is really January or February One of the things that we would do is we would open up, you know, and have about 80 to 90% of our paid media would be focused on prospecting to try and actually build out these audience pools that then we could remarket to. But by the time you get into March and April, we're actually shifted it to more. 70% of all of our media spend is remarketing to people who are in the consideration set, because these are the people that are kind of down to their final deliberations and choices versus where we started, more broad. So along those lines, Brendan I mean there's just a couple examples for me I would love to get your take on how you work with clients to determine their audience and where they should be investing more of their paid media dollars to drive conversions from their ideal.
Speaker 1: 38:51
The one thing, obviously, that's unique about paid media, as you well know, is that it's much more trackable. It's much more measurable and you can have a clearer sense, especially when you're looking at the social channels, Unlike Google. One of the challenges that we always had, and still is a factor, is that you don't necessarily know the exact profile of someone who's coming in from a Google search, whereas you're using meta, you have a clear idea, the whole idea of lookalike audiences and knowing exactly. You mentioned James Thornton's amazing conversation on this podcast and he knows exactly who his target profile is A 45-year-old female traveler that is typically single, a nurse or a teacher and so you can narrow in on a customer profile that you can use paid media to target. So tell us a little bit more about audience profiling and targeting.
Speaker 2: 39:38
I love audience profiling. They say profiling is bad but it's so good. No, I'm kidding, sorry, you can feel free to cut that out. Okay, so building audience personas is an art, but it's an art that is like most art, not certain right, and it takes some testing to get right. You throw a couple out.
Speaker 2: 39:59
It's really not just the audience, it's the audience and then the messaging and the match between those two things. So when we're looking at audiences, we'll take what the client says, right, and we'll say, oh, they said this is who they want to target, and then we'll take the message that we've built and put it in front of those people. But we and put it in front of those people, but we'll also put it in front of somebody else and say, okay, is this really the audience or is this just the average, or can we say that maybe there's somebody else that this resonates with more Um. So really, it depends, but you want more audiences that are narrow rather than less audiences that are larger. So you can tailor your messaging and get the right words across the, across the media system, so they click on the ad and actually have a good from pre-click to post-click experience that's consistent and leads to a booking. Um, but yeah I, the high level strategy is more audiences with more specific and narrow granularity than fewer audiences with large uh, large uh specifications. Cool.
Speaker 1: 40:55
One other thing I want to ask you on paid media and I want to cover content and get your recommendations for driving bookings in 25 as well is, when you mentioned that entire portfolio of paid media opportunities, what would you consider core so obviously Google, meta and what would we consider more alpha, when you mentioned interactive TV as a good example and what you can do now and so, or even LinkedIn as a channel or TikTok as a channel. So how would you view when a client is thinking what's gonna be core to their paid media versus alpha? And are there scenarios where once in a while, you have a client where just like, actually let's do alpha, let's go after LinkedIn or let's go after TikTok or let's do something based on your spend, where you're not even necessarily doing the core, you're actually just doing something that's more experimental? Do you ever recommend that to clients or do you always make sure you have the core plus some of those other alpha opportunities that you're playing around with?
Speaker 2: 41:53
I always want the core and then I always want some alphas and I like that we're using this terminology. It's not one that we commonly use but, um, I just heard it from again a friend of mine and it just makes sense and fits so well. Um, I would say that you know, like the, the percentage may be 10%. Um, because hopefully that is enough for you unlock something that makes up for the loss of efficiency you get from only spending 90% of your budget. Basically, in tough times you cut the alpha and you just run the things that you know work. But I would say, in terms of things where I think there could be alpha in travel, I think the only people doing out of home or bookingcom and Expedia and kayak, like I don't think there's any small travel companies trying really niche small media buys in the airport where they're based. I think they could get creative and do that. I don't think there's any small companies doing niche small media buys in the, in the, in the bathroom stall, at the bars that are their activity.
Speaker 1: 42:48
Really.
Speaker 2: 42:48
I mean it's, it's, it's. It's kind of silly to talk about, but it's. You know, google's easy. That's why everybody does it. Google is easy. I mean it's not easy to do perfectly, but it's easy to get on. But the things that are less trackable are the things that I think are more likely to drive an outcome. But that also creates the paradox of like how do we reconcile whether or not it's working?
Speaker 1: 43:09
So for sure. So you mentioned a keyword there what's working. And then this is where I mean people have hired you and continue to because you produce results and you've got many great testimonials so people can go find those themselves. But I actually wanted you to take us through one case study, if you will that, and just to clarify some of the terms like ROAS, return on ad spend. Obviously, everyone's familiar with what your return on investment is, but give us some of the metrics that companies should be looking for to truly measure their success and I'll share this, brennan, just with our listeners is that we were often trying to make sure that we it all depends on your margins and we were always trying to look for a 10 to 1 ROI. So if we could actually achieve a conversion for 10% of the gross value of the booking, so if it was a $5,000 trip, if you get a booking for $500, that's going to be less than what you might be paying in commissions.
Speaker 2: 43:58
Essentially, Exactly yeah.
Speaker 1: 44:02
So break down how you look at it for clients and give us one scenario by which a client came to you with a paid media and you produced a return of X. I think that would just be good for everyone to listen to how you just to walk through that.
Speaker 2: 44:19
Yeah, I mean and I'll pull up the case study and just read some of the statistics this specific client we haven't gotten the approval to share this case study yet. It's sitting in their inbox so I'm going to have to mask the name, but can go through the data. It's the most recent one that's come across my desk. Um, but before I get bookingcom inventory, for instance, they might be getting a 50% to 70% split of bookingcom's revenue. Bookingcom's revenue is 15% to 20%, so really we can't spend more than 6% to 7%. Otherwise we bust the budget and it's a negative return on investment booking. But if it's a multi-day group tour operator and they're operating at a 35% to 45 margin, we can spend gross margin right. We can spend more to acquire that customer. So it's really just dependent with hotels, super easy. They'll gladly spend anything less than 20 to 25% to get a booking. That's direct, because then they own the customer and then they don't have to deal with all the nonsense of the, the confusion from from third-party bookings, and also it's less expensive to do it that way. So it's again, it's less expensive to do it that way. So again, the actual return on ad spend is very company specific. We have some really pretty sophisticated calculators. If anybody wants to figure out that number for themselves, just email me. Brennan at Propelliccom, it's B-R-E-N-N-E-N at Propellic, which is with two L's, dot com.
Speaker 2: 45:32
But here's an example of a vacation rental reseller or not a vacation rental reseller, but a vacation rental management company. I think they've got like a few. These are like $3,000 a night properties. So these are big bookings, right, it's a small portfolio and six destinations that are luxury destinations and right out the gate they came to us and this case study. By the time this podcast gets published, I'm sure the case study will be published too, so it'll be on our website.
Speaker 2: 46:00
Um, look for paid media for a for a vacation rental company, but across the brands. Like. Within the first couple of days, we found annualized about $210,000 in savings, and that's typically from bidding on search partners, bidding on display network, and this is just in Google ads and just bidding. That is not effective. So, not being intentional about of the distribution channels that about 90% of the companies that come to us have turned on in their Google ads account saved substantially, and in this case it was $210,000 annualized, which makes all the rest of the money work even harder, right. So we got to a 11.6 return on ad spend, which means every $1 that's spent is 11.6 in booking revenue.
Speaker 2: 47:00
Albeit, not the important metric. The important metric is margin created, because they're a property management company and I don't have the privilege of being able to share what that margin is, but it's solid, is what I'll tell you. So, basically, we wouldn't typically report on top line, on top line impact, because it just it's, it's not relevant for a company that's only keeping a certain percent of the revenue, but even so, that the numbers are really solid enough to justify publishing a case study and submitting it for a couple of awards. Um, and then, on top of that, year over year, 102% revenue and booking growth, without taking into consideration and that's after factoring out their properties that have been added. So that's just what their core properties, which is a pretty exceptional outcome. I think Evan and Melissa on our team are responsible for that, so shout out to them for making that happen.
Speaker 1: 47:48
Yeah, that's great, and that's why I wanted to share some of those stats, because I know how meaningful and how powerful it is when you go back and present to the client or your internal travel brand and showcase the results of that activity, and whether it's a ROAS, a return on investment, and what they've spent, how many bookings they got, it's very clear. The one thing that always comes up with that, though, is brand marketing and content, and how important that is, which, if you were to give a couple of tips for those people moving from SEO to paid to our content strategy, what would be a couple of tips that you would have for travel brands that are trying to optimize their content strategy?
Speaker 2: 48:22
So, again, this is 100% a stage of business thing. It really depends on where they're coming from and where they currently are performing or not performing. At the very least, go for the booking like try to get the booking. Companies that are not sophisticated a company that can't get a booking at the bottom of the funnel is definitely not sophisticated enough to capture somebody in the research process and convert them two months later. Um, bookingcom did I think it was booking. It was either booking or expedited. They did this path to purchase study in 2023.
Speaker 2: 48:50
That was basically like 73 days from initial inspiration and making the first booking. It's something you can expect across the industry, including business travel. So it's longer than that and and you know you look at a metric like that and it's like don't, don't start your marketing work at the inspiration stage. It's just going to fail. You're not going to have any way to build that audience and retarget them and bring them down the funnel as you develop that competency. You definitely want to climb up that ladder, but that's not a one person marketing team that does that.
Speaker 2: 49:18
In terms of how to allocate, I would say start with the bottom of funnel search, do that with organic, do that with paid and then retarget those audiences for a couple of days thereafter in case they didn't make the booking, and then make sure you're feeding your paid media decisions and data into your SEO strategy and vice versa.
Speaker 2: 49:35
So if you see a keyword that's converting, well, that's when you start targeting it with organic search, because you don't want to spend six months or a year and a lot of money and time building organic search visibility for a keyword without validating that it actually converts on the paid side. In terms of content strategy, you want topical relevance for the destinations that you're targeting. So if you're looking at something like I want to sell fishing trips in Destin, you need to have solid content about Destin that's not written by a robot. Or if it is written by a robot, it's done with heavy human oversight. So a lot of different angles there, but I would say it's very situational. It's hard to make a blanket recommendation for a company. That's why we really kind of try to build pretty bespoke strategies for everybody that we work with.
Speaker 1: 50:19
We'll be right back. We're thrilled to announce two amazing new title sponsors who'll be joining us on this exciting journey of Travel Trends Season 4. First, let's give a warm welcome to Stay22, the ultimate affiliate solution for travel creators. Stay22 offers a suite of innovative products designed to help media and content producers earn revenue effortlessly. Their solutions are free to use and a breeze to install. Curious about how they've teamed up with the industry's coolest creators and organizations? Well, check out their partner success stories at stay22.com that's spelled S-T-A-Y-2-2.com and see how easy it is to join in just three quick steps.
Speaker 1: 51:01
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Speaker 1: 51:54
Now back to the show.
Speaker 1: 51:56
I've got two more for you, and I know our listeners are going to be keen to have you back on, so we're going to have to make this part one.
Speaker 1: 52:02
And one of our other partners and sponsors, travel AI and I mentioned this in the ads because you actually do their SEO and so one of the things I wanted to ask you about is that, going into 2025, depending on what people listen to, either we're on the cusp of it or we're in 2025, but in either scenario, many people are also trying to figure out what's next. What are the digital marketing trends that I should be paying attention to? What would your response be to that? Because I would imagine that most of the companies don't even necessarily have some of the fundamentals right, and so they're keen to do something new, but the reality is probably there's a lot they need to actually get sorted out first before they start experimenting or doing the alpha things we talked about. But if people are just keen to know what digital marketing trends they should be, their travel companies should try to capitalize on in the year ahead. What would be your advice?
Speaker 2: 52:51
You're not focusing on loyalty right now, you're falling behind. Everybody's focusing on loyalty right now. This is specific for the multi-destination brands, which is a significant portion of the people in the travel tech industry. I know a lot of the people that listen to you are likely in that space. If you're not focusing on a loyalty program in one way, shape or form, you're going to you're. You're doing the opposite of what everybody else is doing. So, um, there's one thing to uh maintain, uh, maintain the index and not seek alpha. There's another thing to fall under the index and you don't want to fall under the index. That's one. And then here's another you're not going to be able to inspire people to travel with your blog posts, so stop trying to do that. That's not how that works anymore.
Speaker 2: 53:29
That's that's on social, both paid and influencer driven, and then and then family recommendations and and and um, and incur in, and, I guess, people's personal experiences that they share, and then I would say, on top of that, um, capitalize on the visual situation. So most travel companies are doing horrible, horrible visual marketing right now. Um, it's all about the destination. Travels a commoditized service, even as much as we try to make it not sound commoditized it is. You're selling a thing that other people can sell, in most cases in one way, shape or form, so make sure somebody can see what it's like when they're there.
Speaker 1: 54:07
And if you could give one piece of advice those people listening to this. They're looking to enhance their digital marketing strategy. What would that be?
Speaker 2: 54:14
Please, please, please, stop relying on the data that Facebook provides you on who to target. It's horrible. It's horrible that audience that says someone traveling to Hawaii. Don't just accept what audiences are available from the platform.
Speaker 1: 54:30
Perfect. And then, in terms of people being able to follow up and find out more about Propellic, I know you kindly have set up a page for our listeners, which is slash travel trends. That redirects to trends. But, yeah, tell us just trends, just trends just Propelliccom slash trends, p-r-o-p-e-l-l-i-ccom slash trends.
Speaker 2: 54:49
If you want to set up an audit and talk to our team. I think Preston probably will be taking on most of those conversations and I probably will be taking on most of those conversations and I'll hopefully be involved in some and then reaching out to me. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Just search Brennan Bliss B-R-E-N-N-E-N Bliss and I'll be at nearly every single travel conference for the end of the year.
Speaker 1: 55:08
That's awesome, and you guys also have your own podcast, too, which is great that people should check out.
Speaker 2: 55:12
The Travel Marketing Podcast.
Speaker 1: 55:24
It's great for junior and intermediate marketers to really get inspiration and learn about the travel industry and marketing scope. We interview some brands on there. It's pretty fun. You here too. Thank you again for all the support with the Travel Trends Podcast. You are an early supporter, one of our biggest supporters, and I value our friendship, our relationship. I'm so glad that you're continuing to grow your team and build your team and have great success. That's all well-deserved and thank you for the partnership and thanks for making the time to be here for this.
Speaker 2: 55:51
Thank you so much, dan. It's an honor to know you. You're one of the good ones, for sure.
Speaker 1: 55:57
Thanks, man, I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for joining us for this latest episode of Travel Trends. I really hope you enjoyed the conversation with Brennan Bliss and the team from Propellic and make sure to check out Propelliccom slash trends to register for your free marketing audit. Thanks again to them for being such a great sponsor of this series. And, as I mentioned when we were kicking this episode off, we are going to be doing a series of one-off special episodes in between our deep dives so you can look forward to conversations on business travel with the Navon CEO. Also, kayak for business will be joining us. We're going to have a great session on short-term rentals. We're also going to be focusing on investing in travel with a number of VCs and a conversation with both Kayak and Priceline on the role of OTAs. So a number of one-off sessions to look forward to in season four.
Speaker 1: 56:45
But we're really excited to bring you our next deep dive into Travel Advisors, which I also mentioned last week. I would officially announce the sponsor and I'm thrilled to let all of our listeners know that Flight Center has agreed to be our sponsor for the Travel Advisor series. So thank you so much to Flight Center and the team for being a part of this journey and supporting the industry and the Travel Advisor community, and I'm looking forward to rolling out a series of really engaging and interesting episodes. So make sure that you spread the word, let everyone know that's coming up, and we'll look forward to having you join us on the next episode as we dive into the renaissance of travel advisors in 2025 and beyond. Thanks so much for joining us.
