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You’re a marketer in one of the most competitive industries.
You may be tired of trying, over and over, to use the same marketing strategies that you read about online or learned about in school - but is that really going to move the needle?
We all know the big brands - Booking.com, American Airlines, The Points Guy, Royal Caribbean, Marriott, VRBO, and Hertz... but what about the emerging brands that have found their path to scale?
The Travel Marketing Podcast is about sitting down with successful marketing professionals in the travel, transportation, and tourism industry to learn what has worked for them, what they’ve learned along the way, and what new trends they’re noticing.
We are Propellic, and we’re on a mission to create more diversity in thought for the planet. We’re doing that by helping brands - specifically travel, transportation, and tourism brands - increase their reach through intelligent marketing that travels further.
This is the Travel Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Propellic, bringing you the news and insights and what's working and not working in today's competitive transportation and tourism landscape. From emerging brands to the most established professionals, these lessons of intelligent marketing will help your marketing plan travel further.
Brennen Bliss: Welcome back to the Propellic Travel Marketing Compass podcast. I'm your host, Brennan. And we really want to enrich your understanding of the travel marketing industry, not just through marketing success stories, but also by sharing meaningful content and stories that push the boundaries of our field.
And today I'm really excited to introduce Carl Pihl from TicketingHub. Our topic is going to be B2B SEO and Carl and I go way back, but this is not necessarily a chat about our friendship, but rather, to get insights from his expertise. TicketingHub is a fast growing bootstrapped reservation system for tours and activities.
It was born out of Carl's frustration with a reservation software that over-promised and under-delivered, eight years later, TicketingHub service over 300 clients worldwide and processes more than 80 million per year on those clients behalf. Is rated five stars on Capterra, and it's because of a really customer centric philosophy and commitment to helping its clients grow. So I'm excited to introduce Carl today.
All right, Carl, thanks so much for joining me today. It's super good to see you. How have you been since Arrival?
Carl Pihl: I've been good, Brennan. Thanks for having me.
Brennen Bliss: Okay, good. Super nice to have you here. I'm excited to dive into TicketingHub strategy, learn a little bit more about how you’ve been growing over the years and see if we can share some of that with our listeners.
Carl Pihl: Sure. Happy to help.
Brennen Bliss: Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. Before I get started, I just want to hear about your favorite trip. That's the thing that I like to start all of these conversations with, looking at the background of where you are currently, it looks like you're, you said you're in Switzerland?
Carl Pihl: Yes.
Brennen Bliss: All right. So beyond the Switzerland trip, where is the most meaningful trip you've taken?
Carl Pihl: I think I don't have one meaningful trip. My father was a world traveler and every year he wanted us to go to a different destination we've never been to, to kind of see the world and see the different cultures.
And I think that was really something that stuck with me and now wanderlust is my favorite word cause I love to travel and see different things. And I'm sure with my kids it will be the same. So I think seeing different cultures. seeing how people live in different places is really interesting. If I have to pinpoint one trip it's going to be a bit harder, but I really like Peru.
I went to Peru with one of my best friends, did a backpackers trip and that was incredible. A really great experience, but again, each trip has its own benefit, I would say.
Brennen Bliss: Yeah. Well, incredible. I think, one of the things that's fun about this industry is, not only are the conferences that we get to go to in pretty fun places, but, it's hard to say you work in travel without traveling, right?
Carl Pihl: Well, to be fair, we meet a lot of our clients online, so I don't think we need to travel. It's true that the conferences are great and it's nice to meet people face to face, but now, you know, post COVID, nobody really wants to meet you and a zoom meeting is fine.
Brennen Bliss: Yeah. Well, I want to meet you. I like seeing you, of course, always.
Let's dive right in. TicketingHub obviously is a fantastic online booking software for tours and activities. I'm super excited to dive into your marketing strategy. Let's just start with an overview. So what would you say are the key channels that you're using to generate business for TicketingHub?
Carl Pihl: Currently we only have one channel, which is our website. We don't do any cold emails. We don't do any advertising. It's all inbound and recommendations from customers.
Brennen Bliss: Okay. Got it. So I guess we can call that too, right? We've got the website and we've got recommendations from customers. On the website, do you have multiple channels or is it all SEO or where are you going to get traffic from?
Carl Pihl: It's all SEO
Brennen Bliss: Wow. I guess we'll unpack that today, right? What role do you think SEO has played in the success of TicketingHub?
Carl Pihl: It's had a significant role in our success. I think our success comes from our clients' feedback and the team working hard on making a product that's complicated, simple, and that's really what resonates with our customers.
They love the interface. They don't have to learn or spend time learning. They can just go in and start doing which is a change and refreshing in the industry. So I think that's really what's kind of driving our success. And then it's just about people finding us because often, you know, people look at FareHarbor, they look at Peek because they're the largest one in the industry. And they often like to go with the safe bet because they've been around and now it's kind of changing because we're growing. And so it's more reassuring to go with a company that has, you know, more employees and is growing fast.
Brennen Bliss: Yeah, that's incredible. I think I obviously have done a bit of research on your SEO strategy, and we've talked about it in person back in March. I think one of the things I want to talk about today is really the approach you take and how it's a little different from the standard SEO approach. What type of pages on your site are generating traffic or where do you focus right now?
Carl Pihl: We started by focusing on the industry pages. So we went for the low hanging fruits because it was harder for us to rank for tour booking software or activities.
Brennen Bliss: Is that like food tour booking software, for instance?
Carl Pihl: Correct.
Brennen Bliss: What are some other examples?
Carl Pihl: We have 138 of them.
So software museum, you know, kids museum, booking software zoo, so we've created 138 industry pages, and for all of those were ranking probably in the top 10 of Google, we have 320 keywords. We rank at the number one spot of Google.
Brennen Bliss: That's incredible. So I guess that's a lot of pages of this program. I heard that you created each one of those individually.
Carl Pihl: Yeah. I learned how to do SEO during the pandemic because I didn't feel comfortable in cold calling anyone, that was our previous strategy a very, very long time ago. And I didn't feel comfortable calling people when their business was going sour and say: "Hey, we have another ticketing software". So I was like, okay, what can I do? How can I engage with people? And I never really did advertising and I didn't feel comfortable with advertising. So I decided to learn how to do SEO and it took me months of nights of videos and looking at how people, Neil Patel and others were getting a ranking and I understood that there were certain things that were needed, one, the cluster of content for your website. So that's where I created all the OTA connections and things like that and turnstiles and scanners. And so I have a lot of pages that obey the rules of the Google cluster.
And then I realized that there was a second cluster that was needed on the page. And, for example, Zoo Booking software, was one of them where we needed to rank for. And I didn't have a membership solution. I realized that when I did the keyword density of our competitors, they were membership inside.
So I was like, well, that's a word we need to use. So I wrote membership, we will build membership, membership is coming, wait for membership or something like that. And that pulled us to the number one page of Google. So when I realized the strategy was working and it was at that time, I had about 10 pages for the industries.
I was like, okay, so let's multiply this for every single industry. So I started making a list of all the industries, created a big Excel, and instead of doing it myself, obviously it was going to be like, not efficient, I hired a team in Philippines, to write the content and gave them a lot of tools like Grammarly to optimize, their written English.
And got them to write all of those pages. And so we used the CMS model in Webflow. And created all those pages and slowly they started ranking. And now we rank for 320 keywords or the ones that aren't really referenced by SEMrush or Ahrefs because they don't have enough view or visibility.
But at the same time for us, it's actually very intent driven.
Brennen Bliss: It is abundantly clear through our review on Ahrefs that we did. And then from my conversation with you that, the high volume, short keyword strategy is the exact opposite of what you're doing. You're going, wide and deep into a very, very specific, maybe that's narrow and deep.
It's wide in one way and narrow in another way, but you're going into these specific keywords that are very rarely searched. But when someone's searching for it, they are looking for you without a shadow of a doubt, right? Which is interesting, so this becomes much more of a game because you're not just casting a net, you're really spearfishing.
So, I want to talk a little bit about how you do that. I know, I've had to slide some money under the table to get you to talk about your strategies but tell me now in this very intimate room, with the one listener that's sitting and listening on this, are there any specific tools or resources that you rely on to make these pages perform?
Carl Pihl: Sure. We use Frase, we use Surfer, we use SEMrush, Wordtune, Grammarly, Chat GPT-3. Plugins for like Harpa and others. So there's not just one tool. We used to use Jasper, for example, we use Quilts to make sure the content is not AI driven.
So there it's not just one tool, it's a mix of different tools that you put together.
Brennen Bliss: Can we focus on a couple of those, the ones that you said at the beginning, I think Frase and Surfer specifically, because if you might've heard me ramble or talk my head off about data driven SEO and how it's different when you're just following the best practices.
Then when you're finding a keyword, looking at what's influencing the rankings for that specific keyword, and then optimizing for those things, which I think that's really, at least at scale, it's a little different from the way that we approach it just because we don't use the consumer facing software that's available, but let's make this accessible and talk about how Frase and Surfer, make that process a little bit more, tangible and certain.
How does that help you?
Carl Pihl: I mean, Frase can get you an outline on content that you don't really know and compares the top 10 results of Google to give you a really, really clear outline. So when you're going to give work to someone and you don't necessarily know what you're talking about, Frase is a really, really good tool to give you that structure and then give it to them so that they can, you know, then research or then put the content they need.
So it saves you a lot of research time. I can write about wine, you know, I've recommended this to our clients that are doing wine tours and they were like: well, you can't write about a Bordeaux…and I was like: okay, let me show you. And within two minutes I had all the data I needed about Bordeaux to actually write a really comprehensive article.
Brennen Bliss: Yeah. That's, it'll be interesting, as content becomes more and more of a quote and quote commodity with the AI making content creation, such a click and rinse and repeat process, I guess. It'll be interesting to see how that data can differentiate itself. If everybody's using the same information, which one will rank? I think, I guess it's going to be the people that can understand the algorithm best, which is what I think Surfer does best. And how do you use Surfer generally?
Carl Pihl: We use Surfer to recommend the amount of keywords and the keyword density for an article, we started it on the industry pages and now for every blog or anything like that, we're using Surfer. We also started using their AI, it's pretty good. I think it still needs some kind of tweaking or manual tweaking, to what the output is. But, it helped us a lot to understand, what words we had to use, who we're competing against. Again, you know, we're not necessarily competing against Capterra, that's a review site, but we're competing against FareHarbor and Peek.
Therefore we can select the domains that we really want to compete with as opposed to just going into the keyword density and having an analysis that would take us hours it does it in minutes.
Brennen Bliss: That's a really important distinction that you just made right there. The difference between targeting something like Capterra and targeting your competitors, whether it's Peek, Zola or FareHarbor or whatever it may be. And I think that's one of the places where people really don't see, exactly what they're supposed to, is that a user intent for a search, like tour booking software or res tech for tours and activities. Those types of search terms, they're going to give you two types of results, they're going to give you the actual res tech, they're going to give you the actual booking software, and then they'll give you comparison sites.
And some people want the comparison sites and the way we approach SEO, generally, we don't look at those as positions we have to earn when we're independent operating companies, just because the user intent for those is so strong.
Google looks at dwell rate. It looks at how long somebody stays on the page before they return to search. And if the dwell rate on those are high, it's very likely that Google will continue to show those regardless of what we do with our independent website. So I liked that that's your approach.
That's exactly how we recommend our clients do SEO.
Carl Pihl: We started actually looking at where we lose people on the page to actually see, you know, what we should change on that page, if the content structure should be different or not, to actually, hold them on the page longer.
Brennen Bliss: For sure. And that's through, what tool do you use to do that?
Carl Pihl: Google Analytics.
Brennen Bliss: Got it. Very cool. You've clearly done SEO well but also the other channel that you talked about was word of mouth. So I wanted to dive a bit deeper into that. To get word of mouth, you need to both have the ability to get new clients, which we've talked about through SEO, but also to deliver a superior product for them, because that's the only way you're going to get recommendations and referrals.
How do you get your customers and clients to advocate for TicketingHub?
Carl Pihl: Generally they do it on their own, so we haven't really put an affiliate program in place in TicketingHub. So our clients just decide they like our product and will recommend it to their friends. Generally it's multiple things that come in hand. Our service is impeccable, people are super happy with the time it takes us to reply or to make changes to the platform. It's the fact that we customize the solution for them so we add, you know, whether you're a small customer or large customer, we do a lot of custom work free of charge.
And then it's really about even teaching them about the industry and giving them as much information as they want. So for example, SEO is something I spend a lot of time with customers kind of giving them advice and showing them how I've done things. So I think it's what you put in, you get out.
And that's how our recommendations have gone so far. I think the future is going to be having an affiliate link or something like that, where we can give commissions to our customers. It's a bit hard for us because we don't have a monthly fee and it's all on a percentage basis and we have very high revenue customers, but then we also have some that make us a pound a month.
Brennen Bliss: Where's my 10 cents? It costs more to send the money than it does to actually have the value of the money.
So I guess knowing that you've got this superior experience, one that someone can come in and actually get really what sounds like white gloves service. They're obviously gonna be happy with that onboarding experience.
How do you keep them as clients? What does your retention look like? What does your strategy look like for retaining clients?
Carl Pihl: Actually our client strategy is actually quite poor. We don't send out emails. We don't let them know about new features. It's something that we're changing.
We've just put HubSpot in place to, to kind of educate them on new features. Generally we're quite small, right? We have about 300 customers, so we have a very direct relationship. They all contact me when there's anything. So that's really where it is. And, recently we onboarded a new customer.
And, their feedback was like, I was reading threads online and people said, this is a very personal experience. You won't go from one agent to another. They really listen to what you have to say. And I think that's really why we don't have that much churn. Also, you know, when you're moving to another platform that costs twice as much, even though they say they're free, you're, someone is still paying, which is the end customer.
You know, what can you do with 3% more revenue? We're half price to some of the platforms. So if you put that 3% into Google Ads, you're gonna make an amazing return.
Brennen Bliss: Got it. I guess the continued value delivery is your pricing, right? That's a huge part.
Carl Pihl: I mean, it's the pricing and it's the continuously new features.
We've done an email validator. We're the first ones in the industry to do this. And, we make sure that no one can vote without the right email address, because we do the US military and they were having a lot of people, putting the wrong email address and calling them up. So we found a solution.
It was a very simple solution. But people love it when you're doing volume. We were the first ones to do the magic link, we call it, which enables customers to change their booking on their own. And you know, FareHarbor launched that three months after us. I think the issue that TicketingHub has is how do you keep innovating without some of your competitors that have raised 120 million, you know, build those same features in a month or two.
Brennen Bliss: Well, it seems like you're not doing a poor job of it. I think that, you know, the one thing that you don't have that they have is bureaucracy, so that's kind of nice, right? You don't have to go through three rounds of approvals to get something live. You can really save your customer immediately. As soon as there's a need.
Carl Pihl: That's exactly what we do.
Brennen Bliss: That's incredible. So we've got these customers that we've onboarded. We've gotten them through either referrals or SEO. We have them retained. One of the things that is always interesting to me is to know, how do you use customer feedback?
How do you gather and implement it? Is there a strategy you have in place for that? Is that on the roadmap?
Carl Pihl: So generally we always ask for feedback on any call. So any support call, anything we're always like, you know, what can we do to help? How can we improve this for you? So it's part of our culture.
Then I'm a big advocate of everyone providing support to understand what the problems of customers are. And, a recent example, a customer had a meeting location that was a parking spot and that had to change for X, Y reason. And that customer had 30 different products in TicketingHub.
So normally you had to change that 30 times. And when I went to see my developers and I was like, could you change this 30 times? They were like, okay, 10 minutes later or an hour later, we had a clone button allowing you to clone that location. So I think when you're putting yourself in the shoes of the customers and actually helping them, uploading their inventory, managing their inventory, things like that.
We want to be a full service company. If someone doesn't know how to do it, we'll do it for them. But that kind of puts a lot of pressure on us and we want to save time. So then we build the functionality to do this quickly and efficiently.
Brennen Bliss: I got it. Yeah. The clone button probably made a big difference for that one customer, right?
Carl Pihl: But it was one customer and then other customers see the clone and they're like, Oh, this is so cool, that's great, I'm so happy to see this. So it has this ripple effect, you know, when you start small somewhere and those small changes make a big difference on the long term, the email validation tool.
I had customers call us and say, Hey, there's a problem with TicketingHub. I was like, what's the problem? It's like, well, we're not getting anyone saying that they have the wrong email address so I'm guessing we're having problems with bookings or something. I was like, no, no, no, we've added this feature.
And they're like, wow, this is brilliant. Thank you so much.
Brennen Bliss: That's incredible.
Carl Pihl: So I think the small things have a big impact and I think we're like, my focus is how to make this the simplest platform for the industry. I've spent fortunes with the biggest UI guy in the UK to help us build one page.
And I'm still not finished with it after one year of iteration and reiteration
Brennen Bliss: Oh no, I really wanna know what that page is.
Carl Pihl: It's the main availability page. And, you know when you're looking at FareHarbor, you're looking at Peek, you're looking at all these different platforms, it's really cumbersome to manage your inventory.
And what I want is for someone that doesn't know anything about your product, your service or anything to just log in and be like, Oh, okay, I know what's happening here. And that kind of wow effect and I think no one's really managed to do that. And that's why the market in itself is completely fragmented, segmented.
There's so many different reservation systems, there's new ones popping up constantly. They think that they have all the features and then they realize, Oh, we just have this new lead who wants something different. Oh, we have like, it's really, really complicated.
Brennen Bliss: You're 12 years behind your process, right? Where you started learning your... What your customers need and implementing it, I guess, just scaling back out a little, we got deep into the customer retention and feedback mechanisms. What would be some KPIs that you track and follow to show that your marketing is either being effective or not as effective as you want it to be?
Carl Pihl: I mean, for me, it's all about revenue. My main KPI is my revenue. Because again, like some customers are very big, others are very small. 300 customers like probably the 20% of our customers are the one generating the most income. We don't want to set a minimum monthly fee or anything like that.
Like other platforms do not enable those small customers to come in cause you never know, some grew and, for example, Secret Food Tours grew from one location to 65 cities around the world using TicketingHub and a multi million pound business.
Brennen Bliss: A mutual friend of ours, right?
So you've got revenue being your primary KPI, which is deeply aligned with your constituents with your customers because your revenue is driven 100% by their bookings, right?
Carl Pihl: Correct.
Brennen Bliss: So everything that you're doing, this investment in the user experience for operators...
Carl Pihl: It's all about providing them, when you go to FareHarbor, you go to Peek, you go to any of those platforms, they don't actually track events on the widget.
So someone like you would actually go mad because once they open that book now button. Then you have no idea what's happening. Whereas with us, you can know whether they've used a discount code, they've dropped off at this calendar page or anything else, and that's a huge amount of value that currently operators don't have.
Some are savvy enough to know what that means and others are just like, what does that mean? How am I supposed to use that?
Brennen Bliss: Others will be savvy enough in due time, right?
Carl Pihl: Yeah
Brennen Bliss: you're doing SEO and you've got customer referral strategies in place. Have there been any marketing campaigns that were particularly successful one page that you think makes a big difference for you?
Carl Pihl: Yeah, I mean, we've done alternative pages.
That was very successful. Alternatives to FareHarbor were number eight on Google and we get loads of leads from that after Capterra's. So those have been very, very successful for us. And very soon we're going to start, I mean, we're changing our website. We're very data driven, so we're changing for the fourth time in two years our website. And now there's going to be some clear changes to how we operate and what we're going to do. And we're also going to be building a funnel cause we have a lot of time wasters or people that we can't really service now, that are just booking meetings. So now we're going to be building more of a funnel for reviews and we want to start doing advertising and things like that.
I'm probably going to start on Facebook and then see whether we push it to Google.
Brennen Bliss: Okay, great. And on the other side, any failed marketing launches or initiatives?
Carl Pihl: Not really, cause we haven't really tried that much. When I started TicketingHub, that was almost 10 years ago, I had some problems with my co-founder that, you know, and a lot of people know in the industry, where he hacked us and did some very bad things.
And so we haven't, you know, before it was cold email, like cold calling, cold emails that worked really well for us. That was really at the beginning. Then the platform stalled and we had to build things. And then I stalled because I didn't have all the shares in my business. So I was able to recover TicketingHub in October 2019.
And that's really when I put the campaigns in place. If I have to consider something that's failed is more like building a website. So the first person that built our website was a designer and I loved what he did, but the lighthouse speed was terrible. And so we were losing traffic because the website wasn't loading fast enough.
I can consider that a failed attempt and had to find someone else that did a better job, but still not there. And then finally found someone that did a great job. And our lighthouse speed is now 92.
Brennen Bliss: Which seems to be a really important metric for you.
Carl Pihl: It's fairly important. I saw like, our traffic doubled, when we increased the lighthouse speed. So it's a fairly important metric.
Brennen Bliss: Yeah, certainly enabling all your other work to have a website that's fast enough, right? So just looking ahead, knowing what's coming down the pike and looking at the future of marketing, what kind of trends and innovations are you excited about?
How do you plan to incorporate them into TicketingHub's future marketing strategies?
Carl Pihl: So, yeah, I think we have a long term view of where the market is going and it's really where we want to drive our business. But I think right now we want to start at the basics and the basics being how to create availability and making that as simple as possible for everyone.
And I think once we arrive at that point, we will be a product led hundred percent product led business, but we won't have demos. We won't have calls because everyone should be able to achieve what they want without having to interact with someone. And I think at that stage is where we're really going to be pushing our marketing, and trying to step our ground more.
Brennen Bliss: Less of a human element to get things to move forward. That makes a lot of sense. That's most of the questions I had for you.
I think the one thing I would ask is there some sort of deep down secret weapon revelation that you've had, something that we've all been waiting to hear, something that you wouldn't share with anybody other than me and our many, many listeners.
Carl Pihl: Wow. Yeah, of course we have some secrets that we're not sharing with the world. I think the one thing I can say is we've seen a lot of people copy some of the innovations we've had and therefore we're trying to steer away from that.
So either not share innovations on our website and only on demos with customers, or launch a kind of a separate product. So now we're going to be launching Tipper, for example, very soon. That's completely separate from TicketingHub.
Brennen Bliss: Wow. Okay. Very cool. I can't wait to hear more about that.
This was an incredible interview. I really appreciate you getting on with me. The one thing that I think is most fun for me to hear, at the end of all these interviews, is where you're going next. What's your next trip?
Carl Pihl: I'm off to Thailand
Brennen Bliss: I hope you have a fantastic time there.
Carl Pihl: Thank you.
Brennen Bliss: Thank you. I'm making it my way to Asia for the first time for our honeymoon at the end of the year. Excited to follow in your footsteps. But in any case, thank you so much, Carl. I appreciate it. Can't wait to see you again soon.
Carl Pihl: Yeah, me too. Take care. All right. Bye.
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