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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.
There's nothing I love more than bringing friends on this podcast. So today I get to interview Justin Buzzi. He's the founder of Get Up and Go Kayaking. He's also the CEO. It's a 30 location, I think 31 now location and kayaking tour company. They are so, so good at organic social, not paid social. And it's incredible what they've done millions and millions and millions of impressions of interactions they've got. They have a whole community around their tours, which is just unusual in the travel space. So I'm going to dive in with him. We're going to talk a little bit about both paid and organic channels.
We're going to talk about some really cool things they're doing on the multi-location side and also have a little bit of fun. So listen up.
Justin, thank you so much, my friend for joining me today. I'm not sure why we waited so long to do this. I think y'all had me on your podcast and it occurred to me, oh, we probably should have done this a year ago.
I know I'm excited.
So here we are. This is fun. I love multi-location brands.
So before Propellic was a SEO firm for travel and tourism, we did SEO, we specialized in multi-location. So this is like the confluence of those things, and I wanna learn about it. We're gonna ask some questions to that effect. Let's just dive in.
So most companies struggle to market a single location for what they do. How the hell do you do it for 30?
I mean, that's the question that I ask myself every day.
What needs to change? What can we do differently? How can we double down on what's working? How can we get rid of things that aren't working? But the good thing is with multi locations is like, you can try something somewhere and if it work, you can apply it across the board, right? Or if you find that something's not working, you can do the opposite.
But with us, I feel like you need to do a lot of everything to cut through the noise of being a commodity of.
There's so many things people can do when they're going to destinations that we're in. Right? Like we're in Orlando. How do you compete with going to a theme park? You know, in these other huge things, right?
You'd be a little bit lower on the price side, but to that point, like there's hundreds of thousands of things to do in a lot of our destinations and you still have to cut through some of that noise so that people can find you. That's the tough part.
So. I love this multi-location thing that you're doing. I saw on your LinkedIn the other day that you're doing a badge system. So I want this episode of this podcast to really just be about how to scale and the leverage that you get by being multi-location.
Let's talk about one marketing strategy that you're employing for customer retention and loyalty. Tell us about this badge system.
Yeah. So essentially we had someone design a thicker and it's also a poster so people can buy it as a poster form.
But at the end of every tour that they do with us, and we have 31 locations right now. So they come to our Rock Springs location at the end of the tour, they get a free sticker, which serves a couple of different purposes. One, as you mentioned, the loyalty program. So we're allowing people to collect these stickers as they go to different locations. They get a free sticker out of it, which is cool in itself. But on top of that, as they collect these stickers, they unlock different rewards.
So if you go to three locations, you get a free shirt. If you go to six, you get a free tour. If you go to 10, you get 50% off tours for an entire year at any of our locations. We're going to do like a crazy one for anyone that hits like 15. And we've grown faster than people can visit our locations, which is kind of interesting. But so it serves the purpose of trying to get people to visit all of our different locations. But also like part of it is tour design. And at the end of the tour giving guests something that they didn't expect if they didn't really know about our loyalty program, they feel like they got a little bit more value out of this experience that they weren't really expecting.
So it serves a couple of different purposes, but I really like the idea of having a loyalty program, even if you have one location, you can encourage people to come back as many times as you want, right?
And you can call that a loyalty program.
So getting people to come back. I'm very curious on the economics just because the scratches and it's in my brain, not because this is gonna be helpful to literally anybody listening to this. So like Marriott, they have a rewards program and the hotel has to honor the rewards program and let someone stay on points, but there's no cash collected for points, right?
So Marriott Global sends money to the hotel to fund that person's night stay. It's less than they would get otherwise, but so the t-shirts, the free tours, how's that being funded? Does the franchisor pay for that?
Yeah, so I figured that would be the easiest way instead of trying to figure out, does every location submit like a little bit to it? It doesn't end up being a whole lot of extra money. And I feel like the value out of it is definitely worth getting people turning them from a fan to a super fan to me is so worth it. Each location buys their own stickers. So like they're in charge of doing that, but I'm in charge of the reward side of it, and it also is really interesting because it gives me access to like our top customers. And if I ever want to introduce something new, or maybe I want to throw up a new merch design or whatever it may be, I could go to this like focus group of 40 people that have done six or more of our tours and ask them directly and get some really good feedback. So every time someone claims one of those rewards, I have a one-on-one conversation with them about...What's your favorite location? Why was it your favorite? What can we do better at any of the locations? And it's cool.
So beyond what I already said before, like this is a third reason of why I do it, I get really direct feedback from our top customers on what we could be improving on, which is really important, I think.
This is brilliant. Okay. Now we're going to go back to the things that we typically talk about here, which is digital, but before we talk about the beast of a social media dude you are. Let's just go in channels across the board, marketing channels, what are you doing and what are you not doing?
Yeah. So I think most of our time right now on socials…
Paid or organic?
Organic.
Okay.
And the majority of our ad spend is going to Google.
Okay.
A very small percent of our ad spend goes to social. I want to actually change, I want more of our ad spend to go to social. It has a cheaper cost per click, but you get a higher intent person on Google that's searching for kayaking. ‘
Is that all, is that what you target “kayaking” and you go further up in the funnel and just do things to do?
It depends on the market, but usually we'll go just to kayaking or kayak tours or clear kayaking or something that is really, really high intent for what we do. Typically on a month, each location is spending on average, probably like a thousand dollars for Google ads.
Okay. So it's, it's fairly small, but I imagine it comes out of like a marketing fee. The franchises pay y'all.
So they pay their own advertising budget, but they do contribute 2% of their revenue/fund, right? Our marketing fund that I can then use to buy t-shirts if I want to for the loyalty program
Or develop brand assets that apply to everything.
Exactly.
Okay. So you've got your channels are bottom of funnel, like clear kayaking in destiny, like things like that. And then you've got paid social that you're trying to unlock, it's a new channel for you. And then we can't not talk about organic social.
That's a big one. Like I hired a community manager because of our organic social like I need someone that can reply to comments every day because there's hundreds every day. I need someone that can build a Facebook group and stay active in the group, post engaging things and come up with creative content and repurpose the content that's coming in from all of our locations in a way that maybe is more hard hitting and all of those things.
So right now the corporate team is literally me and a community manager. Like that's how much I value organic socials. It's crazy.
Okay. So you've got this really cool thing that I don't think most brands have dialed in. I'm trying to think like maybe Intrepid Travel does, has a little bit of this, Mikey Sadowski was on our podcast, their global head of PR a couple of months ago and we talked about that.
Um, I can't think of many brands who build a community that are in travel.
I can't either.
You know who does one other company that does it is Context Tours. That's a darn good job. June Chen Ramsey's company does a really good job of that because it's like PhD led tours and they do all this content along the side, but how in the world do you retain travelers when they're not traveling?
Yeah, that's a tough question. Right. I mean, how many do you need to retain to grow your business though? And just because you're not necessarily retaining them with organic socials doesn't mean that you're not retaining them in other ways, you know?
It's like you're building a community on organic social. What is the mindset? Like what are people learning? What is the type of content they're seeing? How are you getting people to engage with your content when they're not in that destination or they maybe only went to that destination once. Like how are they falling in love with Get Up And Go?
Yeah. You know, since I started the company, like eight years ago, it's always been my goal to kind of under promise and over deliver. And so I think that comes in a lot of different ways on socials, whether it's just asking questions as polls and stories, and then replying to all of them or creating insightful posts that give you details about the destination or details about the activity, creating blog posts around what to eat while you're in these destinations, putting that in our confirmation emails sometimes.
Creating this Facebook group that then also reshares and repurposes all of that same information and really just facilitating like open communications between the customers and us for them to ask questions and for us to answer them. But I don't know if there's like one specific answer of how that builds community. I think it's just doing a lot of things to allow for that open communication. And it's not just people that are waiting 24 hours for an email response from us, right? That doesn't build community. It's like they could go into our Facebook group and ping us and like, one of us will respond pretty instantly.
Yeah. Well, I'm glad you've elevated yourself out from doing the response. Like that, that is equivalent to me pulling myself out of client delivery and being more in the sales and marketing of the organization, which I think you and I similarly, like to land in that space. That's where I live is on the like, let's market us side and thought leadership around how we market companies.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm interested to go back offline. We're talking dancing, backing for it between online and offline. I think I saw this. I might be remembering something that didn't actually happen, but I think there was a Visit Florida partnership or Visit Orlando. Was it Visit Florida or Visit Orlando?
Probably visit Orlando. We're pretty active.
Cause I think I saw it's Cassandra is their leader there, right? Yeah. So I saw we're connected on LinkedIn and I see her posts sometimes and I saw something that maybe she liked a post of you with a video of your company on a billboard in Times Square.
Yeah. So Visit Orlando has been a great partner. I always, and this is another marketing channel is like, I always recommend other operators connect with their local DMOs or local organizations that are there to market destination.
We've been a partner of theirs for like six or seven years now and partnership only costs, I don't know, let's call it $2,000. And this year alone, like my analytics are, I've made 60 grand off of that partnership of just referrals from their website.
Okay.
One is worth my investment.
So that's like just UTM tracked conversions.
Yeah.
Geez. So that's awesome.
30x return is worth it to me, right?
They constantly, constantly, constantly send bloggers, influencers, people that are coming to Orlando to cover the, what to do beyond the theme parks. It seems to be like a common thing that's been happening recently and is that Orlando has been putting a lot of emphasis on that is their unbelievably real campaign of like how real Orlando is. And so over the course of the last few years, a couple of really cool things have happened with that partnership.
They partnered with Amazon for packaging, like packages that went to 10 major markets in the US last holiday season. It had our location on the Amazon envelopes, which I thought was like insane. And then we had like, they partnered with TripAdvisor to do a series called the wanderer, which was on Amazon Prime. And they came and did an episode at our location at no cost. And then this billboard thing, so there's a billboard in New York, Times Square for one month. And like every three minutes, you see a clip of get up and go kayaking. It says rock Springs on it. It doesn't say our company name. So I've got a little bit of a bone to pick with them, but if someone were to search clear kayaking at that location, they're going to find me because of my digital presence, right?
Yeah. All right. Very cool. So I think we should explore the social strategy a little bit more. I'm trying to figure out if this is something that can be replicated for a company that's not Get Up And Go Kayaking.
So walk me through. So what are the components of your distribution on organic social on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook? Cause what I see there is an incredibly visual purchase, an incredibly visual, a beautiful experience. I mean the travel, like the dupes and real versus reality, all that stuff. But like your stuff is actually beautiful and it looks like it.
Yeah. I mean, our industry specifically is perfect for that tours are inherently visually appealing. Whether it's a walking tour, that's just going to restaurants. Like people want to see the food. People want to hear about the food. People want to hear about the people that make the food. People want to see the destination of where the food is.
Like I have a hard time thinking in my head of a tour that wouldn't be visually appealing for people in some sense of the way, like, yes, at the end of the day, I get it. My tours are probably quote unquote, more appealing than most tours out there because we've got clear water and manatees that will come up and hug the bottom of your clear kayak and how do you replicate that as a walking tour operator? But I think there's…
I mean, it wouldn't be easy.
It would be hard. That would be hard. We can get someone in a mascot to kind of replicate it. And because of the eight listeners that we have, get sales of manatees suits on Amazon have gone up at least 140%.
Perfect. So. So I think the strategy for a lot of people here is like, how do you tell the story of your tours? How do you show off the destination? How do you show off the places that you're visiting? And like right now there's, I think of so many trends that are happening on TikTok. I see the one where it's called like a dangerous remix and like the beginning of the video is someone that's like actually falling or flying or something. And then you cut it right when like something crazy is about to happen. And then you stitch it with you falling into like rolling into the frame. And it's like this trend that's going around on TikTok, right? And I think that's what people need to get better at is noticing what the freaking trends are and replicating them. Like, yes, maybe that's not going viral in a way that's necessarily selling your tour. I swear to God I've seen 30 car dealerships doing these stupid little trends on TikTok and their engagement, they're following people that comment that say, I am never buying a car from anyone but you guys.
Like that's brand and there's ways to get your business in front of people. End of the day, that's the business that we're all in is getting people's attention so they come and do our business. Right?
Yeah.
So it doesn't need to be the visual thing always. It could just be you telling about why you started the business or talking about your employees or a funny story that happened on a tour or a funny moment. Like there could be so many different things. And I think that's what people in our industry specifically don't do is they don't try making content. People just assume that you can pick up your phone, take a three second video and it's going to go crazy on the internet. Yeah, maybe that happens for my business, but I'm now spending a lot of time creating content, whether that's a green screen in the background and me talking to my phone about, oh my God, we were on Forbes for sustainability.
That's how you build a brand and that's what people really need to do in this business.
Okay. So one of our core principles of our marketing philosophy at Propellic, it's called performance bookings is the goals. It's North Star metrics. It's what are we tracking? And often people will come to me and say, we want more followers on Instagram something like that, which is hilarious because we don't even do social media marketing. Literally, I've had this conversation many a time. And my general response is why the vanity metric? Like, who cares how many followers you have? Let's drive some bookings. But, but, but that is not always the case. So I'm curious to hear because I'm certain that your tension and your interactions bring people to the bottom of the funnel. I'm curious how you track that what metrics are important to you and how you turn engagement into bookings?
Yeah. Tracking it to a hundred percent is not fully possible in today's world of someone sees you on social media a week ago and then happens to Google your business and then when they book a tour with you, they say, how did you hear about us? And they put TripAdvisor, even though they never went to TripAdvisor, right? It's impossible. Your analytics are showing they came in through Google, but really their first touch point and how they heard about us was on social media. So to me, it's impossible to track that a hundred percent.
At the scale that we're at, we can track it in terms of seeing what the trends are month over month, year over year. And that gives me a good ability to understand like how much of our business is actually happening because of X, Y, and Z. But yeah, as far as like metrics side of it goes, I think the amount of shares is really important on a post. A lot of business goes down in the DM as they say, and people, me included, I see something cool on Instagram. I share it with my wife and then like three months later, we're going and doing that cool thing in the destination that we want to go to. I look a lot at how many shares our posts are getting, like are people actually caring enough to send this to someone else? At the end of the day, that might not lead to a booking. So yes, booking metrics are going to be the most important, but all of it leads to something.
And just because they're not booking today doesn't mean that they're not going to book three months down the road. So that's the tough part of it all to wrap your head around it. I think that's kind of the difference between branding and marketing though, is marketing should get you a sale pretty quickly. Branding may take you a year or two.
Yeah. It's definitely a different strategy. I would say my specialty is definitely not on the brand side.
Yeah.
We're like, it's a different way to build a business and it's an incredibly effective way to build a business in the long run, especially when you're not in just one destination. That's the part where this, I don't think would work as well, is if you don't have the ability to capture the revenue when they're in destination.
Yeah.
That's a product of being in one place. So you would say bookings being a down funnel metric, what are your up funnel metrics that you follow that drive revenue for you?
When you say up funnel, what does that mean?
I mean, like is followers important to you? When we look at things that are not directly tied to booking.
Yeah, no, I don't care about followers much. I mean, I think it's a fun like woohoo moment when you hit 10,000 or, or 50,000, right, or a hundred thousand, but that could be a hundred thousand people that are on the other side of the world that are never going to do your experience, right? And that doesn't matter too much to me. It's a cool thing to look at, but to your point, it's a vanity thing. That's all it is. I do think there's a little bit of…when you first go to someone's profile and you see, oh, they've got many followers. They must be legit. I think there's a little bit of psychology that goes on with having followers and seeing a lot of engagement and that kind of thing.
But the bigger thing is, and this is where I want to get into more of with the social ads is how do we turn our best hitting organic posts into really, really good salesy Instagram, Facebook ads. And so we don't really track much for the up funnel in the, just the metrics of our socials, other than how many views are we getting? What's the engagement? What's the shares? Even the views doesn't really matter at the end of the day. I just like to make sure that we're getting views, you know, and people are doing the right things and for posting visually appealing things, it should get views and shares and that kind of stuff, but yeah, we don't really like track that too much at the end of the year, we track it and monthly sometimes we'll go in and track it.
But more so important for me is tracking the how did you hear about us and where are people actually coming into our website from?
Yeah, and definitely not the way that they reported themselves because more than 50% of those are inaccurate, right?
Yeah.
Sometimes I track that metric just to see how false it is.
Yeah, it's tough.
We don't have attribution on everything. We are in a world of data privacy. There are new laws that are going into affecting Texas and other states. Like Texas of all places, there's data privacy laws. I live in Texas. That's not a Texas thing. That is odd.
But it's happening everywhere. And in a lot of the cases we can't see where the booking originated from, especially we can't retarget. I mean, there's a lot of different things we can't do, but on the situations where you can, it's 50% or less actually matched or user reported and the browser reported source.
Yeah. Which I think that's like a hugely interesting point that people in the industry should be aware of, right? Just because you're, how did you hear about it says one thing? And maybe that's where you're like, Oh, I need to double down on that because it's working.
Yeah, you can't make decisions based off of that.
Yeah.
And you know, the one thing that as you go into the paid social stuff, media efficiency ratio is going to be a great metric for you. Tells you, you know, of your spend, what's the impact that's not directly measurable to a specific ad. Cause conversions are not typically going to happen on an ad, but there's like, you can retarget that audience that's in your social platform because that's the first party data to the social platform. Which is awesome.
What else? I mean, what, what are you excited about right now? Any new channels you're testing or anything that's miserably failed. I always liked those too.
Yeah. I mean, the one that I think I'm the most bullish on right now actually is YouTube shorts. This month alone. So it's May 31st in May, we've had 3.5 million views on YouTube shorts alone. And I think it was like 20% of that was from search traffic. The other 80% was just from showing up in the feed, but that's a result of two and a half years now of posting three times every day on YouTube shorts.
Whoa.
Yeah. So we've posted a lot of content.
Who's managing your social?
So at first, while it was me and my wife, you know, up until maybe three years ago. And then I had my admin who's been with us for a while and she's a good friend of mine also, she was doing our socials for a bit. And then when I hired this community manager, maybe 8 to 10 months ago. I passed her along the socials and just kept her a part of that system. And so now she's full time on posting and just community engagement stuff. Yeah.
That's awesome. Okay. Last question, since I brought it up, I need to ask it.
Yep.
What is something you've tried that's just failed in marketing? Like something.
Yeah. A good one is TikTok ads. I tried it, but this was also like a year ago, so I need to retry it. I think a lot has changed this might've even been like two years ago. A lot has changed with TikTok's ad platform. From my understanding, I need to try it to get a full understanding.
Slightly.
Are you not a big fan of it either?
Was my voice and face not revealing?
Maybe a little.
I like when ad platforms give you attribution. Like Facebook, even though it typically reports something very different from the truth, will typically at least claim that they're driving some revenue. TikTok is only recently forayed into like some resemblance of revenue attribution, which is.
Yeah. So bearish. I'm, I do not like TikTok ad platform, but organic TikTok works really well for us. As you know, it delivers to you when you're in local markets, local content, you know, I'll go to New York for like three days and all of a sudden I'm getting served all of these New York things and I'm like, I've never seen these before.
As it should. I mean, that's what they could say. I mean, that's what you're going to want to see when you're there. That's I'll be in New York on Monday. I'll don't start seeing some New York ads.
Yeah.
I don't have TikTok on my phone.
Ooh. What do you have it on desktop? What's going on?
I don't have it on desktop.
It could be going away though. So maybe you're just ahead of the curve, okay.
You know what? I just, why waste space on my phone for something that's going to be outlawed in 10 months.
Yeah. It's funny because everyone's kind of concerned about it.
It's not like anywhere.
Even if it does, that attention is just going to go either back to Instagram or more to YouTube shorts.
You know where it's going. Let's start My Space back up and Threads, My Space and Threads.
Yep. Or I've heard rumors like Elon is thinking about, you know, bringing Vine back because I'm pretty sure Twitter, X owns Vine.
I do.
Still owning IP.
I'm pretty sure the code base probably still exists somewhere. I'll be at very outdated and unlikely to be able to run on current devices. Nor, nor does he have a development team because he fired all of them.
Yeah, true.
Or he said, I think it was more creative. I think it's if you don't show up in the office, your job is no longer available to you.
Yeah.
All right. Well, Justin, thank you so much for doing this today with me. I appreciate it. Where is your next trip?
Yeah. Next trip. Oh man. I got a lot planned this year. Actually I'm going to Turks and Caicos in July.
Okay.
We're opening Outer Banks locations. So I might be going there. We're opening in Austin, Texas. So I might be going there. Arival is coming up in San Diego, so you'll see me on Arival. Water Sports Forum, Fort is coming up in St. Augustine. So I'll be going to that. Spark is trying to get me to go to Spark, you know, good old Fair Harbor. Wants their clients.
Oh, they're still doing that?
Yeah. They're doing it in New Orleans this year.
Yeah. I know they're doing the Fair Harbor, sorry, they're doing Viator Ignite with...
Yeah.
I'm having dinner with Sarah, I haven't met her yet.
Nice.
Chief Commercial.
TCO.
Yeah. So I'll be with you at the port. We're sponsoring the port. We're sponsoring Arival. We're sponsoring Phocuswright. All the things. So I'll see you at these.
And then also if you're in Austin, please reach out to me. And lastly, in Turks and Caicos, are you looking at opening up there or just going for vacation?
You know, for government purposes, for travel expense purposes, we're looking to open a location.
Good. Say no more.
No, no, we're just going to have a little fun.
You got to check out, uh, connect you with our client there, Caicos Dream Tours and get you on a boat tour, a snorkeling thing, if you're interested. I would just say it's beautiful there.
I would love to open a location there. Actually. It's beautiful.
Well, thank you so much, Justin. I appreciate it. And I will see you many, many times later this year. It sounds like.
Let's go.
I'm taking that thing away from you. That's enough. I'm ending this right now.
For more empowering ideas, visit Propellic.com. We're on a mission to create more diversity and thought for the planet, and dedicated to helping brands both large and small increase their reach through intelligent travel, transportation, and tourism marketing. P-R-O-P-E-L-L-I-C.com.