The Travel Marketing Podcast

Brennen Bliss (00:02)
Hey Fabio, thank you so much for joining me today.

Fabio Bin (00:05)
Brennan, thank you for inviting me. I'm very happy to join this today podcast.

Brennen Bliss (00:09)
gonna do my best to pivot you were telling me right before we got started you just come back from a conference where all they talked about was AI so today we're gonna talk about marketing and maybe they'll layer some AI but that won't be the focus I promise

Fabio Bin (00:22)
I really appreciate that.

Brennen Bliss (00:24)
Sometimes there's a little bit of fatigue from the AI conversations. So in the last like three or four episodes, I've not gotten right into it and I've gone over by like 20 minutes. So today I'm going to try to get right into it and we're going to just get so I've already done the intro. Everybody already knows who you're who we're talking to. I want to start with We Road and why you were on the founding team, correct? So why, why did you start it?

Fabio Bin (00:49)
Yep.

Simply because I went on a tour with an international big company a few years ago doing tours for a small group of people that don't know each other and my co-founder Paolo did the same with another tour operator and when we came back, it was like in a span of a couple of months of distance, and when we came back he came to me because he's a serial entrepreneur

So why I wasn't at the time, I wasn't an entrepreneur at the time. And it came to me saying, look, I tried in these guys, they were very good, but I felt it missed something in terms of the bonding of the group, on the leading of the group. So we have an amazing travel guide, but it was just a travel guide. I felt the need to have someone.

more into the group, more belonging to the group, what do you think about? And we start discussing about that and about the fact that we went on these tours because we didn't have any friends to travel with at that point. And why? Why? Because modern life is complicated and, you know, it's difficult to match your schedules with the others, or maybe your friends got engaged, some of them are kids, some, you know, life.

And so we put together these two conversations like improving a product that already existing and the need for someone to travel with. And so since he's an entrepreneur, was like, okay, let's do it. And we tried to do it.

Brennen Bliss (02:32)
Okay, so you tried to do it. You've gone through an incredible season of growth. What year did you start the business again?

Fabio Bin (02:39)
We started in 2017, actually we started Boost Rapid because we had the first conversation among ourselves at our Christmas party in December 2016 and we went live on March 2017.

Brennen Bliss (02:59)
Let's get this done. Okay, so March 2017, just high level, walk me through some growth numbers, whether it's passengers or whatever, every year since then and now.

Fabio Bin (03:10)
Yeah, first of all, again, the model is about putting together people that don't know each other and they want to travel to far away destinations. That was the idea. And at same time, putting along with them a travel coordinator who is kind of a travel buddy, bigger brother, that is part of the group and at the same time leading the group, fixing problems, taking care of organizational matters.

but most of all keeping the group together because the point is not about the tour itself, it's about the group dynamics, that's the most important thing. So we boosted up the idea, we started with eight itineraries, we had our first booking after one month, after a few weeks we launched the website and after a couple of months we had our first tour and the coordinators at the time was all friends and family, just like them people, something like that.

So that year we did like 250K, more or less 250 customer. And then the year after we did 2.5 million in revenues. And the day after, the year after again, we did 10 millions. And then the pandemic came along. We resisted, we just, not a bit, we just...

in a deep way the company and we stay on the same level for a couple of years and then after the pandemic we exploded because we did 30 million then 60 and then we are pushing now to close the 2025 with about 100 million in revenues.

Brennen Bliss (04:55)
Okay, so just a little bit of growth. Okay, so did you start in the CMO role or where did you start?

Fabio Bin (04:58)
Yeah, it is, it is.

I started since it was a bootstrap project doing basically everything. So Paolo, my co-founder was on the travel design and the sourcing and I was on the both marketing and digital product. Since I used to say that I'm like a one third digital product person, one third content, one third marketing. And because I like the, let's say the multi-potentialized kind of

of persons and so I designed the, the beginning, the logo, the identity, I crafted it on a voice, at the same time I developed the website, the MVP, which wasn't actually an MVP, it was a real, fully functional product, and I started doing marketing. So in the beginning I was looking after both the technology

which at that time was just the consumer website and the marketing. And then I would say over the years, I transitioned to fully fledged CMO role, because we started doing just digital ads. And then after a couple of years, we started introducing offline, I like to call in real life marketing.

Brennen Bliss (06:31)
Brand campaigns? Gotcha. So I want to talk a little bit about that in a second, but just to kind of craft out this, walk me through how your team developed and changed through, you know, 250,000 to 100 million over a six or seven year period. What does the team look like? What did it look like then? What did it look like in the middle? And what is it like now?

Fabio Bin (06:32)
Yeah, exactly. yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. started with, was myself and another guy. We were doing both contents. When I say content, I refer to social media content actually. And I have to say shame on me, I neglected CEO at the beginning because I was thinking about spread the word out about WeRoad as a brand, as a way of traveling.

Because the idea of traveling with strangers, at least in our core market at the time, kind of, I would say, not that cool. Yes, we in Italy. It wasn't that cool. was like, what's this tour for people that don't know each other? Don't they have friends? Or something like that. So it wasn't that cool. I was very, very obsessed with the...

Brennen Bliss (07:30)
And that's an Italy, correct?

Fabio Bin (07:48)
telling the story about what this type of tour can be. So we start building content on social media. We started on Facebook, but in a very short time we moved to Instagram, was the right Instagram momentum. We understood how the algo worked. We understood how to create content resonating with people. And we grew a lot organically.

The idea was not to do lead generation or something like that, but just having people, followers, really engaged followers, to sell the product too. the content part, we always treated the social media as a of a magazine or a publisher, but not just for brand purposes. It was just completely integrated in the marketing funnel. The idea is...

You're following WeRoad, these guys are proposing interesting content, even if they didn't know that we were like selling tours. We were proposing content in the travel space on one hand, and on the other hand, we were proposing content resonating with people, like how it is living in your 30, being single in your 30, how do you cope with the work, how do you save money for your next trip, something like that, very, very relatable content. That was the idea.

And we paired that with meta campaigns, course, more commercial, but pretty soon we inserted the social proof to show people that these guys are not just doing content, they're even selling trips. So it was like a smooth process, and we were two again doing at the same time content and performance.

That, I think, has been paramount at the first stage, not to put all the money on ads to sell, not just to kind of call selling, but in even not doing PPC or search because probably there wasn't a demand for the specific kind of product we were offering. And so we started like that. And then over the years,

Brennen Bliss (10:13)
So real quick, have just a quick follow up question to that. So you said you didn't think there was demand for what you're selling at the time for your specific travel product, correct?

Fabio Bin (10:24)
Queries. will say queries. Explicit queries about the product. So the people weren't...

Brennen Bliss (10:30)
Okay, so there wasn't something long tail enough that describes you that I would have had enough volume for it to be interesting. Okay.

Fabio Bin (10:33)
Yeah.

Yeah. My point was like to get people acquainted to the idea that you can travel with strangers, but you're not looking at living on Google like a tour with strangers or something like that or group tours, because group travel and group tours, they were associated to like older audiences, older targets. So that's the point. So that's why we were more on

Try to make people understand that the trip can be an experiential and transformational way of spending your time. So that's why we have to build on the need that probably they weren't aware of at that time. See? And there was a time when dating apps were on the rise, you know? And so everyone was about dating, not connecting with other people.

for friendship purposes. So we have to somehow to get them in the know of this. That's why.

Brennen Bliss (11:44)
So what is the structure of your marketing team in November 2024? What does it look like today?

Fabio Bin (11:50)
Now, now we have, I have three sub teams. One is digital marketing. That's basically meta PPC retargeting all the usual digital stuff SEO for sure. Then I have another team. This is about content. And again, content for us is 99 % about social media, Instagram and TikTok. We have handles.

Instagram and TikTok handles for each market in each language we are present at the moment. And then there's another team that I call the rest of the world, but actually they are called brand activation marketing, but they are not only brand activation marketing because they do ATL sponsorship, they do partnerships, they do also creative operations.

all the material, all the assets that we need to run campaigns, to do marketing, not just run campaigns, and the NPR, that are very important to us,

Brennen Bliss (12:52)
So if you were to describe, you were talking about out of home advertising brand activations, I'm really curious to hear, this is a little bit off my planned agenda, but it's an interesting thought, how you see, like if you had a budget, how you would allocate at your current size in a $100 million company in a percentage towards brand versus performance.

Fabio Bin (13:15)
I would say 65 performance, 35 brand.

Brennen Bliss (13:21)
I think I would agree with that and I want to say the caveat for all of the junior marketers at smaller companies and the senior marketers at smaller companies that the answer is going to be different for you and then at bigger companies the answer is going to be different for you too. When you were smaller, was it the same split?

Fabio Bin (13:42)
No, absolutely. At the beginning we were 100 % digital and after a couple of years we stepped into the Out of Home, which is for us, I would say the preferred channel when it comes to the real world. But again, when we do Out of Home campaigns, that's very important for me. When we do Out of Home campaigns, first of all, we negotiate. We negotiate as hell. That's a very important thing.

It's not like in digital. You can speak with other actual people. If you know when the salesman, the salespeople in the companies, they are eating quarterly targets or they are late, you can get better deals. Or if you sit at the table with a sales house and say, guys, we want to buy empty spaces because we will be always ready to put in a matter of hours a creative for you.

So you don't have any antistasis out. It's something that can be very important. So my first advice is negotiating and understanding the dynamics of salespeople and sales houses, because this can be very game-changing in the way you spend and allocate money. Secondly, I wouldn't do just auto-vorm for the sake of doing auto-vorm. In our case, please.

AutoVome is always paired with a city domination strategy. So we pick up a city, or more than one city, it depends, and we start doing a series of activity in the city. Because in this way, my point is, your customer, my customer, they are moving in real life beyond the screen. So these people...

they commute, they go to the office, maybe not every day anymore, but still, a large majority, they still go to the office. And then they have lunch, so they use delivery services, food delivery services. So I can maybe put some flyer, and then that's a matter about how you execute this flyer. You put the flyer in the delivery, in the food that is being delivered.

And then these guys, maybe they go to the gym and maybe you put a flyer, another flyer, a different one in the locker of the gym. And then they use mobility sharing tools, bicycle, mopeds, whatever. And you have a partnership maybe with these guys and you put again flyers or other, I'm saying flyers back to me, messages.

Brennen Bliss (16:24)
It's kind of like the ubiquity be everywhere so I'm curious I take it when you say you have a destination or when you have a city domination strategy you're talking about the source market correct? Are you advertising multiple destinations is it even about the destination or is it about the like what is the creative look like?

Fabio Bin (16:26)
Yes. Yes.

Yes, exactly.

It's never about the destination. It's always about the experience. Actually, we have two, I would say two big streams of campaigns, two main streams of campaigns. Look, we are not that into the typical flights. We are more into kind of a, I would say, platform. The platform is content, is the message, and then the flights in case can be a way to execute this.

this message. So for example, we have to show which kind of experience we are going to offer. So the idea is showing people, real people in a real destination doing real experiences. So for example, all our campaigns are UGC in the sense that we source all the materials that our customers send us and our travel couriers send us.

And we use this material to showcase what the experience is and showcase real people and real experiences. it's kind of also empathetic because people can recognize themselves. We are putting the same people as you in that specific situation. This is kind of a, I would say, I don't like the terms, but the idea is this one, institutional campaign, just to showcase the product, what we are doing.

Then we have another line, is, I think, very, important for, it has been, still is very important for our positioning and for our success. This is more about the tone of voice and the content relatable with the target, with the audience. Since I didn't mention before, but we started with a clear audience in mind, millennials, so 25 to 35 years old. Now we also have

35 to 49, but let's say that the people that we are targeting is people in their 30s. It's our core target. These people have the same cultural background, same issue. don't know. Recently, we ran a campaign in all the European capitals about the cost of living and the cost of rent. And the copy said something like,

Brennen Bliss (18:46)
you

Fabio Bin (19:10)
It's easier to organize a travel with your friends than finding an affordable flat in London. So the idea is that we didn't mention at all the destination, the fact that we are selling trips, whatever. We are simply stating a sentence that is very relatable for the target.

And so using this campaign, we tend to use it, especially in AutoVolume, as a copy-add, very easy to produce, just a line of copy, very ironic, very resonating with the target, and doing in a consistent way. That's another point. I used to say that we have to drop a bomb, load a new one, drop it again, repeat, and be consistent in doing this. So the point is, on one hand...

I have to tell you what we are doing. We are organizing trips that are changing your life because you're gonna meet new people, you're gonna have fun and enjoy your time, and this is what we are doing. On the other hand, I have to say that I'm a different brand. I'm not a true creator, I'm not an e-commerce, I'm not an OTA, I'm someone that is solving a specific problem for people your age. And so I want to be always top of mind and always be...

Brennen Bliss (20:27)
Mm-hmm.

Fabio Bin (20:32)
wanted to be reminded by you as this. Just since we are speaking, I think to a US listener base, have to say, okay, international, let's say, one of the brands that I think, a couple of brands that are very similar to what we are doing is for sure, Oatly, the oat milk and liquid debts.

Brennen Bliss (20:46)
It's international.

Fabio Bin (20:59)
So they are not talking about the product itself. They are always engaging people, even doing like kind of meta marketing because ultimately it's a lot about that, a lot about having fun on their own hearts. Still the point is they have personality.

Brennen Bliss (21:21)
yeah, they did that campaign where they compared drinking liquid death to drinking the most expensive foods in the world. And they were like blending up sushi and blending up Wagyu burgers and people were drinking. It was amazing.

Fabio Bin (21:33)
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. of course, you ask me if I'm promoting destination. Now I'm not completely stupid. When it comes to digital marketing, when it comes to retargeting, to catalogs, of course we use destination. But there's another way to use it. There's another stage of the funnel. It's a completely whole different situation.

So my point is that when it comes to upper funnel and even people that are not necessarily our customer or they're not necessarily becoming our customers, they still know about Twi.ro as a brand with a personality. I always tend to make you smile, 90 % we can make it. And yes, that's it. So we are pairing the experience.

and suggesting that I'm solving a problem and the fact that I'm speaking your language.

Brennen Bliss (22:33)
I'm gonna start skipping questions because we're gonna get so... No, don't be sorry. This is exactly what I think is... We're gonna have to do a part two. I'm already looking at this and saying, wow, there's so much here and we have so many things to cover. So you mentioned a...

Fabio Bin (22:37)
Sorry.

Brennen Bliss (22:50)
Retargeting. you were talking about, you know, retargeting is really effective, as you know, when you have first party data and you can actually get back very visibly in front of those people. And you have a lot more of it than a lot of companies that we talked to. You've built a community. I'm curious how that community works and do you have a specific platform that you continue to stay in touch with your travelers on? And how does, how does that community affect rebookings and lifetime value? Just tell me everything about your community.

Fabio Bin (23:18)
Yeah, yeah, that's a very, very good question. And because I have to deep dive in what we wrote actually is. So first of all, have to say that I generally speaking, I don't like the word community because everyone is speaking about community and I think the community is something that should be about a passion or a sense of belonging, et cetera.

So if I'm using community in WeRoad, I'm using it because I believe we have a real community, not just an audience or not just a bunch of customers that have the same experience. That's why I have to say in advance to try to explain what is community for WeRoad. First of all, a WeRoader is a person that, again, has to a problem, find someone to travel with, and establish a new connection.

So we started in Europe market by market, language by language, even because this is in a way making easier people to reconnect after the trip. So we wrote the experience doesn't end with the trip. The point is that it's pretty easy. When you come back, you live solo.

And after a few days, you bond with these people and you become friends. And then you finish the trip, you get home, you go back to home. And at that point, what's happened? People start to keep to get in touch and they self-organize like dinners, a reunion, even if they are living in a different part of the country, the source market that they are living in. This is the first bit.

On this layer, we added many other events in each source market. For example, in the most mature market that we have, have up to 40 events per month nationwide. These events can be, I don't know, social drinks, yoga sessions, hiking parties, whatever. This is a way...

We conceived these events at the beginning just to make, when we started to attract new customer as an occasion to explain about the product. But they quickly develop themselves in reunion parties. And so people were bringing along new customer, new friends that didn't travel with us. So basically now they are just an occasion to, to, to reunion and an occasion to introduce new people.

to the format, to the concept. And the basic concept, again, is not about the travel. It's about connecting with people, making new friendships. So that's very important. So the events are a prominent part of the strategy because it is a way to reinforce this community, this sense of belonging. And then there are also some other, something that starts as a gimmick that it turned to be a real powerful.

tool for community building. For example, we gave to each WeRodder a bag in the trip with the WeRod logo in it. This bag, we weren't sure about at the beginning. It was a mark to the condition of the group while in the station. But when they came back, they started using the bag again. And so they recognized each other at events.

I went to a festival recently, found three people with a bag and it's easy to connect. You did a We Road or I don't know, at the last Gay Pride, I saw that we had here in Milan, I saw many, bags from We Road that's there without putting money in sponsoring the manifestation, for example, the event.

Brennen Bliss (27:25)
Yeah, that's pretty impressive. Yeah.

Fabio Bin (27:28)
And we get people that send us pictures of them spotting other people. I don't know if you know this guy, he's very famous, this Artorialist, and he took a picture of a girl with a wheel-road bag and he posted it and it got viral as well. So it's a mark, but this mark became a way to recognize another wheel-roader.

and to start a chat with him, with her. That's another point. Then there's another layer, which is the community of travel coordinators. We have 3,000 of them across Europe, even some outside Europe. And they are based on national community, source market-based community. So we have the Spanish with the Spanish, German with German, and so on.

but they start develop spontaneously local chapters. So they started to create a chapter, I don't know, in London, in Manchester, in Berlin, in Munich, and they started since basically the beginning, wasn't just in Italy and Spain at the beginning, but to self-name like we something, don't know, we Manchester, we London, or even we crazy name, for example, there's a group in Italy that is called...

We pull from Apulia, it's not linked to the other inner jokes about that. And they self created the brand of each local group, even distorting, manipulating the logo. But I'm very happy about that. I'm not just the logo because this way the brand is a living thing. They feel the sense of belonging and they self-organize again events, okay, among travel coordinator. They do internet. So.

We have a local presence with local chapters and then local chapters speak with other local chapters in other markets and they do stuff together. They organize even three day long events in another country. So when I say that that's a kind of living thing, it's actually a living thing. And they also have relationships with the packs, with the customers because they stay in touch with the customers.

So, for example, the event for Travel Coordinator, we invest a lot of effort and money in not only sustaining these bottom-up initiatives, but also in creating national events, even international events. We've just done one with 2,000 Travel Coordinators all together for three days. huge effort, which is basically our internal festival.

It's the force here in Arroa that we are doing that. And yes, it's a way to keep people engaged and connected. And having people that are living and breathing the brand and being spontaneous ambassadors of the brand.

Brennen Bliss (30:30)
So like, what do you think created that? Like why did this happen with Reroad and not another company? Like why have y'all created a community?

Fabio Bin (30:39)
I guess that if you look at our specific industry, multi-day tours for small group of people, I think the big players out there, they have like a long story, so they have even a legacy. And probably the model that they are looking at the market is kind of a product of the legacy.

why we started completely fresh like maverick in the market. We weren't coming from this specific industry. And the idea that we want to solve at the beginning, again, was about the make the social part, make the connection among people the most important part. you remember, when started, when Paolo, my co-founder, he said that

the tour guide was a nice guy, but was a professional when he traveled with some other company. And you can say that because as a person that is doing that as a job, why we wanted people doing this not as a job, as a side gig, is the way you invest your free time because all our tour coordinators, sorry, I forgot to mention, they have a regular job in life. They are teachers, doctors, developers, marketers, whatever.

and they choose to spend their free time to lead a weird group because they like it. In fact, they also have the driver for free, they have even a small conversation, but the driver is not money. The driver is being part of this, is connecting with people, is traveling. That's why I think we made it, and we are probably the only one in the market doing this, even because its operation is pretty...

complicated because it is about managing people. Exactly. And that's why you have to create the sense of belonging or to foster the sense of belonging or, for example, was speaking with another company and they were surprised about the degree of freedom that we gave to these people to self-organize events. But the point is, if it's the way to create a sense of belonging, cannot

Brennen Bliss (32:31)
little bit. Just, nending people who don't work for you.

Yeah.

Yeah. Do you, do you fund, do you provide like, stipends funding for those events?

Fabio Bin (32:59)
Hmm, hope to

yeah, it's, yes. but generally speaking, they are not so costly because they are small events as a frequency. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Brennen Bliss (33:12)
Yeah, it's a little, it's a bar meetup, right? Like it's a beers. Okay. I want to talk about performance marketing. want to, no, no, no, go for it. I, this is so fun. This is, this is perfect.

Fabio Bin (33:20)
Sorry, you also asked me about the... Sorry, I'm chatting. I love to speak about WeRoad. No, because you asked me about the repetition and the community. So I spoke about Travel Coordinator, but I have to say we have a very impressive level of loyalty because we are people that doing even three tours per year.

Brennen Bliss (33:34)
Yes.

Fabio Bin (33:47)
We are people that done, I think our record is like 26 tours in total, maybe even more than one, honestly. There are people that then they apply to become travel coordinators as well. That's another point. The repetition rate is very pretty high and now with the course that we have, can project the activity about, we're talking about marketing.

Brennen Bliss (33:53)
Whoa.

Fabio Bin (34:15)
We can project it in the LTV. We know exactly what we are acquiring in terms of the customer, but we know at the same time that we have to keep working on the quality level of the product and service that we offer and the level of quality of travel coordinator. That's why, for example, for us, a very important metric is the product quality and the score that the coordinator gets from each tour.

A travel coordinator is not set to stay a travel coordinator forever. So it's based also on his performance, but also on his involvement in the community. Maybe it's a stage of life in which you want to do the travel coordinator and then you have to put in pause and then do it again after a few years. And the same goes for the customers. Maybe people start as a single.

Then they do a couple of eros, they get engaged, and then after a couple of years they come back again because they break up. So, that's it. Yeah, yeah. No, Yeah, yeah.

Brennen Bliss (35:21)
sad but not bad for WeRode but bad for the person that's... god. Okay, okay now I really do I want to get into performance marketing and digital just because that's you know that's my world that's the stuff that I love and I'm curious to hear how you're doing it. So I'm gonna do this more as rapid fire so I'm gonna give you a question and then give me an answer and I'm gonna give a follow-up okay? So new campaigns.

Fabio Bin (35:36)
Yeah.

Okay.

Brennen Bliss (35:51)
Are you generally evergreen based or are you more campaign based in your marketing?

Fabio Bin (35:57)
Evergreen with some seasonal dedicated campaigns, but in a context in a frame of Evergreen campaigns.

Brennen Bliss (36:06)
Do you have any seasonal campaigns running right now?

Fabio Bin (36:10)
Yeah, for example, Northern Lights, so it's based on destination in this case. Yeah, exactly. It's not just Light Fund, it's the whole world of Northern Lights.

Brennen Bliss (36:16)
Like Lapland, right? Okay, got it. Very cool. that's.

Okay, just as an example, perfect. Okay, so it's a lot of destination based. Do you do any seasonal, like, I guess, do you do anything around holidays? What I'm trying to see, well, really, like, here's my question. So we're coming up on holiday season in the US, prime travel from late December, sorry, early mid December through the end.

Fabio Bin (36:25)
Yeah.

Brennen Bliss (36:50)
I'm curious how far in advance you plan for these and what type of booking windows you're seeing generally for your audience.

Fabio Bin (36:57)
I'd to ask you what you guess that I'll tell you. Or you can tell me.

Brennen Bliss (37:05)
There's it's so I'm just gonna make myself sound like a fool

Fabio Bin (37:09)
Okay, I know. Okay, I'll tell you. It's about 60, 70 days in the booking window from, let's say, the first touch point with another and the actual booking. So we plan pretty much in advance. Let's say in September, I start with new receive tours. Like, for example, Sakura Japan is in...

Brennen Bliss (37:18)
Okay.

Fabio Bin (37:37)
March April so we start in November December Like this

Brennen Bliss (37:43)
You're seeing you've got a general expectation, you're launching campaigns far enough in advance to capitalize on the opportunity. So you've got a couple of different channels, you've got this community side, which sounds like it in large part runs itself, just because you've got a really strong brand image and a really strong level of involvement from your guides, your coordinators.

Fabio Bin (37:50)
Yeah, absolutely.

Brennen Bliss (38:11)
Social media performance, how do you balance? You've been talking about social and I haven't asked, but it sounds like there's a lot of organic social.

Fabio Bin (38:18)
Yeah, absolutely. We have like about two million followers on Instagram worldwide because we're just one million Italy, which is the main market. But the point is, I'm not talking about followers because it's a vanity metric there. because, yeah, yeah, because the point is when I heard about follower, okay, these guys are going to talk about follower. What are we in year 2000? No.

Brennen Bliss (38:35)
Yes.

Fabio Bin (38:46)
The point is that followers for us are not only followers, are engaged followers. So that's very important. That's very, very important to understand which role the organic social plays out in your marketing funnel. The point is that if you look, we have sales conversation out of organic posts that are not meant to sell. You can find a post, even a meme.

And from the meme, you can find the comment, people asking us directly on social, do you have departure for Mexico, whatever date? And then we reply to this person with a tone of voice, which is really relatable again. And the point is social media are fully integrated in the marketing funnel. It's not like a brand thing. That's something that I hate, honestly.

If something doesn't make sense in the marketing funnel, it shouldn't happen. Even if there's something that's not that measurable, like the ATL. But I know they are playing a role somehow, because maybe I see more brain queries on Google, or I'm seeing more spontaneous mention in the social channels. By the way, how we are pairing the social organic with the social paid, we've always been pairing that.

Social Organic is meant to storytell about the experiences, showcase the real experiences. We have stories every day, live from destination, managed by Travel Coordinator. We give them the full ownership of the channel. There's a long, not long, there's a process, pretty structured about how to give to five people in five different parts of the world, the assets to an Instagram account and doing stories.

and not overlapping in the stories. But still, we are showcasing what is happening in our little tour. And then there are the grid, the feed part, which is about content curiosity. It's always to keep people engaged. And we have our own framework for each content that has a specific objective and a specific metric, which is not the standard social metrics. We create our own framework, basically.

A social post should basically work on retaining people or keeping a certain level of engagement, acquiring new people, new followers, or drive to action. So for example, we have many posts with a click to link in bio, where the link in bio needs to be set for specific activity that we are doing. So every post is conceived, is designed in order to serve one of these

free objective and we have several metrics, several KPIs to monitor that. About the brand campaign, sorry, the digital campaign, of course, we are working on meta mainly on the upper funnel, not only upper funnel honestly, but mainly on the upper funnel. And of course, we are spending, we shifted over the years.

more more budget to the PPC, to the search, because at the beginning we were like, the majority was on meta and now they are pretty balanced, I would say. And yes, are, Google is Google, you know. So basically it's driven by queries. While on meta and TikTok we can play more with the branding part or get...

Brennen Bliss (42:20)
Mm-hmm.

Fabio Bin (42:31)
get people to know which kind of experience we are offering.

Brennen Bliss (42:37)
So you've transitioned significantly from meta and social and added a lot of paid search, it sounds like. Let's talk a little bit about the search experience, And integrated search as a whole. There's been a lot of change going on in search, a lot. How do the SEO and paid media roles play together in your organization, specifically on

paid surgeon, SEO and your philosophy around the two of those.

Fabio Bin (43:09)
Yeah, first of all, I to say that it is completely my fault, maybe I said it before, with neglecting the CEO at the beginning. I wanted to scale fast and it was at that time, social property has been the right choice. What has been very wrong is neglecting the CEO for a few years before start working, working on it.

Now, how I'm saying, we have tried to go back on track about that. think we are kind of doing it. We started with the easy part, which was blog content. At the beginning, the blog content was supposed to be something different, not SEO driven, but much more inspirational. And then I gave up and said, I understood that I have to do that.

Brennen Bliss (44:01)
haha

Fabio Bin (44:05)
And so basically is driving quite a good part of the organic traffic now. What I'm foreseeing, what I want and what I'm also internally fostering, not only with my department, but also with the tech department for the future, is try to have portion of the SERP, or not only direct the traffic. That's the obsession that everyone wants to get.

direct traffic and work in the direct traffic, sorry, direct from Google to your website. I'm much more into getting portion of syrup. So I don't care if I'm driving traffic to YouTube and then after YouTube to my website. I like to be more feature with snippets, YouTube snippet, video snippets, image snippets, rich box.

I like to get real estate room on SERP with weird brand more than just getting a link in the first position for a specific destination. That's my personal view, honestly. I wish I do. I have to say that we are pretty far from that at the moment. But again, it's a big mistake. So my advice is...

think about SEO as soon as you start, honestly. I want to be, try to disrupt the digital marketing model itself to enlarge, to expand it to that, let's say, capital marketing model. Okay, that's why I'm investing in social, investing that even just for social or offline, but I neglected the...

the fundamentals of the digital marketing. So that's what I regret profoundly.

Brennen Bliss (46:02)
Got it. So integration for sure. I want to pivot with the time we've got left. We're almost out of it. We are going to have to do a part two. Are you approaching, so you're entering new markets, right? You started in Italy, you're expanding. How are you approaching marketing strategy in a market you've never been in? You talked a little bit earlier about city domination. that how you look at it? Is it just let's do a lot of out of home in this place and get brand recognition?

Fabio Bin (46:32)
Okay, the playbook is pretty straightforward. So basically we start in advance building the social media audience and building before start selling. Let's say for three months we start working just on social media in order to get a decent amount of follower, engaged follower. And at the same time we operate with the scouting of the early community of travel coordinators in the source market.

As you can see, I put together digital and offline because it's pretty important. And then at the beginning, of course, have campaigns to recruit, digital campaigns to recruit travel coordinators. And then we start with digital, mostly meta, but immediately also on Google.

Brennen Bliss (47:03)
Sure. Yeah.

Fabio Bin (47:26)
and targeting the most generic queries like group tours, these kind of queries. Because the problem, you know pretty well that this industry is pretty packed when it comes to ads because we have the OTA, we have the hotels, we have the people selling experiences. So I have to be super precise and the way to not waste the money is going after.

Brennen Bliss (47:42)
a little bit.

Fabio Bin (47:55)
people looking for group tours. So I know that I'm not doing kind of prospecting in a way, for Google, I have to go to reach out to these people. And then we start, so the few months that are about digital, about make the word out and NPR as well. That's another important bit I didn't mention before, but we work a lot on NPR. Not necessarily...

Digital PR, but PR at large that includes also digital, but the idea to spread out the name and the concept of the tour. So I have to tell stories about people that transformed their life with travel and also about travel coordinators that are doing like a side gig as an employee. it's about speaking about WeRoad. And then we started the activity in real life study, which is city domination.

When I do city domination only when we have the possibility, the capability to run not only the auto-vone campaign, but also all the other activities that I mentioned before, we pick up the, speaking, the most important city in the market, usually the capital, and then we move to second tier cities. That's the approach. Then, of course, it varies market to market. For example, in Germany,

The situation is widespread. have bookings across all the country, while in France we have the majority of bookings from Paris. And this is common from the other countries as well. So we have to adjust the strategy, understand if we are capable of managing a city domination strategy on multiple cities at the same time.

And of course, the digital go nationwide and partnerships and we do a lot of partnerships, very important, and we tend to do global partnerships or multi-country partnerships. And they serve the nationwide coverage that we need. So basically we want to have a coverage which is about the whole market, the whole market. This is more digital and partnership.

and make us stand in a specific city. And then once we conquered the city, because we saw also booking wise, the number of books and bookings coming from the city, we moved to the second tier or third tier city. This is more or less the playbook.

Brennen Bliss (50:28)
So it's core and then expand and then core and expand. it's kind of like get the brand recognition and capture with digital. That's amazing. You have a playbook. You've been scaling really quickly. There's so much more I want to know, I just... I mean, honestly, it's amazing. you've done what I think a dream of lot of marketers is. You've gone from...

Fabio Bin (50:30)
Yes, yes, yes.

Sorry, little too much.

Brennen Bliss (50:58)
the bootstrapped you have zero and you've skilled in a hundred million dollar company in seven years with a pandemic in the middle. That's pretty freaking amazing. Without, you know, spending too much time on that. I just wanted to point it out and then ask you the same thing I ask everybody else. First off, thank you for joining. It was amazing talking to you today. Are you, any trips planned for you coming up?

Fabio Bin (51:01)
Yeah.

Thank you.

Not yet, because I do mystery tours two or three times per year. Just had my last one in Sri Lanka. I didn't plan the next one, but probably,

Brennen Bliss (51:29)
Okay?

Do you use your name? Do you use your own name when you go on these tours?

Fabio Bin (51:39)
Yeah, I use my name, since there are Facebook, I was a group in which we, everyone is introducing himself. I used to say that I work in marketing for an agency. I'm not saying that much. And then the last day of the tour, I say who I am. But this is very, I can tell you, it's the best part of my job because you can listen to real feedback and biased feedback and filter feedback from the people.

can be about an accommodation, can be about a long transfer, can be about competition, but the best part for me is understanding the customer journey. That's the best part when they tell how they decide to join the trip and why they book with other competitors.

Brennen Bliss (52:15)
Yeah.

Tandris have to be on the front line. It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. Again, this was amazing. All right, Sole's gonna stop the recording, but thank you

Fabio Bin (52:31)
Thank you, Brandon.