WorldVia Travel Network’s chief revenue officer Joshua Harrell has published a book, “Travel Marketeering: A Complete Guide for Starting (or Refreshing) Your Travel Agency,” designed for travel advisors of all experience levels.
The host agency’s parent company, WorldVia Travel Group, is based in Roswell, Ga.
Harrell is a seasoned marketing executive. He started his career with cosmetic company Bare Minerals and ended up working on its TV sales strategy team selling makeup on QVC for two decades. He transitioned to doing consulting work around marketing, then applied to work with WorldVia. He’s been with the company since 2017, including through its acquisition of the host agency TravelQuest in 2018.
“When I first started to meet independent advisors and agency owners, the conversation always came back to, ‘What’s hot in marketing and what should I be doing? What am I doing wrong?'” Harrell said.
There was a lot of ambiguity around marketing, he said.
“I knew that, for most agency owners — and those could be multimillion dollar agency owners out there — they’re not just the marketing person,” he said. “They’re the sales person. They’re the operations person. They’re the accountant. They’re all the things.”
Marketing, Harrell said, is generally viewed as an art form, but in actuality, it’s more of a science to be approached with systems that can be tweaked over time.
“Marketeering is selling your products and services through marketing systems,” he said.
Harrell has long run Saturday morning marketing sessions for travel advisors on YouTube, talking about creating systems in their marketing. He has taken some of that content and, with the help of editor Evan Greenberg (WorldVia’s content manager), turned some of those conversations and his broader experience into his new book.
The book delves into topics including developing results-focused marketing plans, risk management and hiring support teams.
Harrell’s No. 1 piece of marketing advice for travel advisors is to know who they want as customers.
“I would want everyone to really hone in on who they want to be their customers, because that’s the cornerstone,” he said. “I would also say that it sounds trite, but work smarter, not harder — there are so many AI tools that are free and readily available.”
A common hang-up around marketing is that it takes too long to create things like blog and social media posts, he said, but AI tools can help create the initial content and turn it into more marketing pieces.
Harrell’s new book is designed for advisors of all experience levels, he said. It is available for sale on Amazon ($12.99 for a Kindle edition or $27.45 for a hardcover).
