Building a Travel Company Without Social Media
It’s not enough to just register a company and build a product you’re proud of. To go from building to selling, that magical transition every founder dreams of, you have to get the word out – people have to know what you’ve built and why it’s cool enough to spend money on. For Beagle & Baobab, the travel company I’ve been solo-building for the past few months, that means going from a big idea and a snazzy website with a handful of curated itineraries to folks actually booking an unforgettable South African adventure with us. How does a young, cash-strapped travel venture get the word out and convert interest into income? In other words, what’s our sales and marketing strategy?
My first thought was social media, as you’d expect. Instagram and TikTok are the heart and soul of an industry dominated by visual storytelling. These digital oceans of image and video are where young brands, be they fresh eateries or boutique hotels, go to be discovered. To not exist on social media, particularly as a travel company – a business that trades in pictures of Italian villages and African safaris as much as it does in actual vacation bookings – would be to set yourself up for failure. But you know what? I don’t buy it, at least not fully. I couldn’t shake the feeling that diving headfirst into social media, even with a well-engineered plan, was putting the cart in front of the horse. It felt like skipping a step. After mulling it over for a while, I discovered I had some serious reservations about using social media as a marketing channel:
First, good social media takes an enormous amount of effort. To build sustainable growth on these platforms you need to post engaging content with high frequency. But you can’t just post trash, and I certainly would never want to. Creating engaging content, in a digital world where the goalposts are constantly shifting and tastes change by the day, is a full-time job when done properly. And if you’re going to do something, you best do it properly. As a young business strapped for cash, Beagle & Baobab doesn’t have the resources to hire a social media manager. Given this, is it wise to redirect my time and energy from building good product to obsessing over socials? I doubt it. My intuition is that, past a certain point, good product sells itself.
Second, I couldn’t possibly compete with the big established travel brands, even if I were to redirect my energies into social media. Partly because I could never match the scale of their storytelling, what with their teams of creators pumping out in-depth content every day, but partly because they’re so much further ahead of me on the learning curve. When the competition is so far ahead, why compete at all?1 And if I’m not competing at the highest level in quality and usefulness, what value would I be adding to the global digital discourse? Would I be offering the world anything new, or would the company’s social media content end up in the same sad pile as all the other forgotten, copy-paste travel content? Again, not great prospects.
Third, I think there are cooler, more effective ways to market a new business and a great product. I get really excited thinking about hands-on, ultra targeted marketing strategies that slowly build an audience or customer base one person at a time. Not only are you more likely to connect with people who are actually excited by your product, but these people (if your product is really good) will probably tell all of their friends about it. Slowly but surely, by doing things that don’t scale2, the snowball starts to form and roll downhill. Contrast this with the shotgun-like approach of social media, where you pepper the world with inaccurate shots and pray that you hit something.
In short, I’d rather personally bring in 10 loyal customers who love my product and are happy to give me word-of-mouth referrals than 20,000 semi-interested followers waiting to be distracted by the next fad. It seems obvious to me that the best way to build long-term sustainable growth is the old fashioned way – by finding the people you think would love your product and showing them, personally, how cool it is. That’s easier said than done, but that’s also part of the point. Growing a new business is difficult, as much as the “but just start posting on Instagram” advice would otherwise imply, and rather than try and outsource it to a clever social strategy, you’re probably better off doing it yourself (at least in the beginning).
Fourth, I’ve grown wary of social media as a whole. While I appreciate the use case for these platforms – I’ve personally benefited by keeping in touch with family, making new friends3, and building connections – it’s also difficult to deny the harm these platforms are causing, particularly as the engineers behind them increasingly design for addiction. And in a world that moves ever faster, it’s no bad thing to slow down and reduce your information input to a small selection of carefully considered sources – physical magazines and books, a few well written blogs, and focused personal interaction. In fact, with everyone else so overwhelmed by the global digital flow that they can’t tell fads from paradigm shifts, minimising your inputs and being more considered in your thinking could actually be a substantial competitive advantage. Not to mention good for your mental health.
Where does that leave us?
While it’s difficult to deny that social media is a significant marketing channel, I don’t think it’s the right one for Beagle & Baobab. At least not right now, when I’m so busy building itineraries, onboarding travel partners, and creating the background infrastructure I need to actually send folks on a South African adventures. As I see it, building a great product and personally converting those first few customers is a much more sustainable, cost-effective strategy than blasting content into the digital void. And I’m not alone in making this kind of assessment. Take Monocle, one of my favourite print magazines and also one of the most profitable in the English-speaking world. For most of its existence it has firmly avoided social media and similar digital distribution channels, favouring an old-school approach to interacting with and growing its readership4. It’s damn cool.
Going forward, I’m going to build and grow a travel company without social media. It’ll require some seriously creative thinking to develop the kind of ultra targeted, high-effort high-reward marketing strategies I’m thinking about. But it’ll also be a boat load of fun, not to mention a hell of a learning experience. Beyond all that, however, I think tossing aside the crutch of social media presents an opportunity to do exactly what I wanted to do in the first place – to totally reimagine what a travel company can be. One that doesn’t just flash fancy photos and videos, but celebrates an amazing country in a way few people have before. If I can do that, who needs an Insta page anyway?
The Chinese have an expression which roughly translates as “To overtake by switching lanes”. Essentially, rather than trying to compete in a space where your competitor is miles ahead of you and it would take extraordinary effort to catch up, simply switch focus and compete in another, less crowded space where you’re more likely to end up dominating.
This approach was most famously used in the Chinese automotive industry. Instead of competing in the manufacturing of combustion engine vehicles, a space dominated by powerful Western companies, the Chinese state and young startups switched lanes and instead went all-in on electric vehicles. By entering a market with little to no outside competition years before anyone else, Chinese manufacturers were able to quickly build dominance in the global EV market and much of its supply chain. Switching lanes wasn’t giving up – it was tactical.
“Do Things That Don’t Scale” by Paul Graham is one of the most insightful business essays I’ve ever read. If you want to understand how tiny startups rocket into the stratosphere, read this. It’s so damn simple that anyone could do it. Why not you?
The best man at my wedding was Steve, a wonderful guy I originally met through a random Twitter conversation some years ago. He’s great and you should definitely subscribe to his satirical South African news programme, Politically Aweh.
“Why Monocle shuns social media in favour of going swimming with its readers” by Ian Burrell for The Drum. You’ll find other useful bits and pieces on Monocle’s unique strategy if you hunt around the web enough.
Great read. I’ve always saw the scope of social media in business and you’re putting yourself at a handicap if you don’t use it since everyone else is, but your point with the shotgun approach is right. Who’s to say everyone else is right? Especially when larger bodies and companies have more resources and can thus let social media work for them instead of them working for it.