Rewind two years, established and respected digital agency 3Sixty dropped a load of non-travel clients. It felt risky. It definitely felt scary. There were challenging times and challenging conversations, but it also felt exciting, it felt invigorating and above all, it felt right. And it was.
Now fast forward to 2019, it’s been a good year for us, in fact, we’ve recently gained 4 really great clients/new projects, we’ve recruited our 10th member of staff who is having an incredible impact, we’ve launched our travel start-up solution and we have an exciting co-owned travel brand which is growing by the day.
What’s changed? Well in truth, not a lot, but what we do have is more focus and it’s this focus that is making a difference. Everything we do is focused on two key areas:
- Focus 1 — be the best travel-focused digital agency. Everything we do is about being the best. The countless hours of travel sector research, conversations with travel leaders, the sharing of insight and intel, the projects we work on, the team we develop and recruit, investment in innovation, in culture and technology experimentation etc.
- Focus 2 — drive tangible commercial results. From day 1, it’s all about understanding the numbers, we understand all the key metrics from digital performance to conversion rates of call centres, to trade commissions and average order value and profit. This is captured, shared (within the close-knit team) and ambitions are set. We work to drive commercial uplift and know exactly what an e.g. 32% increase in digital conversion looks like on revenue generation. Having the team focused on the end goal, accountable and fully engaged reaps real reward.
Our actual process hasn’t really changed at all but our focus has helped us get to the next step. We’ve always been good at what we do, but I think we’ve just hit a new milestone. I’ve got no doubt in my mind that we are now:
the best possible option for any travel brand looking for a digital agency/new website
I was sitting down with a travel leader last week, (we are redesigning and building their website) when I suddenly felt very proud. I realised that I had/have absolute confidence and certainty around the fact we are going to completely transform their already successful business. We are going to drive unprecedented levels of enquiries and they are going to have their highest revenue-generating year ever in 2020. Having this confidence is a great feeling, conversations move from costs to investment, and investments (when invested right) = positive returns.
Being the best possible option for any travel brand is perhaps a big claim, but our process when combined with the absolute focus just works. Without giving away the secret sauce, we:
- Build a team of exclusively digital leaders who have big agency experience + who have worked in or with the travel industry (it goes without saying but they also need genuine passion).
- Give the team direct exposure to our clients, ensure that we are goal orientated, understand the commercials. Build relationships. This ensures we are focused and super responsive. In short, they genuinely give a shit and understand the bigger picture.
- Create a culture where ‘employees’ are treated like adults. Work when and where you want, take as much holiday as you need, providing that it doesn’t prevent us from offering exceptional service.
These are the foundations, it provides us with a high performing team who are completely focused and care.
- Then we speak to X travel brand’s users, their target market.
- We use our expertise and our insights (having a travel insight manager, analytics focus, conducting research projects and sharing information helps), to create solutions.
- We then test these solutions. Whilst we have years of experience to call upon, we gain validation and feedback from users (current and prospects) to further refine the solution.
- Then we build it…and watch the results come in.
Obviously, there is more to it than that, there is also a lot of ongoing optimisation, but in truth, it’s really not rocket science.
The next few months are really exciting, I’ve got trips to Houston, New Orleans, and Tokyo (pleasure not business) coming up; normally this would lead to slight anxiety and a little too much checking of emails! Upon my return, we will have launched a design and build project that the team have been working on tirelessly, a website that will propel a challenger brand to the top. The team will be in full flow with another three key projects which will have massive impacts on our client’s businesses.
I need to be better at communicating the impact of the great work we are doing. So stay tuned for more case studies, great stats, and hopefully some shareable learnings in the not so distant future.
And stay tuned for our next few workshop and travel meetups. Email me if you fancy more info: ryan@3sixty.co.uk