The Covid pandemic has had a devastating impact on the organisation, within one week, from around 12 May,we had 95% of our clients pause or cancel contracts. The effect on the economy is still to be seen, but I believe it will be more than a 5% decrease to our GDP this year.
Our challenge was that there was no one really interested in spending money on travel marketing related services in this uncertain time. In many ways, travel came to an abrupt standstill. We’re quite lucky to have a couple of other clients outside of travel and took this time to change our focus and put a face on a more general agency, hence The Marketing Mill was born. Travel Tractions will continue to operate at full capacity, ensuring that the travel industry has resources despite the decline. The Marketing Mill will run alongside the current company, offering services such as SEO strategy, content creation, link building and web design.
We reacted fast. As the owner I haven't taken a salary for the last couple of months, the team has temporarily decreased their salaries by a percentage, of which UIF is mostly subsidsing and we have reduced a lot of our operating costs. Essentially we were able to cut our monthly costs to almost half of what they were and have been able to keep everyone employed and extend our runway for another six months. We also launched a new agency and used the weak rand exchange rate to offer a 25% discount on all our services to international clients, bringing in an influx of old client work and some new clients.
Not that much, we were always very pro working remotely so the team adjusted quickly, we have reduced salaries but have implemented a “family fund” to help those in need and put away money for part of the team that may run into financial problems in the future. If anything, this has brought us a lot closer. The team does Zoom parties doing yoga and all sorts, although there have been some challenges in being locked up and I can tell that some people's mental health is taking strain. We have been very flexible with their time and encourage people to switch off and separate their workspace from their living space as mental health during this time is also a priority.
Ha, personally I’m a homebody and wasn't a big fan of driving to face-to-face meetings so it’s gone really well in that sense. Our clients are happy meeting remotely and the team does a lot of Hangout calls with each other. We also have more weekly workshops, which have made us more tight-knit because for once we all are in the same country and timezone, so everyone is kinda online at the same time, which is really nice. We’ve also started making use of our “water cooler” slack channel which brings about plenty of laughs and stories.
We allocated a family fund and have implemented monthly check-ups to find out how everyone is going mentally and financially. We’ve also been very transparent and give regular updates on the financial situation of the company once a week. As a team, we have set goals to achieve to try to get everyone back to 100% salary as soon as we can.
Right now we are working on quite a few campaigns.In the past week, we have created content and strategies marketing cat-centric products, knives, CBD oil, cannabis, insurance, wine and all sorts. We are not working on any big travel campaigns to deal with the virus as of right now as it's hard to say when tourism will be back, but it’s really nice to see our wine and cannabis clients do exceptionally well in this time.
Big time! To be honest, I don't think travel will be the same for years. There is going to be a new way of how we travel and no one really knows what that will look like.
I just hope that some of our clients are going to make it out of this so we can work with them again. There are some travel companies investing big time in SEO right now because when travel does resume it will be a far less competitive market and those that are positioned correctly are going to have really great returns.
Yeah, virtual tourism is all the rage right now. We’ve had a couple of enquiries about this and digital travel is changing forever. People are consuming way more travel video content and we are so excited to see that shift.
Don’t be idle. It may be uncertain at the moment, but travel will resume eventually and when it does, be ready. Make sure your messaging is on point (address the corona concerns head-on) and now is a really great time to focus on the digital presence of your company or tourism. It’s great to see products being refined and made better, and we have a lot of time to perfect things that may not have had the time or have been a priority the last couple of years.
Ha, rocky, uncertain. I don't think anyone knows what the next six months of this is going to look like, at the moment we are taking it one week at a time.
