July profile: Odette Faling, CEO at Wanago Travel
This month we chat to Odette Faling, CEO at Wanago Travel – a new online travel agency with a difference. Having spent the last ten years (eight of which were in the travel industry) gaining extensive experience in marketing, sales, affiliate marketing, lead generation, traffic acquisition, building partnerships, global expansion and marketing strategies, Odette shares some of her insights and experiences, as well as her expectations for her latest venture. Describe yourself in 3 words. Ambitious. Passionate. Versatile. When I was a kid I wanted to be….. An investment banker. As boring as it sounds, but when I was 10 years old I walked into the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen looking out on the Sydney harbour and I asked the owner what he did for a living, and he was an investment banker. Tell us about Wanago Travel – where did it all start? One of the founders was looking for technology to add to concerts, events and park entries so he met the Israeli ambassador at Oppikoppi last year who pointed him into the direction of an Israeli tech company. They came to South Africa and realised that nobody is yet selling events, flights and hotels in one flow. That is where Wanago and Travelcheck were born. Travelcheck being the low cost online travel agency selling flights, hotels and bundles only. And Wanago which is still in production that will be focused on experiences first. How is Wanago Travel different from other online travel agencies? Wanago travel is an experience driven website that will be selling experiences and adding flights and hotels on-top of the experience. Travelcheck is an online travel agency selling flights and hotels in a package; this has not yet been done before in South Africa so we are excited to bring this feature to the market. What is your experience from working with performance-based affiliate marketing? My entire career is based on what I learnt from my experience in affiliate marketing. As a CEO I now think of acquisition cost as a necessity and I have put affiliates at the forefront of our marketing initiatives. Most valuable lessons learnt in your professional career, the past 10 years? Take care of your partners (including affiliates) as if they were your family. They pay your bills at the end of the day and take huge risks to buy into your dream. Your vision for Wanago Travel? To be an alternative to booking your entire trip through a travel agent. We want travellers to save time and money by booking their experiences and holidays online. What advice do you have for aspiring affiliate marketers? Ensure that you prioritise building your brand. The days of Google dependency is gone. Hold your suppliers and merchants accountable for the product that you are selling and keep the relationship with them strong at all times. Greatest destination ever visited? Italy, Italy, Italy. The food, the people, the architecture, the beautiful hills and the wine. It gets me every time!
Less is more – more or less
I often tell clients/marketers/start-ups: “Rather do a few channels well than all of them poorly”. While this statement applies to all areas of life, it is particularly relevant to internet marketing. Of course, if you have an unlimited budget and time, then definitely go ahead and design a new site, set up a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, content campaign, and blast everything on social media. However, most companies have a finite amount of money and time. Therefore, it is better to grow your marketing plan by starting small and adding on elements. Start with a website and then add-on core social media accounts your users actively use. Then, build your content up and begin to rank higher on search engine results pages. Once you have nailed search, expand to PPC and Affiliate Marketing. Finally, once you have mastered all of this, expand to newsletters, podcasts and videos. If you have a small marketing team, spreading resources thinly across several channels will unlikely yield the results you are looking for and will leave your team feeling frustrated and demotivated. From the user experience point of view, the less-is-more approach is also becoming more and more appealing as users are inundated with messages, ads, videos and emails. Marketers have been going full steam ahead, pressured by C-suite, high customer expectations, and the daunting selection of new innovations and tech tools, to adopt and master more channels in order to reach more customers and to create a more sophisticated multi-channel explosion. But when do we realize we’ve hit the point of over-saturation? How much is too much? Research shows that we are seeing a shift towards the compact and minimal in everything from lifestyle to home building. It’s the backlash from too much screen time, always being plugged in, and the personal device addiction. As a result, more people are unplugging, embracing minimalism, and decluttering their life. LESS OVERWHELMING IS IN. So, if your customers are simplifying and downsizing their lives, your marketing messaging will more likely come off as appealing if it is presented in a cleaner, simpler box. Good marketing means listening to society’s trends in order to keep brand messaging one step ahead of cultural shifts. Taking a more scaled back approach, rather than trying to do more with a multi-multi-channel CX, may be more appealing to your audience. For example, instead of creating 20 marketing videos a month to keep your social media channels active and your brand relevant, what if you created 2 really amazing videos that are more likely to go viral. Better quality video, better quality content. Of course there will be times that call for a more aggressive approach, whether you are launching a new product or pushing an offer, but for the most part keep it simple. Like Ron Swanson of the TV show, Parks & Recreation, said: “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” Daniel Gross – CEO
Understanding Intelligent Optimization
The terms SEO and Optimization are nothing new and we’ve covered both topics extensively in the past. While having a well-executed SEO strategy is vital for any online business to succeed, the buck shouldn’t stop there. Many web developers still overlook the importance of other on-site tactics that go beyond SEO auditing, to create value from users. This is Intelligent Optimization and the new future driver for search engines. What we are talking about here is taking it a step further; think expanding into sales funnels, pixels, automation and most importantly, data harvesting. In recent years SEO tactics have focused heavily on rankings, but the next time you and your marketing team sit in a SEO pitch with an agency, be sure to bring up these points: Which pixels? – Simple? Sure. Yet very important to get this right. Not only should a Google Analytics tracking code be placed, but a Facebook Pixel needs to be added as well for the most effective retargeting. The best way to organize your pixels is still through Google Tag Manager. If they’re not familiar with GTM, they need to be. Automation, the right way – No, we are NOT talking about automated follow-up emails here. These are very apparent and generally come off as cheap, annoying and dishonest. However automating social media postings from the blog will save your business time AND doesn’t require personal interaction with customers. A simple Zapier script that cross-posts to all social channels from your blog would be a great start. Data harvesting – One of the first questions your SEO agency should ask is: “how do you collect data on customers.” Data driven marketing is the future, and being able to leverage your site’s data is the first step in creating a high end one-to-one marketing campaign. Combining web pixels, sales funnels, and custom audiences gives your company an edge to creating a powerful CRM database. Do they know Schema.org? – Schemas are lines of code added into the backend of your website that tell search engines, like Google, information about your site. Google treats schema marked-up sites with authority, allowing you to move up in rankings quickly. More importantly though, schema creates rich snippets (those boxes you see in Google search), allowing your business to be found more easily. Do they understand your sales funnel? – It may be simple for you, but many web developers don’t understand sales. Intelligent optimization places a heavy emphasis on pushing your web visitor to create an action. This is common place for business owners, but web developers need to understand this as well. For e-commerce sites, make sure your best selling items are also presented at the bottom of your page (you want them at the top as well). Happy selling! Daniel Gross – CEO
Most important SEO trends in 2019
New year, new challenges and for any affiliate/online marketing professional staying on top of the latest SEO trends and changes should be high on the priority list. We know you are busy, so we’ve saved you the effort of scanning through all the sources and brought you a short-list of the most current SEO trends you need to be aware of (and aim to implement) in 2019. Don’t build your whole business on Google – Google and other search engines CAN provide high quality and targeted traffic, BUT there are so many other places to obtain traffic from including social media, email marketing, Yahoo Answers or network with other bloggers and affiliate marketers. Understand your user’s intent – Does your audience prefer text? Images? Video? Audio. Knowing this will all be more important than ever in 2019. Super content – If you’re still creating content just to keep your blog alive, that won’t be good enough any longer. Google is intensifying its focus on evaluating content quality and rewarding sites that provide exceptional depth – this trend will continue in 2019. Mobile-first indexing – In a nutshell, mobile-first indexing means that Google uses the mobile version of your page for indexing and ranking, BUT that does not mean “mobile-only.” There’s still a single index with both mobile and desktop versions so best to get both right and no better time than now. Page speed – Google’s nuts about delivering the best UX and delivering it fast. Desktop page loading time has been a ranking factor for a while. And it recently got a twin sibling – mobile page speed’s become a ranking factor for mobile. Perhaps time to speak to your hosting provider about that loading time? Structured data – With the rise of AI this is becoming more and more important. If Google wants to move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world, structured data is key. Time to start looking at and understanding structured data, schema, active and passive search behaviors, and how they can connect to behaviors that signal intent. Increate your E-A-T– Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness – better known as E-A-T in Google’s search quality rating guidelines. Hire experts to author and leverage data from known entities, and ensure credentials and credit is given to both, OR get more of your employees to blog, write, and speak. That is the level of expertise that Google is looking for to power their results. The techie stuff – don’t forget the technical side of SEO. Three words: Speed (your page should definitely load under 3 sec), JavaScript (here to stay, so familiarise yourself), Progressive Web Apps/PAW’s (start thinking about how your website can live on as a PAW in the future). Good luck! Affiliate Management Team
