Marketing should fit into the working week

Airbnb reported US$875 million in sales and marketing expenses in a single quarter. The figure, covering the three months ended 30 June 2026, appears in its Q2 shareholder letter. That’s the whole sales and marketing category, rather than advertising alone. Even with that distinction, it gives you some idea of the competition for a customer’s attention.

If you run an independent agency, I’d start much closer to home. Think about the offer you meant to share last week. You knew who it would suit and what you’d say about it, but it needed an image, an email and somewhere useful for the customer to click. Then the phone rang.

By Sunday evening, the idea is still there and you’re back at the laptop. That’s a poor arrangement for you, and it’s a fragile way to keep your business visible. Marketing needs to fit into the week you actually have.

More posts can mean more unfinished jobs

“You need to post more consistently” is easy advice to give. It becomes less helpful when the person receiving it is also answering enquiries and looking after customers who are about to travel. Another target doesn’t give them another pair of hands.

Before adding to the calendar, pick a piece of marketing that never went out. Find the point where it stopped. Was the offer still waiting for a price check, was nobody sure which image to use or had the whole thing reached your inbox for approval and stayed there?

Those are different problems. A folder of approved photographs might solve one of them. Giving a colleague permission to approve routine posts might solve another. If the real difficulty is writing and preparing everything, that’s the work you need help with.

I’d rather see an agency send one useful, properly finished campaign than spend the week feeling guilty about a plan it couldn’t get through. Start with something you can repeat during a busy week. You can build from there.

Use the advice your team already gives

Your next useful article may be sitting in a conversation you’ve had several times this month. Take a customer choosing a family hotel. They might be comparing room arrangements, transfer times or what the children will do when they’re tired of the pool. Your explanation of those choices is worth sharing.

You don’t need to turn every adviser into a writer. Ask them for the question and the answer they’d give over the phone. A few rough notes are enough to get started, especially if they include the detail a customer is likely to miss when comparing holidays on their own.

Then decide which part deserves a longer explanation. Your website article can cover the choices in full, while a social post picks out one useful point and links to it. An email can introduce the same advice to customers for whom it’s relevant. Each version has a job, so you aren’t simply copying a paragraph into three places.

The same approach works for a specialist tour operator. If customers keep asking how much free time a tour includes, explain how the itinerary works and who it suits. That gives people something to think about before they enquire and gives your sales team something useful to send afterwards.

Check what happens after the click

A post can look excellent and still leave the customer wondering what to do next. Suppose you’ve written about a particular holiday, but the link opens your homepage. The reader now has to find the trip all over again. You’ve given them another job just when they were interested.

Choose the next step while you’re planning the content. A specific offer may need a relevant search or booking page. For a more complicated trip, an enquiry form or a conversation with an adviser might be more useful. The right link depends on what the customer needs to do, not which page is easiest to copy.

Try it yourself on your phone before approving the post. Read the caption, tap the link and see whether the page answers the obvious questions. Check that any price, dates and inclusions agree with what you’ve just said. It sounds basic, but it belongs in the job rather than being left for a customer to discover.

Remember the posts you’ve already published, too. An old offer can still attract a click. Decide who checks dated content and who removes or updates it when the details change. Put that person on the original brief so the job has an owner.

Where Luna Marketing takes work off your desk

This is the problem we’re tackling with Luna Marketing. It’s currently in early access for Travelgenix customers and prepares social posts, website articles and email campaigns around the destinations and offers your business sells. The content follows your chosen voice and comes ready to review and edit.

In the weekly preview, pictures and captions sit alongside the proposed channels and publishing times. Relevant offers include booking links back to your website. You can see what you’re being asked to approve, instead of piecing together a caption from one place and an image from another.

The decision about what goes out stays with you. Our job is to reduce the preparation that gets in the way of sending it. I’d judge Luna by whether it helps useful marketing leave your desk during the working week, with a sensible next step for anyone who responds.

Leave room for your own judgement

Getting a draft is useful. Having to rewrite every sentence would defeat much of the point. Give whoever or whatever prepares your content a few examples of how you speak to customers, along with the phrases you’d never use.

Be specific about the sort of business you want to attract. A family agency and an operator selling walking tours have different things to explain, even if they’re talking about the same country. Tell the writer which holidays matter to you and why a customer would choose your advice.

When the draft comes back, check the facts first. Then read it aloud. If you wouldn’t say it to a customer, change it. You should sound like the people who’ll answer the phone when the marketing does its job.

Give one person clear responsibility for the final decision. They need the whole post, including the link and timing, so they can judge it properly. Keep that review manageable by starting with an amount of content the team can comfortably check.

Look for useful conversations

When you review the results, ask what the marketing helped your team do. Did it prompt a suitable enquiry or help a customer understand a holiday? Perhaps an adviser used the article to answer a question that usually takes a long email. Those are useful things to know alongside the clicks and reactions.

Count your own time as well. If preparing and checking a campaign still takes the whole afternoon, find out which part is doing that. It may need a clearer brief, better source information or a simpler approval step. Publishing more won’t fix a job that’s still awkward to finish.

Be honest about what you can trace to a post. Someone might see an email, hear about you from a friend and then call after visiting the website. Ask what prompted the enquiry, but don’t pretend one click tells the whole story. Use what you learn to make the next campaign more useful.

Pick the email or post you keep putting off and bring it to a conversation with Travelgenix about Luna Marketing. We’ll start with the work needed to get it finished. Your next Sunday evening shouldn’t have to be the backup marketing plan.