Travel Leaders Group is rolling out a number of new updates to its Agent Profiler agent marketplace, now called Profiler Plus, as well as to its Leaders Edge website program. Jeremy van Kuyk, Travel Leaders’ vice president of information technology, briefed Travel Agent and other media on the changes at the organization’s recent EDGE Conference, which drew over 2,100 attendees to the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Washington, DC.
“We’ve done a really good job again this year at driving leads,” van Kuyk said of Agent Profiler, noting that the product had delivered a total of 140,000 leads in 2018. This year, the site is already at 68,000 total leads delivered, representing 35 percent growth over the same period last year.
Advisors who are already on the most recent iteration of the website, Agent Profiler 2.0, are being automatically upgraded to Profiler Plus as of Wednesday, June 12. Profiler Plus will incorporate a number of new features aimed at boosting an advisor’s credibility and drawing in clients with more engaging content, particularly Millennials.
Advisors will now be able to post videos to their profile, in addition to photos, which van Kuyk says is key to appealing to consumers, noting that 75 million people in the U.S. watch online videos daily. Also new is a “My Travel Experience” feature, which consists of an interactive map on which advisors can pin places they’ve traveled to, as well as places they’ve booked. Each pin will include photos, as well as client reviews related to that destination.
“We have the expertise with the multiple bios, we have trust through ratings and reviews, we have engaging content through photos and videos, and now we add credibility by letting our advisors show the places they’ve been and the places they booked,” van Kuyk says. (The ability to host multiple advisor bios, a popular feature that can really boost an advisor’s Google search ranking, is still in Profiler Plus.)
Leaders Edge
Along with Profiler Plus, Travel Leaders is also rolling out a number of updates to its Leaders Edge website program. While the back end and CMS on which Leaders Edge is built remains the same, van Kuyk says, Travel Leaders has completely changed the site’s layout to be more flexible, personalized to the individual agency and mobile-friendly.
Leaders Edge websites now have a single-page design in order to minimize the number of clicks clients need in order to navigate it. The sites are also wider, so they will completely fill a large monitor. At the same time, site is also completely responsive in design, making it able to automatically resize itself based on the device that is viewing it in order to be more mobile-friendly.
The sites are also now able to be personalized to an agency’s logo and brand colors, something that van Kuyk says was a key feature that advisors had asked for. “They want to fly their flag, so they wanted to have color changes that match their brand,” he says.
Another big request from travel advisors: more customizability.
“We had a lot of agencies that said, ‘I don’t want to go to market with a website that looks just like everyone else’s,” van Kuyk says.
As a result, Leaders Edge sites are now broken into a number of building blocks that agencies can rearrange, or leave out entirely, according to their preferences. The increased modularity will make it easier for agencies to help their website stand out and serve their needs more exactly.
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