Question one
What is your visa position, in one sentence?
If you cannot answer plainly, that is the first thing to fix — not the campaign.
IndiaThe India Playbook
You cannot enter India in a quarter. You can enter it in a year — and the year costs less than the burst campaign most boards try first.
This is the sequence we would run for a destination starting from nothing. It is deliberately front-loaded with the cheap, unglamorous work, because the expensive work only pays once that is in place.
Before you spend 01
Question one
If you cannot answer plainly, that is the first thing to fix — not the campaign.
Question two
Two stops is not fatal, but it changes which segment you go after and how much you have to spend to overcome it.
Question three
If the answer is nobody, the campaign will generate interest you cannot convert.
The year02
Relative investment across the first year, and the work we deliberately hold back until there is something for it to amplify.
Months 1–3
Search first, because it is the cheapest permanent asset you will build. We audit what Indian search already says about you, fix the technical and content gaps, and start publishing against the questions Indian travellers actually type.
In parallel: social listening to establish a baseline and one small creator pilot, deliberately modest, to learn how your destination photographs and what the objections are before you commit a budget to them.
Months 4–8
The creator programme proper, built on what the pilot taught us, weighted towards the tier that generates enquiries rather than the tier that generates screenshots. Always-on paid activity against planning-intent search terms rather than brand terms, because nobody is searching for your brand yet. Content production in market, answering the family, food, safety and visa questions explicitly. And the WhatsApp path built and staffed, so the interest has somewhere to go.
Months 9–12
Amplification of everything already produced — this is where a Spotlight page earns its keep. Trade activation off the back of consumer awareness, which is far easier to sell once agents have seen the destination appearing in their customers’ feeds. Then measurement against the month-one baseline, and an honest decision about year two.
Creator content has a natural life of about ten days and a useful life of about three years.
Held back03
next 04
The boards that succeed in India are rarely the ones that spent the most. They are the ones that stick around.