Reason # 4: To be really effective, marketing needs to have two important qualities, consistency and constancy. In short, you must always deliver the same message to your clients in every encounter they have with you and you must deliver that message with enough frequency to remain top-of-mind. Without the quality of consistency, your clients will be confused with regard to your identity and ethic. Without constancy, they won’t hear your message often enough to develop an association with your brand each time they think of traveling.
Clients want to know what you and your travel practice stands for as a matter of company ethic and values. We tell ourselves we are consistent, that we always deliver the same message to the market. But do we really? For example, if your website indicates that your travel practice is all about the quality of each individual travel experience and the premium you place on value, but each of your tweets on Twitter is about travel specials, pricing and discounts, are you being consistent? If your unique selling point is crafting highly specialized itineraries for your clients but you offer up an “off the shelf” escorted tour or a cruise with very little research or effort to match the trip to the client, are you delivering on your promises?
The best way to ensure consistency is to have a mission statement for your travel practice that will act as a benchmark for everything else that you do in a business context. A mission statement should be a compass for your business, a way of synchronizing all of your efforts to keep them properly aligned, in unison and consistent.
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To be constant in your marketing means to develop a marketing mindset, to be a student of marketing. Your marketing efforts cannot be off-again, on-again tactics but instead should be a coherent campaign that covers your calendar, that offers up a varied number of tactics at a frequency that will ensure you touch your clients often enough to remind them of your concern for their travel plans. Clients can be fickle. A single email from Budget Travel can have them on the phone with a supplier direct and handing over their credit card information before they ever remember to think of you. To stay top of mind, you have to stay in front of their eye.
With that said, don’t jump from one tactic to another in a frenzied effort to hustle up business. Pick a few tactics, ensure they are part of a unifed campaign, and work them consistently.
A single, clear, client-centric message delivered with adequate frequency is key to growing your travel practice.
Tomorrow: A Transactional Mentality
