Campaign Season | Travel Research Online

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Campaign Season

How do you make your travel practice known to the public? If you are like most travel professionals, you rely on a number of tactics to raise your visibility. You may use social media, public relations, or content marketing through your website, email, and blogging efforts. You may take advantage of speaking opportunities or write for a local newspaper. You may advertise.

Inherently we know marketing works, because in our own civilian lives we ourselves respond to well-placed and produced marketing and advertising.  We have less confidence in our own efforts, however.

ScreamerIdeally, your efforts to be better known are coordinated tactics where your public relations endeavors work with your networking at local functions, and both reflected through your social media marketing.  When unified by a strategy, your Facebook posts and your advertising efforts all have a common persona and voice. The message should remain the same no matter the media. When properly executed, a marketing campaign has multiple touch points approaching the public from a variety of directions and media.  Each supports the other, and the result is a clear and well-defined brand image.

That’s the ideal, anyway.

The reality is too often otherwise.  Instead of being ahead of our clients, we end up chasing them, trying desperately to get their attention. The problem is, of course, better marketers are out there in front of your clients, taking the role of “thought leader” away from you.

Even experienced business people treat marketing like magic tricks we need to practice and learn.  We try first one and then the other, each time hoping for a better result without ever considering the need to start from a core message: our mission statement.

Unless we can clearly articulate what we stand for as a business, unless we know our own reason for being, we will have trouble communicating it to others.

What we fail to do is unify our marketing with a common theme.  Marketing works best when it occurs in the context of a campaign – a unified series of efforts designed to work together to raise a company’s public profile.  Each effort carries the same message and the same promise of quality and service. Each effort promises a distinct reason why doing business with you is better than doing business in any other way.

Spend some time working through your mission statement and unifying all of your marketing in a campaign approach.  You will save money, be more effective, and will find yourself ahead of the crowd rather than bringing up the rear.

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