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Don’t get me wrong.  I am all for creative niche marketing and I, too, am eager to learn of new media techniques for marketing. However, I am equally convinced that in the eagerness to quickly build business, too many agents dart from one “technique” to the next rather than honing tried and true fundamentals.  The truth is, it is far better to have one or two tactics that you can accomplish very, very well than a whole repertoire of marketing techniques to which you give marginal time and attention.

In the name of getting back to basics, then, let’s look at ten fundamental principles, two each day for the balance of this week, that you will need to effectively market. Each principle builds on the next. Applied consistently, the fundamentals will then give a context to your investigation of new, innovative techniques for getting the word out.  Here are the first two principles that will help provide the appropriate context for all of your marketing efforts:

1. Figure out what works and do it again.  Marketing is very personal and some techniques will work better for you than others. Examine your past successes and figure out what went right.  Pull out some paper and a pen and write down a small narrative about your most successful client experiences.  If you are new to travel, write down something about your former life, job interviews or social encounters. What works for you?  Is it your enthusiasm?  Your confidence?  Your intimate knowledge of product?  You empathy and concern for the client? Did you take on some marketing technique that worked well? See if you can detect a pattern in your successes and, then, seek to institutionalize your strength – keep it in the foreground of all of your client encounters.
2. Figure out what doesn’t work and quit doing it. Next, honestly assess your worst client encounters.  Resist the temptation to blame the client for whatever happened. What went wrong?  Were you too “hungry” thinking about yourself to the exclusion of the client?  Were you too eager to please, taking on clients or assignments on which should have passed? Did you apply some marketing technique that absolutely failed? Again, see if you can detect a pattern of behavior that causes unpredictable, unfavorable results and work it out of your business life.

The idea is to begin systematically designing your marketing tools to work in tandem with each other and to be reliably consistent.  A better understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses is fundamental to the process.

Remember our discussion of the sales funnel?  Typically, only a small percentage of your leads pan out into actual travel planning opportunities.  In order to maintain the volume you need for a healthy business, your marketing activities must be robust and continual. 

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“Filling the pipeline” is the phrase often used to describe the strategy of continually developing new contacts for your business. Most travel planners use a variety of tactics to acquire new clients. Certainly referrals a a big part of keeping the pipeline full, as are your networking activities, speaking opportunities and advertising. Periodically, however, those tactics need to be re-examined, organized and supplemented with new ones.

Sit down and make a list of the various ways you intentionally seek out new clients. Next, make a list of the last few new clients that you added to your roster, and note how you acquired them. Also make a list of new leads or prospective clients and note through which channels they came to your door. You may observe that some methods of client acquisition are serving you better than others and that some are not serving you well at all, including some for which you are paying. Take a hard look at those tactics that have not been working well and decide whether to spend more time and resources developing them or less. Perhaps you have not developed that particular channel well enough, or perhaps it is truly non-productive. Take your most fruitful tactics and focus on them to ascertain whether you need to accelerate your efforts in those channels.

Simply spending time looking at your client acquisition channels will likely be productive. Organizing and evaluating how you acquire new clients will help assure that your business will continue to grow.

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The key is to work with the client on an advance basis: ask what their travel plans are over the next one to two years. In reality there is no reason you should not work on a ten year plan, but by honing in on the near future, you remain involved in those travel plans that are closest to the client’s active planning. Begin to drill down on details: where does the client want to go and when? Are there acceptable alternatives? What does the budget look like? Special activities during the trip? While the client may not have thought about each of these issues very far in advance, you can use the information gathered to begin to provide the client with regular updates that fit their travel ambitions. By so doing, you remain involved in the planning process.

Do not think for a moment that this is overly aggressive. Does your accountant wait until you are 60 to talk to you about retirement? Does your the doctor wait until you have a heart attack to tell you about good eating habits and exercise? Does your real estate agent ever discuss your “next home”? All professionals are involved in the future of their clients. You should be as well.

The process of thinking through your own story, of putting it together in a narrative form, will help you to better articulate and express your passion for travel. Practice will make it easier to convey images of travel to clients and to help them to understand the benefits of your recommendations.

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Take some time out to write your own travel history, to put together your own story. Answer the questions above, and then later, come back and polish it a bit. Read it over. The value to knowing and rehearsing your own stories can not be over-stated. Your story reveals your passion for travel and it is your passion that sells you to clients.

Now, learn to tell the story by putting your client at the center. Can you describe a location or a trip so well that your client can feel the wind, or see the sites while in your office? Practice working with the art of describing sights and telling stories. Remember than many buying decisions are based on emotional energy, and to the extent you can tell a story well, your clients will respond.

Why? Because we love stories, especially when we can identify with the hero’s passion. We somehow feel a part of it.

Learn to tell your story, and to tell it well.

When short on marketing ideas, I suggest a run straight for the business section of the nearest Borders bookstore. Certainly every business person should know and understand the basic marketing principles and the standard techniques of telling their story and cultivating a clientele. However, remember too that every other business person in your community is reading those same books. That is why so much marketing activity looks the same and too often lacks an essential ingredient – personality.

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Subscribe to or read as many magazines not related to travel as you possibly can. Make the topics diverse, but of some interest to you and seated in popular culture. Oprah, Men’s Journal, Photography, Popular Mechanics, Cosmopolitan….whatever you can handle. Another technique is to browse sites on the internet that you might otherwise not ordinarily visit such as iVillage.com. These magazines and web sites each have a readership and a core demographic that may be very different from your own. When you browse unfamiliar reading, magazines ad and art, you expose yourself to new perspectives and concepts that will serve to move you from your own settled ways of thinking.

One of the really great aspects of the travel industry is the way that it ties into almost every other activity. From astronomy to genealogy and culture to sports and interests of all types, there is almost always a connection you can make to travel.

As always, there is a real temptation to treat exercises such as these as something other than productive work. However, many travel consultants make the mistake of spending all of their time IN their business and neglecting the importance of spending time ON their business. Remember that not all productive activity looks like work. Sometimes it involves feeding your mind the raw material it needs to stay refreshed and healthy.

At the beginning of every client relationship, set the client’s expectations. Educate the client – empower the client. Let the client know exactly what they can expect of you, and explain the principles that you use to determine a good value for the client’s travel dollar. Explain the resources you have at hand that you use as a professional: your agency resources, GDS, consortia, on-line forums, relationships with suppliers. In turn, let the client know what you need from them to be the best possible travel consultant on their behalf. An open, frank discussion will help the client better understand the value of your services.

Ask your client about their past use of travel agents. What worked well for them and what went poorly? Listen carefully to your client’s recounting of past relationships. It is likely you will hear key words like “price” that will tell you a great deal about where matters went astray. Dig deep to uncover and correct any misconceptions your clients might have, some of which might have been reinforced by other travel agents!

Early in your discussions with clients, set the expectation that you look forward to a long relationship with them. Ask the clients to be open and to discuss any concerns that they have. Explain that your interests are in establishing a long-term relationship with them over a lifetime of travel.

Then, go the extra mile, even for the smallest booking. WOW the client! Practice being insanely great at customer service and follow up with thank you notes and light correspondence. The client that books a simple car rental with you today will be looking for a safari sometime in the future.

Friends and family – there is no more accessible, nor unforgiving, collection of clients anywhere to be found. Acting as a travel consultant for close friends and family (F&F) can be something just short of torture when things go wrong. Here are a few tips that can both salvage your relationship and provide you with a close group of intimate clients and evangelists.

Remember that F&F do not begin their association with you from the perspective of a professional relationship. These are people who have known you as a child, as a student, as a teenager or as a golfing buddy. They know you as an intimate: you must work to gain their respect as a professional. The temptation is to permit your familiarity with your F&F to control the professional relationship. This is a crucial mistake that can lead to a laxity of performance and misunderstandings if something goes wrong.

It is important to treat F&F exactly as you do your other clientele. Do not skip client service steps or neglect to properly “train” the client. Begin with a client interview just as you would any other client. Follow through properly with the same presentation, documentation and formalities you would use in any other circumstance. In other words, remove yourself from the familiar tone of the relationship and set a professional tone.

Once you have established a professional relationship, F&F can be a terrific source of business and referrals. Some portion of the training they receive should be on how to speak about your travel consulting services to others.  Make certain that they communicate your core values to referrals, your concern for the well-being of the client and your professionism.

Remember, too, that not everyone is your client.  On occassion, that includes some friends and some family. What’s true is that some people cannot be helped, and those closest to you are sometimes in that group. If so, remember that while you can not choose your family, you can choose who is a client.

Developing and marketing a niche area of expertise is one of the best possible ways to differentiate your travel practice from the competition. As an expert in a particular theme or destination, you can quickly establish your travel agency as the only reasonable resource to which consumers should turn when considering travel in your niche venue. Niche marketing is a way of helping you focus on locating new clients, not a set of restrictions on your business offerings. Niche Marketing is not necessarily about gearing your entire business to a particular type of travel. It is about segmenting your marketing efforts to focus on particular groups of people, however. Properly executed, niche marketing is a terrific way of locating and marketing to a group of potential clients in a highly effective and cost efficient manner.

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One great advantage of a niche market is the way in which it helps you locate potential clients. When you are marketing general travel, everyone is your potential market and you lack focus. When your market is “adventure travelers”, however, you know where to find them. When your market is “golfers”, you know where to find them. Once you have located your market, it is much less costly to reach out to them as opposed to using much less efficient “shotgun” approaches.

When you focus on a niche, you very quickly become an expert. You will be able to speak with authority on your topic and marketing will be a matter of speaking directly to those who share an affinity for your niche. As an expert in a niche, your ability to generate referrals and word of mouth advertising will be amplified as those who have used you in the past tell others interested in similar travel experiences. You will also develop deeper and richer relationships with the suppliers that you use as they come to understand your devotion to their area of business.

The lesson of effective niche marketing is this: It is important to be clear about the market you are addressing and to address that market clearly. This might require you to have one marketing brochure or presentation for adventure travel and another for senior escorted tours and yet another for golf travel. You do not have to devote your practice exclusively to any of these niches, but you can devote some of your marketing tactics to the niche. Then, choose the appropriate marketing tools and pitch for the market you are addressing.

Choose a niche market for which you have some affinity. Open a file to aggregate information. Spend some time on the internet studying the marketing of others in similar niches. What are their unique selling points? What elements seem essential? What is missing from their marketing?

Finally, spend some time figuring out the demographic of your selected niche. Where do the people who are in that niche market congregate? How can you best reach them? What will be your best approach to the market? Chances are, you will quickly realize that not far out of your reach is a group of potential clients just waiting for you to grace them with your presence.

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The effort to gain credibility is ongoing. Every agent who seeks to be the best at their profession will undertake continuing education. Destination specialist courses, geography, cultural history, niche destination and themes, and certifications are all vitally important to a proper professional positioning in the market. The dedication necessary to earn these credentials typically exceeds the motivations and passion of the hobbyist or the travel agent for whom travel is a mere job. Once earned, don’t let your good work go unnoticed! Your official designations set you apart from the crowd of less motivated agents and from the pseudo-agents of all stripes.

Make sure that your marketing materials describe your credentials and, most importantly, how your clients benefit from your learned skill sets and designations. The accolades you earn are of real interest to your client only when it is clear they benefit from your expertise.

Every agent also builds a second set of credentials over the course of the life of their practice. Testimonials from the clients for which you have worked are also credentials, a third-party attestation of competence. Testimonials carry with them the inherent credibility (same root word as credentials) of a third party endorsement. A client testimonial is a powerful message to potential clients that indicates not only are you knowledgeable, but you also know how to apply your knowledge in the service of your clients.

Yesterday we indicated that positioning is a matter of finding the key points that differentiate you from your competition. Your credentials perform that function. Make certain that your marketing collateral, your websites and other marketing tools have client testimonials and display the credentials you have earned during the course of your practice. Your credentials are one more very important defining characteristic in your quest to properly position your practice in your community.

Yet, too many travel agencies are loathe to invest in their own futures. They have no website, no professionally produced logo or collateral, no CRM system, no advertising or promotional efforts. Not coincidentally, they also don’t have many clients. The timidity is understandable, but regrettable. Every business takes on investment in its own growth. The secret is to spend every dollar wisely and to then monitor results not just at the end of the effort, but throughout the duration of the marketing expenditure so that the effort can be fine tuned while in progress.

Without dedicated resources to leverage the company profile, the travel consultant is thrown back to the early business stages of guerrilla marketing tactics that, while useful and necessary, do not permit the strongest possible growth curve. Investment in marketing accelerates growth when properly applied.

Invest in yourself. Most knowledgeable marketing guides will indicate that for small service businesses, between 1% to 3% of your gross proceeds should be reinvested in marketing. Thus, if your Gross Revenues are $1,000,000 (commission income of approximately $100,000) a marketing budget of between $10,000 and $30,000 is a norm. A budget forces the travel agency to focus on the marketing process and to invest in growth in a responsible and predictable manner. Like the marketing plan, a budget should be in writing. Periodically, the travel agency should review its expenditures, measure return, and make appropriate adjustments.

Here’s the good news: not every outlay needs to be in actual dollars. Many of the marketing tactics we discuss daily in The 365 Guide are more labor than capital intensive. In fact, in a small service business like travel consulting a direct marketing approach is actually preferable to capital outlay since so much of the impact of the marketing message has to do with the people who own and operate the agency. The more the marketing plan involves direct involvement by the agency staff in events, speaking engagements, word of mouth campaigns and other public relations efforts, the lower the actual capital outlay is necessitated. Nevertheless, there is an important lesson in the simple and undeniable fact that to make money one has to spend some money.

Allocate money to marketing and spend it wisely, but spend it.

Exercise:  Pull together your 2008 and 2009 marketing expenditures and take a good look at how you spent your money.  Can you calculate a return on investment for each effort?  Are you satisfied with the way in which you have been investing in marketing? Tomorrow, we will begin to choose the actual tactics you will use and we will allocate marketing dollars to each tactic.  For now, however, determine a preliminary gross budget that will approximate 2% – 3% of the gross you realistically hope to achieve.

Tomorrow: The Tactical Array

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