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.

Article continues below This 365 Marketing and Sales Tip is provided free to the travel agent community by:

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.

The concept of niche marketing is often misunderstood. 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. Niche Marketing refers to the process of focusing a marketing effort on a particular theme or destination. Many travel consultants avoid it as a concept out of fear of having to turn away business outside the chosen niche, or being too closely identified with the niche. Properly executed however, niche marketing is a terrific way of locating and marketing to a group of potential clients in a highly effective and cost efficient manner.

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.

Exercise – Choose a niche market for which you have some affinity. Decide that next year, you will devote some major portion of your time developing your niche as a specialty in your travel practice. Set up a FAM trip or visit to the destination if possible. Next, study the suppliers for your niche destination or theme. Set Choose several to decide on the best ones to work with on your project. If you need assistance, use the TRO Community to ask other agents for suggestions on good suppliers with which to work.

Integrate your niche into next year’s marketing plans. 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.

As you develop your 2010 marketing plan, refine your initial observations on a niche for full integration into your overall strategy.

Travel agents that have a specialization have distinct marketing advantages.  Firstly, it is easier to locate your market.  Specialize in Celtic ancestory, disabled travel, birdwatching or  skiing, and the location of your target market becomes instantly visible.  Your ability to reach out and touch the very clients you want to locate is greatly enhanced. Marketing becomes much less an expensive proposition when you don’t have to hunt for prospects in a random fashion.

Just as important, however, is the ability to quickly gain an unprecedented degree of notice in a niche community.  The very essence of a community is the ability of its membership to communicate within its own ranks. Do an excellent job of travel planning for one member, and watch others begin to take notice.

Being an expert in a particular destination or theme has unexpected competitive advantages as well.  Establishing your expertise in a community actually creates a natural barrier to entry with regard to competitors. As other travel agents do their research, they will likely veer away from your niche if you are sufficiently well established locally.

Many business people wrongly feel that every breathing body is a potential customer.  Not only is this not so, it is absolutely wrong.  If “everyone” is your customer, then nobody is.  Your brand is built on your ability to distinguish yourself from others.  Find a niche and grasp it with all the passion you can muster.  Soon, you will have a following of like-minded clients.

Tomorrow: Outrageous Service

This 365 Marketing Tip is sponsored by:

We started out on our journey to write a marketing plan by identifying the need to develop a niche market as one of our key objectives.  In fact, we also identified practice in a niche market as one of the characteristics of top travel agents. We now want to focus on integrating niche marketing into our 2009 Marketing Plan.

The concept of niche marketing is often misunderstood. 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.

Niche Marketing refers to the process of focusing a marketing effort on a particular theme or destination. Many travel consultants avoid it as a concept out of fear of having to turn away business outside the chosen niche, or being too closely identified with the niche. Properly executed however, niche marketing is a terrific way of locating and marketing to a group of potential clients in a highly effective and cost efficient manner.

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.
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.

Further, 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.

Exercise - Choose a niche market for which you have some affinity.  Decide that next year, you will devote some major portion of your time developing your niche as a specialty in your travel practice.  Set up a FAM trip or visit to the destination if possible.  Next, study the suppliers for your niche destination or theme.  Set Choose several to decide on the best ones to work with on your project. If you need assistance, use the TRO Community to ask other agents for suggestions on good suppliers with which to work. 

Integrate your niche into next year’s marketing plans.  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.

As you develop your 2009 marketing plan,  refine your initial observations on a niche for full integration into your overall strategy.

This 365 Marketing Tip is sponsored by:

Each of the top travel agents that we interviewed for this series had a niche. That is not to say that they only booked one type of travel or only a single destination, but there was at least one type of travel on which they were the absolute experts and they did it very, very well.  It might have been a destination like Hawaii, or a theme like safaris or river cruising, but these top travel agents had made expertise in their niche a mission.

By specializing in a particular destination or theme, top agents are able to become experts in a much more directed and concentrated fashion.  They can speak with authority on their topic and can better understand the demographics on which to focus their marketing.

The agents we interviewed used their niche as a way to forge a local and even national reputation.  They had been to their niche destinations dozens, and in some cases even hundreds, of times and knew it intimately, as an insider.  They wrote about their niche, they had websites devoted to the niche, and as far as each was concerned, they had no equal in their niche.

Exercise - Choose a niche market for which you have some affinity.  Decide that next year, you will devote at least 25% of your time developing your niche as a specialty in your travel practice.  Set up a FAM trip or visit to the destination if possible.  Next, study the suppliers for your niche destination or theme.  Set Choose several to decide on the best ones to work with on your project. If you need assistance, use the TRO Community to ask other agents for suggestions on good suppliers with which to work. 

Integrate your niche into next year’s marketing plans.  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.

As you develop your 2009 marketing plan,  refine your initial observations on a niche for full integration into your overall strategy.

This 365 Tip of the Day is Sponsored by: