Do you know why your clients do business with your travel agency? Do they have a clear picture in their minds of what your travel practice represents? What type of relationship do you try to develop with your clients? How are your relationships reflected in the conversations you have with clients, your advertisements, your website and your other marketing efforts?
The answers to these questions go to the heart of your company’s reason for being. When you can answer these questions easily, you are farther down the path to authentic marketing. This means business conducted from a principle set of core values and client relationships built on trust.
A travel professional true to a core set of values has an easier time defining themselves to the community. The travel agency’s marketing collateral, newsletters, and blogs, once in alignment with those core values, more clearly communicate with clients and potential clients. The community perceives the travel agent with a strong mission statement as more “real” – more authentic. The public is increasingly adept at determining when a company is truly authentic and when it is merely veneered. An authentic company will have a compass, and its efforts will reflect the direction of its ownership.
Authentic companies set expectations and provide a framework of trust in which those expectations can be fulfilled. Early in the relationship with its clients, the authentic travel agency will outline the mutual responsibilities of both agency and traveler and will operate within those parameters. Because the central mission of the agency is well articulated and the mutual responsibilities are clear, problems tend to be more easily observed in advance and solved more quickly at their source.
But what does it take to be authentic? Don’t most companies claim to deliver “real” results and “real” value? Don’t most companies claim to be unique in their market segment? Yes, most companies make these claims – which is precisely why the public tends to be very skeptical of such promises.
Our goal is to ground your travel agency in a core set of values that are well understood and communicated. To help you communicate them to your clients, systematically maintain those values, and put them into place internally and in your marketing efforts.
