Many travel professionals have told me recently they have decided to work on creating a specialized, niche segment for their travel practice. Developing and marketing a niche area of expertise is one of the best 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.
The concept of adopting a niche is often misconstrued. 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.
One great advantage of a niche market is how it helps you locate potential clients. When marketing “travel” to the world, 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 than 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 more profound 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 essential to be clear about the market you are addressing and to address that market. 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 marketing tactics and collateral 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? 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. 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.
