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KHM Travel Group began their journey as a host agency in the travel industry with a small, family-owned business. Now, they have a team of over 70 in a multi-office complex. These days they work to support over 5,000 independent home-based travel agents with unlimited support, one-on-one coaching, educational events, group travel support, and the in-house client management system called myTravelCRM. They have also offered marketing advice to Advisors mostly including boot camps and group camp events, basic marketing essentials, and regular updates via newsletters and blogs. Now, in a recent press release, they have announced an increase in what they offer in regards to marketing a travel agency. Read the rest of this entry »
There is probably no aspect of the entire spectrum of marketing that is as problematic as advertising. Done properly, travel agency advertising will influence a target audience. Done poorly, it will, well, make you poor. It’s no wonder that so many travel agencies advertise so minimally, and thereby lose out on a significant opportunity to make people aware of their services.
One of the secrets to an advertising campaign that works is to have the proper expectations going into the campaign. Understand what advertising can, and cannot, do for your travel agency. Advertising can interest people in travel. Advertising can make people aware of your existence. Advertising can motivate people to call your office. Advertising can bring a consumer to the doorstep of your travel agency. Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s consider the tactics we will use to achieve the goals we have set out for our business. In each instance, we want to be certain our mission statement remains our touch-point. This will keep us consistent and properly focused. Likewise, each tactic should be designed to contribute to our marketing funnels, continually drawing both existing clients and potential clients closer to us, engaging with us and becoming evangelists for our travel practice.
There are an endless variety of possible tactics you can employ. Read the rest of this entry »
Where do great article ideas come from? There is a reason to start from your own interests rather than turning to artificial intelligence (“AI“) like Voyager’s Toby for ideas as “Step 1.” If it is important to inject your brand into your writing, it makes sense to begin with you. It really is that simple. Ideation should take root in the human, who then turns to their AI writing assistant like Toby for assistance. Read the rest of this entry »
Hashtags are an essential, but sometimes misunderstood, tool for growing an Instagram following as they allow users to discover new content and increase the visibility of their own posts. Hashtags work by categorizing posts under specific topics, making them more discoverable to users interested in those topics. Instagram creators use hashtags to track trends and enhance search. Simply speaking, hashtags are words or phrases about a specific topic, with a hash (#) before it, e.g. #traveltuesday. Read the rest of this entry »
Acknowledging the role of social media in our travel plans has become as obvious as recognizing that the sun is always shining. The focus now turns to understanding how deeply and widely this impact reaches. It’s no surprise that social media plays a huge part in planning out vacation itineraries; what remains unknown, however, is just how big its influence truly is. Read the rest of this entry »
Goals are a good thing. Without a goal in front of us, we tend to be far less directed in our actions. Without goals, it would be more difficult to measure our progress or the efficacy of our plans. Without goals, we would lack the strong motivation to succeed that is so important to our personal and business lives. Let’s take a look at how we might set goals into the next business plan we draft.
Social media has become an integral part of vacation for most travelers. Some of them simply can’t imagine a single day without sharing their holiday joy with friends and followers, forgetting what’s all about – relaxing, re-charging batteries, experiencing adventures, and communing with the different. Read the rest of this entry »
The word “radical” denotes the idea of getting to the root of a problem. When mathematicians want to find the square root of a number, they use the radical symbol to express the equation. For travel agents, getting radical on a problem means seeking out its cause. One of the best ways to do so is to work backward and ask, quite simply, “WHY?” Read the rest of this entry »
In its simplest form, marketing consists of generating new business and keeping old. Any new customer may spend money with you once, but a loyal customer provides a lifetime of business! Read the rest of this entry »
In 2009, the comedian Eddie Izzard set the almost unbelievable goal of running all the way around the circumference of England and Scotland, the equivalent of 43 marathons in 50 days, for charity and again in 2016 for 27 days in honor of Nelson Mandela.
He had never run a marathon before that time. I think it may be possible to learn something from Mr. Izzard. Read the rest of this entry »
Most of us have encountered the “do-it-yourselfer” who researches and books everything themselves online. Estimates are that as high as 61% of some demographic groups at least research travel online Read the rest of this entry »
Now is a good time to keep a promise to yourself and conduct a SWOT analysis for your travel business. The SWOT acronym indicates Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The traditional SWOT looks at Strengths and Weaknesses of a business (internal factors) and tries to thereby ascertain the relationship with Opportunities and Threats (factors external to the agency). Doing an annual SWOT analysis is a good prerequisite to a marketing plan and assists with developing the appropriate goals for your travel practice. One of the most important aspects of a SWOT analysis for travel agencies is very simply the act of planning: the analysis makes you take a good look at your positioning in the market. Each component of the SWOT analysis bears a relationship to the others. Each of your strengths will give rise to opportunities or the capacity to exploit an opportunity. Likewise, your strengths allow your travel practice to better confront the threats on the horizon or compensate for weaknesses.
Consumer advocates often lodge the complaint that advertising is coercive and monopolistic, dictating public perceptions and buying habits. According to this theory, the public buys what they are told to buy, the product most advertised, rather than the product that is the best for their needs. Certainly, companies with the resources to put into advertising have a distinct advantage. Regardless of the actual merits of the argument, the perception it creates makes it more difficult to form a relationship with clients based on trust. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the chief complaints consumers have about advertising is it is often inappropriate – either wrongly targeted or misdirected. Often, travel agents will blanket their client lists with advertising that betrays a lack of concern for the needs or concerns of the individual client. For example, not everyone is a fan of cruising. Repeated advertisements for a cruise vacation directed at the wrong client will cause the client to doubt the sincerity of the travel agent. If the travel counselor is truly about the service and not the product, if a travel planner’s practice is really client-centric, then the needs and preferences of the client come first and a stream of wrongly directed advertisements will callous the relationship. Read the rest of this entry »
In our last article, we discussed how many consumers perceive advertising as manipulative and less than authentic. Another common complaint is that advertising imposes itself on the individual in an unwanted manner – it interrupts the flow of information or entertainment to gain mindshare. Thus, a commercial appears at the climax of the television show, or the banner ad covers up what you are trying to read. Indeed, much of the advertising to which we are exposed each day is unsolicited and unwanted. Read the rest of this entry »
Consumers have a love/hate relationship with advertising. Some advertising is highly regarded, memorized and repeated, passed along virally. Other ads are the subject of scorn and vilification usually reserved for weapons of mass destruction. It is a worthwhile exercise to examine consumer attitudes toward advertising and to discover exactly what about it people find objectionable. Buried there is a lesson we can take back to our own marketing campaigns to ensure that it will be heard and trusted rather than frowned upon. Read the rest of this entry »
We have devoted this series to Guerrilla Marketing and to the type of tactics that require very little capital but lots of initiative and work. Let’s finish off with a few ways to spend your small marketing budget on tools that will help you more effectively market for many months to come. Specifically, look to all of your “Points of Contact” – those areas where clients come into contact with your brand, and polish them just a bit. An occasional upgrade to your points of contact is a necessary part of keeping your business personality fresh and smart-looking.
Friday’s guerrilla marketing tactics for $150: Read the rest of this entry »
“Guerrilla Marketing” is all about being smart with your marketing budget by using a lot of elbow grease to make each dollar go farther. If $150 is what you have to work with, you will want to find marketing venues that are tightly focused around your target demographic and then put in the requisite face-time with the prospective clients. The combination of a little bit of money and a whole lot of personality and physical effort will pay off for the travel agent willing to go the extra mile. Read the rest of this entry »
“Guerrilla Marketing”, is all about achieving the maximum marketing bang for the buck. Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive, but it needs to be creative. Today we are going to seek out three new tactics to tap into groups of consumers and to spend our money in as leveraged a way possible: Read the rest of this entry »
This week, TRO SMITH is paying homage to Jay Conrad Levinson’s “Guerrilla Marketing“, a manual for street-level marketing focused on achieving the maximum impact for the least capital expenditure. With the slim margins of travel consulting, guerilla marketing is particularly well suited for many travel agents. With that said, however, here is a warning about letting your marketing become a “shoestring noose.” Read the rest of this entry »
