The Travel Marketing System

Why Small and Medium Sized Travel Businesses need Marketing

You have a new website … now what?

Launching a bookable website, with a carefully crafted design can feel like you’re 95% of the way to competing online, but in fact, all you have done is ‘stock’ your shop…. You now have to find the customers.

To understand reality, it’s good to use an analogy of a Town Centre and 2 travel agents, both with identical shops and selling identical travel products. Both agents have spent the same amount on the fit-out of their shops and staff costs are the same. The only difference is location. One agent is in the town centre and one is in a back street.

The High Street gets the most footfall and is the most expensive place to rent premises. The agent that rents on the high street gets more passersby and potential eyes on their business ( although they still have to work hard to persuade that customer to come into the shop), but they pay more to get those customers (rent). They have to ensure that the cost of acquisition fits with the margin they can make on selling holidays.

The agent in the back street gets far fewer passers by and so even if their window display and products they sell are identical to the High Street Agent, they can never sell more holidays to passersby than the High Street Agent ( without marketing!) 

In an online-only world, everyone is in the back street until they make people aware of their website, WHY they exist, HOW they differ from competitors, and WHY people should buy from them. It’s this marketing that gets your website to the online equivalent of the High Street.

Time > Money: “ We can no more afford to spend major time on minor things than we can to spend minor time on major things. Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time. Time is the best-kept secret of the rich. 

What’s the biggest reason Travel Agents don’t do marketing? Answer = Time

TMS automates your travel marketing. The TMS platform uniquely enables small and medium-sized travel agents to compete efficiently with the bigger players online, without breaking the bank.

Typically it can save a full-time marketing person’s salary and more by enabling the creation of a marketing asset library of:

• Scheduled Social posts
• Email templates
• Digital Screens for Promotions
• Website Landing Pages

To Your Success

Regardless of the size of your business, marketing is key to your success. In fact it is the master skill of business.

Allan Dib puts it in a nutshell when he describes marketing as:

‘The strategy you use to get your ideal target audience to know you, like you and trust you enough to become a customer.’

Winning new customers is the lifeblood of your business. There are all sorts of marketing tactics you can deploy in an attempt to do this – SEO, email marketing, Facebook ads etc etc. But unless these actions form part of a considered marketing strategy they simply become random acts. With no synergy between sporadic attempts, these efforts can’t deliver the growth results you are looking for. You may even be thinking ‘marketing doesn’t work in my business’.