The most important part of branding is this: You are your brand. Your personality, expertise, and image are as much part of your business as the sign out front, and successful travel agents know how to leverage their personal brands to build their businesses. Where do you start? You’ve got to get your name out there, and here’s how.
- Your niche defines your image. Who are your best customers? Who would you like them to be? If those two are the same, then you’ve done well in defining your niche. If not, you have some work to do. Once you’ve defined your niche, brand yourself to appeal to that customer base. That might mean a website overhaul, a new direction for your blog, a new headshot and a new marketing plan to reflect your new image.
- Always be publishing. Partnering with publications for advertorial space, contributing monthly travel columns, or writing for a publication’s online blog are all great ways to reach your audience and position yourself as the expert in your niche. This is the real key to celebrity: Your expertise. It’s priceless, it’s unique to you, and people will seek you out for it.
- Meet and greet. Get out there and network. Start by going to as many events as you can find to see which professional groups work best for you. You won’t know until you go. Treat each event like an interview process to see who you want to work with, and what you want to get out of it. Then, choose one or two and invest your energy into them. Offer to speak, contribute, and become part of the community, and you’ll be a local celebrity in no time!
- Get media attention. Journalists are always looking for a good story, so give them one. When one of my clients broke his hip on a cruise ship in Turkey, and was badly treated by his cruise ship company, I immediately got on the phone with local newspapers to start covering the story – which made national headlines. You know what also made national headlines? How Elite Travel went above and beyond to get that poor man the medical attention he needed, even calling in a translator and organizing transportation to a major hospital. You don’t need a crisis to get in the news however: Apply for awards, go on podcasts, do radio interviews, or even host your own radio show, TV show, or web series. It’s the brave new world of the internet – you can make your own media!
- Be the expert. Celebrating yourself isn’t about posing or positioning – you have to have the experience and expertise to be the real deal. Invest in your knowledge by seeing the properties you sell in person, meeting the management, and learning everything you can about the latest changes in our industry. It’s a constant process of learning, but when you can rattle off an intelligent answer to an interviewer’s question (or a client’s!), it’s all worth it.
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Tammy Levent, Public Speaker & Business Mentor
Click here to read Tammy’s bio and a sampling of her achievements.
