The Importance of Marketing as a Travel Advisor

To succeed in the travel industry, you must have clients. To have clients, you need a robust marketing plan. 

Sharing your message, your value, your services, and your expertise with your potential clients is a multi-step process. To understand the pillars of marketing, to effectively communicate your company brand, and more, enroll today in our Certified Travel Associate (CTA) program, which contains the Marketing and Promoting Your Business module.

One important aspect of engaging with current and prospective clients is using social media tools effectively. For fascinating and informative insight on “posting with a purpose,” be sure to view yesterday’s power session, Creating a Social Media Sales Strategy—presented by Rita Perez, founder of Take the Helm, LLC—available in the Premium library. Not a member yet? Learn how to subscribe here. 

Engaging with social media is just one of many tools in your marketing tool belt. One of your peers, Jennifer Dugan, CTA, owner of Dugan’s Travels, has timely and practical marketing insights to share with you, based on her 27 years’ experience as an agency owner: 

To be successful as a travel agent, establishing and nurturing client and supplier relationships is a must. You can’t just sit back and wait for clients to reach out to you. You need to stay top-of-mind, so you are their go-to for all their travel needs. If you maintain regular contact with your clients, they may realize there are other options they were not aware of. For example, they may consider an alternate destination if you have informed them of special perks that are included in the package.

Marketing yourself and the services you provide can make a huge difference. Travelers have many travel agents to choose from; you must put yourself out there as the one they should rely on for the best travel service needs.

There are several resources to help you better market yourself and stay in contact with customers. Here are a few to consider:

1.     Suppliers Many suppliers you deal with offer tools and recommendations that assist agents in staying in touch with travelers. Reach out to your supplier contacts for helpful suggestions to market your services. Check out their websites, social media, and blogs to get updates and suggestions on how to be more successful and ways to keep your clients engaged. You will be amazed at what wonderful resources they have available.

2.     Social Media If you are not using social media platforms to keep in contact with clients, you are missing out on a huge audience. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and others can be great platforms to stay in touch. But remember to post to these accounts on a regular basis and solicit followers to your page if you want to get the most out of your accounts. Branch Up provides a free, professional Facebook Marketing program for travel professionals that engages your customers and generates leads. They will create regular Facebook posts to add to your business page. And it’s free to sign up.

3.     CRM Database Hopefully, you are maintaining a list of your clients with all relevant information. Contact information—like phone number and email address— is mandatory to stay in touch. Each contact instance also should include data on their travel history, likes and dislikes, preferences on hotels, airlines, destinations, etc.
You can retain customer information with a homemade database using an Excel or Google spreadsheet, but, if you want to streamline the process, a formal Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool can be a great asset. There are dozens of CRMs available for this purpose. Those that are specific to travel agents include Tutterfly, Dolphin Dynamics, Kapture, Less Annoying CRM, Capsule, Travefy, Tres Technologies, and many others. The cost for each varies; some have a free trial version

4.     Email Blasts Sending regular emails to your customers is a perfect way to update them on special deals, travel news, and other relevant information. There are tools that are available to automate the process. You can send emails with the software to multiple addressees with a few minor tweaks. A couple applications to check out for this purpose are Constant Contact and Mailchimp. Each can be designed to use your CRM to extract email addresses and other information to create emails that are sent to clients at specific dates and times.

I cannot stress enough that staying in contact and communicating with clients and suppliers is critical to your success. If you’re not doing that, you’re missing a great opportunity to increase your business. The most successful agents use whatever tools and methods they have at their disposal to keep in touch. I strongly recommend that you take advantage of them as well.

Thank you so much, Jennifer!