Niche Marketing Requires Focusing On Strengths & Expertise
By Eric Maryanov, President & Founder, All-Travel.com
Travel Agent Magazine, "Expert of the Week" July 2004
It takes all kinds of experts to build a successful travel agency. At All-Travel.com our combination of unique strengths and areas of expertise among our agents has worked well over the last 20 years. By staying focused on the big picture and specializing in key travel segments our clients win, and so do we.
The benefit of this approach is the level of expertise and consistency we are able to provide our clients. You can’t be all things to all people. No big surprise here. So instead of using energy and time spreading ourselves too thin, we developed our niche for focused marketing. We identified the client base that is a good match for us to target, and have invested all of our efforts both online and offline into a unified marketing approach.
Years ago, before it was mainstream and even mandatory, we developed our initial website http://www.all-travel.com/. This extensive, user-friendly site has continued to expand over time, attract more visitors and earn us industry awards as online leaders. It has proven to be one of our greatest strengths for focused marketing.
By taking our products and services to the Internet, we are communicating with a segment of consumers in a way they prefer. Our site is updated regularly to ensure that we are providing the most useful and relevant information available at the time.
Visitors to our site are able to research destinations, prices and options, and get a feel for what they want before calling one of our seasoned travel experts for assistance in nailing down the details. When people are ready for the next step of finalizing options and booking arrangements, we match them with a staff specialist who handles what they’re looking for. Honeymoons to sun destinations, Costa Rica, Hawaii, Club Med and the South Pacific, we’ve got these experts and more.
As we strive to improve our agency and increase our services, we continue to add travel specialists and focus on agent certification. We encourage agents to stay ahead of the curve by investing time in continuing education courses in specialized areas. As with any industry, the changes keep coming and to remain effective and provide a valuable service to our clients, we need to be informed.
Consumers can easily distinguish the experts in a field, and they make this judgment right away. Remember when we were the ones qualifying prospective clients? When we’d train our staff to ask a series of preliminary questions to see if a caller was serious about traveling, or just wasting our time. Not any more.
Now it is the complete opposite. Potential clients qualify us with their first impression of our agency, business practices, staff experience and knowledge of the industry. This is immediate, so we need to make it clear - and very quickly - that we are worthy of their business. No pressure or anything.
When you’re dealing with someone’s free time and discretionary income, they want to feel like we are the experts in all things travel. To capture their business we have to be. By focusing on specialization among our staff, we provide clients with agents who truly are experts in their focus field. We also go after certain areas of business based on the expertise of our agents. Certified travel professionals with a deep knowledge of a destination as well as the various products are what keep our phones ringing.
Until recently, destination specialist certifications were the training that once set agents apart. But now, the Travel Institute has released a series of what they are calling “lifestyle” specialist courses in areas such as diving, golfing, accessible travel and yacht charters, among others. It’s a good concept. The new designations will carry clout with consumers and show that an agent really knows a specific market. Soon, the industry will be turning out a new generation of double experts, or agents who are trained as both a destination and a “lifestyle” specialist.
By focusing on our unique strengths, website presence and experienced agents - and getting really good at it - All-Travel.com has been providing niche marketing services to travelers for years. Only we don’t look at it as “lifestyle” expertise. We see the focus as good business and even better marketing.
For more information
contact Nicole Stinson, Public Relations
(310) 312-3368
