Ahead of ABTA’s first Essential Guide to Travel Marketing next month, we spoke to the experts about what they consider to be the most important things a travel marketer should know.

1. Understanding your target market
Every marketing strategy has a target market that you want to reach. Even if you’re not certain who you should target, start by inputting information that you do know. Figuring out the demographics of your target audience is a great place to start. Once you nail down the demographics, you’ll want to create a buyer’s persona.

The buyer’s persona is the secret weapon used by successful marketing companies. The buyer’s persona includes information such as age, gender and income. Depending on your needs, it can include details like what they enjoy eating, how many kids they have, the type of car they drive and hobbies and interests.

2. Communicating the value to your customers

The most impressive marketing strategies in the world won’t work unless you communicate the value of your product or service to your customers. You need to clearly communicate exactly what your product offers. If they can purchase a similar product or service elsewhere, you need to communicate what makes yours different – and better – than your competition. This is your USP and needs to be clearly communicated across everything. 

3. Watching the data
In these days of Google Analytics, there’s no excuse for not keeping a close eye on the data. With the availability of marketing data, companies can track which web pages are generating the most clicks, how long visitors are staying on pages, where site visitors are coming from, and much, much more. Failure to spend the time needed to watch data can mean the failure of the entire marketing strategy.

4. Passion
Never underestimate the power of passion in any business venture. If you care – or don’t care – about a project, it will show in the final product. You need to be passionate about your company, your product or service, and your marketing strategy. Business is a long-term investment you need to find a strong motivator at the beginning. If you don’t have passion at the outset, you’ll never be able to keep it going in the long run.

Simply stated, people can tell when a company doesn’t care about it’s customers, and eventually, they will stop caring, too.

5. Focus
The best companies out there focus on helping customers, not on making money. It isn’t an intuitive idea, the thought of putting customers ahead of profits, but it works.

The practice of placing more value on money rather than the human component sabotages any kind of effort you make to grow your business. Good businesses don’t just work that way. To achieve this kind of focus, be sure to include your marketing team on meetings about R&D and find other ways your company can add value to people’s lives. This will help remind your marketing team of the real mission of the business.

ABTA is holding its first Essential Guide to Travel Marketing seminar at its offices on September 19 2018. The training day is designed to deliver comprehensive guidance on how to develop your brand and define the best marketing methods to meet your customer needs. Delegates are invited to return the next day to attend our Advanced Social Media seminar to receive a 20% discount off both events.