How to get a marketing budget from thin air for your Travel Agency....

What New Year Resolutions did you make this year? I'm a sucker for resolutions and while I can't always keep them up for long, I have taught myself that making a resolution that works is the key and one that is easy to keep.

This year one of my personal resolutions gave me an idea for a business resolution for Travel Agents. I have signed up to a Dryathlon for Cancer Research following the passing away before Christmas of a close friend. I have 3 kids and a very busy life so for those of you with a similar set up I'm sure you know how difficult this will be! But Day 2 and I'm still OK...

The thing about charity fundraising is that everyone asks for something these days and so it can be a little awkward raising money. If you are like me you end up adding in funds because you have not managed to collect as much as you intended then the difficulty is how much to personally contribute. How much is enough? Have I got any money left? What else could I spend the cahrity money on?

The brilliant thing about the Dryathlon is that the money you raise comes directly from another pot. By not drinking the money you save from alcohol eacxh day can be redirected to the charity. So at the end of this month I will have saved a whole heap of money from not drinking and instead I can send that money direct to Cancer Research.

So - how does this help me as a travel agent with my marketing?

Each month as I travel around travel agencies I hear the same thing - there is no money left for marketing. At the same time, the very same agents are struggling to find new clients and market to existing ones. 

What some of my clients don't know is that my business management experience does not just come from having run Specialist Tour Operators. Professionally I am also a Qualified Chartered Accountant. This gives me the ability (having also been a business 'fixer') to very quickly isolate areas of the business that cost more than they should. In the past year this has spanned from saving an agent £'000's on their IT set up to £00's on simple things like the amount of money an agent spent on email marketing (saving them nearly £700 on the use of the right software alone). In the past I used to go to companies and 'audit' their expenses and find cost savings. It's something that business owners should do as a matter of course but nearly never do.

What's the Resolution then?

In much the same way that I have found 'Charity Money' by not drinking for the month and putting my 'drink money' towards the charity, you can do the same in your business to find the all important marketing money. Simply looking at all your costs (or asking an expert to help you) and then reallocating that money to marketing is the first step to have a coherent marketing budget to get started on lead generation.

I think it's a genius idea - what do you think? .... and if you think that there is no money in the pot to reallocate I'll bet you there is. In fact I'm so sure that I could find you cost savings that I'm willing to bet that if I can't, I'll contribute £100 of our money to your personal travel agency marketing. You can't get fairer than that.

So - let's get the budget together and then start the marketing plan to make 2013 your most successful to date.

Best wishes

Steve

 

Day 14 | Creativity - Your World Has Changed, as has everything else

Today's post is really to start to get you thinking over the weekend. The crux to marketing is to be creative but all too often I go into businesses and they say "I'm not creative at all". Having probed a bit, I just don't think that's true, it's just that they have had the creativity beaten out of them from an early age. The Radio 4 Today programme was discussing the rise of China in the world economy today and in that the question of wherther China would really innovate and beat the USA in global dominance. Interestingly, the debate centred around the fact that the Chinese don't like to step out of line and so as a result their creativity is stifled. 

One of the most crucial things you can do to have a successful travel agency business today is to not be afraid of thinking outside the box, be able to make marketing mistakes, not to be afraid of trying new things.

I'd like you to watch an amazingly inspirational speech from Sir Ken Robinson at a TED conference. He's an amusing speaker so the 20 minutes will be as enjoyable as a dose of your favourite comedy show, but underlying to this is an urgency that we have to become more creative.

Have a great day.

Steve

Day 14 Tip: Unleash your creativity. Don't keep doing the thing you have always done - think differently

 

 

 

The Last Mile...

Today's post is about writing copy that Google loves. Why is this important? Because if Google likes what you have written then people will find it which = sales. Writing copy that Google loves is called "SEO Copywriting" - the SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization". Have you ever heard of the last mile in the broadband industry (anyone who lives rurally will have). It basically goes like this - there are thousands of miles of super duper fast optical fibers carrying around large amounts of data all over the country at lightning fast speed (Virgin is always advertising it's fibre optic network ). The benefits of this optical cable don't mean anything to someone living in most of rural UK if the connection at the last mile to the customers home is made from old copper BT wires - its going to be sluggish. In the same way, Google's high powered search engine can't get quality visitors to your site unless you tell Google that you page content matches what people are actually searching for. You may have the best blogging software (Wordpress) hosted on a really good server (like we use from UKFast) and you write incredibly engaging content but it will mean nothing unless you connect up the last mile. In other words - you need effective SEO writing to correct this 'last mile' marketing problem.  Here is a simple 5 steps to getting your content loved by Google by applying some easy techniques. KEYWORDS Before you write anything ask yourself : ' what is the relevant question that people will ask that I am providing the answer to?' 'Are enough people asking the question?'.The answer to those questions will help you develop the keywords that you need to use. Titles, Tags and Headlines Google reads the page like we do as humans. It checks the headlines and titles to read any further to make sure that the headlines say they are about what the question (search terms) were looking for and then it checks the content of your writing to make sure that it matches the headlines. In other words, is it all relevant to the search that a user has done? It's logical really. Content See your job to be able to answer questions/searches, better than your competition. Have a plan to do this, so that strangers become readers and readers become clients. Landing pages The design and content of the landing pages of your site immediately conveys to users if they have found the right site. Make sure that your content landing pages convey what you are selling and drive visitors deeper into your site. Many of the sites that Net Effect launch have product driven landing pages that means that visitors may well land on a page about a certain destination but then there are easy navigations and links to product deeper into the site.  Related Content Search engines favour websites with relevant, focussed and frequently updated content with a high degree of link authority. This means you need to cross reference your articles (start to build up links with tourist board websites which will themselves be great link authority sites). Website software like wordpress (which all Net Effect sites are written in) makes this vey easy. In summary, you will see this is not rocket science, in many ways, it is exactly as you would have made it if you had planned it yourself. The mistake that many newcomers make is that writing a piece of content is not like an advert. So many agents start and write one blog and then when they believe that they have made no sales from this blog post (entitled " Susan's Recent Trip to Kruger National Park" - ask yourself - does anyone search Google with those terms?) they give up. This is the future. Developing your persona or 'brand' is the new way that you are going to be able to communicate effectively your business proposition.