Positioning and Your USP
Travel professionals putting together a marketing plan for their travel agency are sometimes stymied by the concept of differentiation. In essence, differentiation is that collection of key attributes that set your travel agency apart from all others – the reason a client would rather work with you than with your competitor. By and large, any agency can offer the same cruises, tours and travel programs. So what Unique Selling Point (another way of speaking about differentiation) can an agency offer?
For a travel practice, properly developing your differentiation is often a matter of shifting from a product driven strategy to a relationship driven strategy. It is absolutely true that any agency can offer a tour to Ireland. But only your agency can offer you. Only your agency can offer the other people who surround you as associates. Only your agency can offer the unique services, personalities and talents you have assembled. The collective personality of your agency and the core values you instill can be the unique selling point that differentiates your agency from all others. Better yet, when you define your differentiation in terms of the relationship you have with your clients, the concept of differentiation becomes ever more tangible in the form of truly extraordinary service.
For a travel practice, properly developing your differentiation is often a matter of shifting from a product driven strategy to a relationship driven strategy. It is absolutely true that any agency can offer a tour to Ireland. But only your agency can offer you. Only your agency can offer the other people who surround you as associates. Only your agency can offer the unique services, personalities and talents you have assembled. The collective personality of your agency and the core values you instill can be the unique selling point that differentiates your agency from all others. Better yet, when you define your differentiation in terms of the relationship you have with your clients, the concept of differentiation becomes ever more tangible in the form of truly extraordinary service.
Your uniqueness informs your company’s ability to chart new marketing territory. If you want to leave the competition behind, you have to quit doing things exactly like everyone else.
Sit down and list the things that make you, as a travel consultant, unique. Is it your passion for helping others travel? Is it the number of years you have been in the business? Is it the destinations you have visited? Is it your outgoing personality? What about your destination specialist training? Perhaps your unique insight into a particular niche market qualifies as a Unique Selling Point. Once you have determined your USP, distill it down into a few coherent sentences. Continue to work on your USP until you can reduce it to a tag line. Now integrate your USP into all of your marketing collateral – make it a central focal point of your brand. Once you find your USP, hold it out for the world to see and you will have fashioned for yourself a unique positioning in your client’s eyes. |
Positioning
How would you answer if challenged with the simple question of “Who are you and why are you here?” The travel professional seeking to also be a good marketer should be able to clearly communicate their brand with enough frequency and volume to be noticed and enough clarity to be understood. Too often, however, travel agents fail to sharply define their market position. The travel agent who is also a marketer will be able to differentiate themselves from others in the market. A strong marketing position will also demonstrate the agent’s credentials, the proof of their right to be where they are and doing what they do. Finally, a well-positioned travel agent is always in motion, focused and constantly maintaining their market status. Accomplishing all of this takes perseverance and passion, and a drive to be truly excellent. Everything begins with the personality of the individual agent, and the authentic passion they demonstrate for the craft of travel |
planning. It is not enough to merely be passionate about travel, there must also be a passion about assisting others to travel well. The smart travel agent recognizes their innate talents and then crystallizes those abilities into a unique selling point, a brand that clients can instantly see.
Confident in their ability, good travel agents know how they are different from others in the market. They continually work to refine their abilities and to make their brand accessible to consumers by ensuring that their brand message is absolutely clear in every point of contact with the public. Once they have defined themselves, they maintain their brand and remain true to it. On occasion, this will cost them a client or a sale. The travel agent who has defined themselves via their expertise and devotion to quality will not bemoan the loss of a client over a challenge to “beat a price”. The authentic travel agent will remain true to his or her own values and ideals.
What sets you apart? Good marketers understand what makes them truly different from other travel consultants. What is your point of differentiation? If you cannot figure out who you are, the public will not be able to figure it out either. The mandate to clarify, refine and articulate your brand message is an absolute requirement for success. If you suffer from an inability to articulate who you are as an agent, then your clients will be equally confused about why they should use you.
What qualities do you own? What makes you unique? As an exercise write down your unique qualities and clarify them. How do you communicate those qualities? What do you do every day that demonstrates them to your employees, the public and your clients? How does your advertising and marketing collateral bear out your identity?
It’s time you discovered who you are.
Being able to position your company’s unique value is a big part of the branding exercise and necessary to engineering the way that the public perceives your travel practice. When you position your travel practice, you set the expectations the public has when they do business with you. The good thing about positioning is that, as the word implies, it is largely under your control. You get to determine the key psychological understanding the public takes away from your marketing efforts.
Position correctly and your sales efforts are going to be more easily undertaken: you and your client will be working from the same set of understandings. Position incorrectly and the public will fail to understand your service or will operate with their own default understanding about what a “travel agent” does. Thus, what is most important is for the travel agent to undertake positioning deliberately. To simply begin marketing oneself as a travel consultant without serious consideration of positioning is to allow the public to proceed with their own perceptions of your services. The resulting interactions with your potential clients are likely to be a muddle of conflicting understandings.
You want to position early in the relationship. It is more difficult to change someone’s mind than it is to create a first impression. If a potential client misunderstands who you are and therefore has little interest, it can be very difficult to re-capture their attention at a later time.
How To Position Your Brand
There are a number of ways for a travel consultant to position their practice. The first way is the one we want least want to use: price. Many agencies openly market themselves based on price. They market “deals” and “specials” on an ongoing basis. Marketing on price is possible only when the business plan is geared to generate high volumes to compensate for low margins. Marketing by differentiating yourself on price means that your business will be largely transactional. Each time a client comes to you, they are concerned with price and price only. Because of the low margins inherent in price differentiation, there is little left over for customer service or for correcting mistakes.
Businesses will often market commodities based on price alone. This is the Walmart model: A 42 inch Sony LCD Television is the same whether you purchase it at Walmart or Target. The only differentiator is typically price. Location can be a differentiator if either store operates without local competition. But in a competitive situation, pricing rules the commodity market.
If the public perceives you and your service as a commodity, then the only differentiator you have is price. For most travel consultants, this is not the situation they want to encourage. Any form of price-cutting or rebating is a disaster for a travel professional. What appears to the consumer as a 5% difference in price is very likely to be as much as a 50% reduction in your bottom line. Therefore, if you want to differentiate your travel practice on some factor other than price, take the time to formulate a new articulation of your value proposition. Put simply – why would someone purchase your services, especially when Travelocity has the same travel products for less?
So if price is not going to be your Unique Selling Point, what can you use? Perhaps you need a good story...
Confident in their ability, good travel agents know how they are different from others in the market. They continually work to refine their abilities and to make their brand accessible to consumers by ensuring that their brand message is absolutely clear in every point of contact with the public. Once they have defined themselves, they maintain their brand and remain true to it. On occasion, this will cost them a client or a sale. The travel agent who has defined themselves via their expertise and devotion to quality will not bemoan the loss of a client over a challenge to “beat a price”. The authentic travel agent will remain true to his or her own values and ideals.
What sets you apart? Good marketers understand what makes them truly different from other travel consultants. What is your point of differentiation? If you cannot figure out who you are, the public will not be able to figure it out either. The mandate to clarify, refine and articulate your brand message is an absolute requirement for success. If you suffer from an inability to articulate who you are as an agent, then your clients will be equally confused about why they should use you.
What qualities do you own? What makes you unique? As an exercise write down your unique qualities and clarify them. How do you communicate those qualities? What do you do every day that demonstrates them to your employees, the public and your clients? How does your advertising and marketing collateral bear out your identity?
It’s time you discovered who you are.
Being able to position your company’s unique value is a big part of the branding exercise and necessary to engineering the way that the public perceives your travel practice. When you position your travel practice, you set the expectations the public has when they do business with you. The good thing about positioning is that, as the word implies, it is largely under your control. You get to determine the key psychological understanding the public takes away from your marketing efforts.
Position correctly and your sales efforts are going to be more easily undertaken: you and your client will be working from the same set of understandings. Position incorrectly and the public will fail to understand your service or will operate with their own default understanding about what a “travel agent” does. Thus, what is most important is for the travel agent to undertake positioning deliberately. To simply begin marketing oneself as a travel consultant without serious consideration of positioning is to allow the public to proceed with their own perceptions of your services. The resulting interactions with your potential clients are likely to be a muddle of conflicting understandings.
You want to position early in the relationship. It is more difficult to change someone’s mind than it is to create a first impression. If a potential client misunderstands who you are and therefore has little interest, it can be very difficult to re-capture their attention at a later time.
How To Position Your Brand
There are a number of ways for a travel consultant to position their practice. The first way is the one we want least want to use: price. Many agencies openly market themselves based on price. They market “deals” and “specials” on an ongoing basis. Marketing on price is possible only when the business plan is geared to generate high volumes to compensate for low margins. Marketing by differentiating yourself on price means that your business will be largely transactional. Each time a client comes to you, they are concerned with price and price only. Because of the low margins inherent in price differentiation, there is little left over for customer service or for correcting mistakes.
Businesses will often market commodities based on price alone. This is the Walmart model: A 42 inch Sony LCD Television is the same whether you purchase it at Walmart or Target. The only differentiator is typically price. Location can be a differentiator if either store operates without local competition. But in a competitive situation, pricing rules the commodity market.
If the public perceives you and your service as a commodity, then the only differentiator you have is price. For most travel consultants, this is not the situation they want to encourage. Any form of price-cutting or rebating is a disaster for a travel professional. What appears to the consumer as a 5% difference in price is very likely to be as much as a 50% reduction in your bottom line. Therefore, if you want to differentiate your travel practice on some factor other than price, take the time to formulate a new articulation of your value proposition. Put simply – why would someone purchase your services, especially when Travelocity has the same travel products for less?
So if price is not going to be your Unique Selling Point, what can you use? Perhaps you need a good story...