Marketing: Offer your clients a consistent branded journey

Nothing stays still in the travel industry for long, so a key challenge is brand fragmentation – with multiple brands evolving online and offline, agents must build brand awareness and loyalty beyond local level. The path to purchase for agents has become hugely complex – customers use multiple devices, powered by different technology, in various retail environments, and it’s hard for any agent to scale up and retain operational consistency.

Travel agents have long recognised that loyalty is best driven through added value and service – which are often best managed locally so that control of standards can be retained.

However, with online searches playing a critical part in holiday selection, we have to recognise that customers, in a world of complex choice, seek out anchor brands that reassure them. You can only get to a place if you currently know where you are – searching online through thousands of options is quickly simplified by going to the sites you know. In the same way, customers head to agents that they know and are familiar with – the essence of branding itself.

So how do you ensure your travel agent brand is delivered consistently?

In marketing terms, the technology and tools that are now available to talk to customers are plentiful – automated emails built from modular templates provide cost-effective and flexible ways of delivering “keep in touch” strategies. SMS capabilities allow personal and urgent updates at low cost, and software platforms such as Exact Target provide friendly dashboards and complete customer contact strategies at the touch of a button.

It’s good policy to visualise the whole customer journey – simply printing and mapping out examples of all customer communication across a wall shows quickly whether tone of voice and message are consistent and relevant.

Of course, technology allows us to measure how engaged customers are with your brand – from open rates to click-through rates, it’s relatively easy to build a picture of where your customer drop-out areas are – these are often a precursor to customers heading somewhere else.

Creating a consistent brand that customers will engage with and become loyal to depends on how customers see your brand as different from others in the marketplace. We know that price-sensitive customers are less loyal and more likely to switch – the key is to stand for something different but relevant.

Many agents are building repeat business through service and added value, but how do you ensure that the experience is consistent outside of marketing. If you’re going to build a brand that is based on service, there are some key questions to ask first.