Creating a Roadmap for Growing

Your Home Based

Part 5 - Marketing and Sales Plans

By Sherrie Funk

In talking with travel agency owners all over the country, we have found a couple of very interesting facts:

Few agencies have a business plan. Most don’t distinguish their business plan from their marketing plan.

Your marketing plan is only one component of your business plan. If you can’t reach customers, you can’t stay in business. It’s the most basic business truth. That’s why an effective marketing plan to contact and motivate customers is vital for your agency’s success.

Because reaching customers costs money, and money is always limited, your marketing strategy must be carefully and thoughtfully designed. It sets forth the specific steps you will take to promote and sell travel products and services, and provide a timetable for those actions to occur.

A marketing plan is the first key to success. Zig Ziglar, a wonderful motivational speaker and writer, tells the story of the airplane pilot who takes off on a flight from Dallas to New York, gets blown a little off course, returns to the airport and starts again. Obviously, very few flights would get to their destinations if pilots were this shaky in their ability to deal with setbacks.

The secret of a marketing plan is that it enables you to see your ultimate goal with clarity, and it keeps the minor setbacks and failures along the way from distracting your attention away from your goal. Just as important, a plan helps you communicate your vision to your employees.

The Five Critical Elements of Your Marketing Plan
In this issue, we’ll take you through five critical steps and help you create your own plan.

Step 1: The Benefit to Your Customers
The only travel agencies that succeed today are those that offer a benefit to the customer that is greater than the cost to the customer. Agency owners and managers frequently confuse features and benefits. Features are elements of a service or product from a supplier that deliver a benefit.

Think about the last cruise vacation you sold to a client. The client was thinking about what they wanted: a safe environment, nice accommodations, the abundance of food, lots of activities for their kids, etc. It’s not hard to translate these benefits for the customer into features: cruise ship safety, a cabin with a balcony, traditional and alternative dining included in the cost, kids’ counselors on board. It’s the benefits, not the features, that sell the cruise.

But what do people want? Understanding the answer to this question can unlock the potential of your marketing plan. As soon as you can distinguish between wants and basic needs, as soon as you understand how to talk directly to the consumer’s psyche, you can begin to establish your agency’s role in their life.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that the only reason people buy from your agency is price. After all, your competitors offer virtually the same products from the same preferred suppliers. You can transform your agency by focusing on your customer and delivering exactly what they want and expect. The travel agency trash heap is filled with agencies that cloned themselves just like their competitors, but cut their rates and made less in commissions.

Step 2: What Business Are You In?
You’d be amazed how much easier it is to succeed when you create a travel agency that people really want to buy from. Here’s an example of success in the travel industry:
Southwest Airlines opened service to a number of cities that already had quite a few major airlines. Yet their flights were quickly booked. People liked the low fares, the friendly people and the excellent service. What does this have to do with a travel agency? Southwest identified a genuine need on the part of customers to use their airline. They offered a clear and distinct advantage, and positioned themselves to reach consumers with a personal message about how their lives would be better once they flew with them (benefit to customer).

Step 3: Who Buys the Travel Products You Sell?
Once you’ve established the benefits of your agency, you need to identify target markets for your suppliers. If you said “everyone” is a target market, try again. Very few suppliers that you sell appeal to everyone. Identify exactly who wants to buy what from you. Find out their age, income, race, marital status – whatever differentiates your market.
If you have trouble identifying a market, it may be time to start again. But this time, work backward. Start with the market first, and then find a supplier for that market. For example, you might find that there are a lot of baby boomers with limited incomes in your market. However, you’ve had a number of these same types of clients take short cruises. How do you get more of them to cruise?

After you’ve worked your way through this process (and it may take a few tries) you will know the benefits you’re offering to your target market. Turn this knowledge into a one- or two-sentence marketing statement that makes clear what you are offering and to whom. For example:
Noah’s Ark Travel offers motorcoach tours to Branson, MO, to church groups.
Noah’s Ark Travel offers cruises for families on both Carnival and Royal Caribbean cruise lines, known for their children’s on-board programs.
Noah’s Ark Travel specializes in cruise vacations geared toward the luxury market.
Noah’s Ark Travel offers free vacation counseling for senior citizens in the midtown area.

Notice that in each case you can clearly visualize the audience – in some cases, you could even buy a mailing list of every possible customer.

Step 4: Your Objectives, Strategies and Actions
Now that you have positioned your agency and the travel products you will sell, you’re ready to create the section on what you want to do, how you intend to do it and what it will cost. To write this section of your marketing plan, you will need to look at the goals that you’ve set for your agency for the next three to five years. The question now is, How will you reach these goals? Maybe you need to grow your group business, or you want to branch out into the luxury cruise market. Is Hawaii a destination you want to specialize in? How will you reach the market for this product? Maybe you just want to increase your FIT business with a specific supplier.

First, you will want to choose three to five areas in which to increase your business – FITs, Groups (affinity, incentive, or speculative?), Corporate Travel, Luxury Cruisers – whatever you see as a lucrative market for you and your agency, and turn these areas into objectives. But how are you going to increase this business and by what percentage? What actions (or sales plans) will be needed to carry out your objectives, and what is your timeline to do this? Of equal importance, what is all of this going to cost? Do you have suppliers who will offer co-op assistance for advertising and direct mail?
This is the real “meat” of your marketing plan. A simple outline for your marketing plan consists of:
Your objective;
The strategies you will use to obtain your objective;
The actions needed to carry out your strategies;
The cost to do the promotions needed.

Step 5: A Month-to-Month Implementation Timetable
This is a pretty self-explanatory. After you have decided the areas you want to grow in your agency, how you’re going to do this, the actions you will need to take and your budget, you will then need to work out the calendar for the next year (or two, or three) to carry out your plan. This needs to be done in a logical fashion. You may not be able to do everything in your marketing plan in the first quarter, but over a two-year period, you can achieve the objectives you’ve set out in your plan.

MARKETING AND SALES PLAN WORKSHEET
A little market planning can go a long way. Let’s start the process. Before spending a dollar on marketing, advertising and promotion, ask yourself these questions to be sure you’re ready to start:
What benefit does your agency offer your customer?
Exactly who are your target customers? Be specific.
What benefits do you offer that your competition doesn’t?
If you could use just two sentences to describe what your agency stands for, what would they be?
What barriers exist to keep others from stealing your market share?
How will you (personally) communicate with your customers?
How will you measure the response of your promotions?
Do you have sufficient manpower and technology to deal with increased demand?

For this section of your marketing plan worksheet, you will need to decide where you want your agency to go in the next one to three years. Choose at three least areas where you want to increase your agency’s business.

For each of these areas, write an objective for what you want to attain. These will be three separate objectives in your marketing plan. Now you have to figure out how you will attain these objectives by writing the strategies you will use. For example, if one of your objectives is to increase your group business by 20% in the next year, how do you plan to do this?

You now know what you want to do, and how you want to attain your objectives, but you must now decide what actions you have to take to actually carry out the strategies. If your strategy is to offer a speaker’s bureau at no charge to civic and service clubs in order to increase your group business, your actions would be 1) send out letters to all clubs in your area, 2) set appointments for speaking engagements, 3) follow-up with the person responsible for making decisions regarding travel for the club.

The last item in your marketing plan under each objective will be your estimated budget to carry out your actions.

Sherrie Funk and husband Charlie own Just Cruisin! Plus, Nashville. They founded the Travel Agent Management Academy to educate owners and managers about the techniques that have been instrumental to their agency’s success.