​Niche Marketing

It is nearly impossible to overstate the importance of Niche Marketing. Developing and marketing a niche area of expertise is one of the best possible ways to differentiate your travel practice from the competition. As an expert in a particular theme or destination, you can quickly establish your travel agency as the only reasonable resource to which consumers should turn when considering travel in your niche venue.

Understand, the concept of adopting a niche is often misconstrued. Niche marketing is a way of helping you focus on locating new clients, not a set of restrictions on your business offerings. Niche marketing is not necessarily about gearing your entire business to a particular type of travel. It is about segmenting your marketing efforts to focus on particular groups of people, however.

Properly executed, niche marketing is a terrific way of locating and marketing to a group of potential clients in a highly effective and cost efficient manner.

One great advantage of a niche market is the way in which it helps you locate potential clients. When you are marketing “travel” to the world at large, everyone is your potential market and you lack focus. When your market is “adventure travelers”, however, you know where to find them. When your market is “golfers”, you know where to find them. Once you have located your market, it is much less costly to reach out to them as opposed to using much less efficient “shotgun” approaches.

When you focus on a niche, you very quickly become an expert. You will be able to speak with authority on your topic and marketing will be a matter of speaking directly to those who share an affinity for your niche. As an expert in a niche, your ability to generate referrals and word of mouth advertising will be amplified as those who have used you in the past tell others interested in similar travel experiences. You will also develop deeper and richer relationships with the suppliers that you use as they come to understand your devotion to their area of business.

The lesson of effective niche marketing is this: It is important to be clear about the market you are addressing and to address that market clearly. This might require you to have one marketing brochure or presentation for adventure travel and another for senior escorted tours and yet another for golf travel. You do not have to devote your practice exclusively to any of these niches, but you can devote some of your marketing tactics and collateral to the niche. Then, choose the appropriate marketing tools and delivery for the market you are addressing.

There are three steps to developing your niche market strategy:

1. Choose a niche market for which you have some affinity and study it. Every niche has its own language. Vow to become an expert, to speak the idiom of your niche fluently. Open a file to curate information. What is important to the niche participants? Buy some magazines read by people in the niche.  Spend some time on the internet studying the marketing of others in the niche. What are their unique selling points? What elements seem essential? What is missing from their marketing?
2. Create your own approach to the niche market. How will you distinguish your own approach to the market? How will you benefit participants in a way no other company does? What types of marketing collateral will you use? In what ways will you approach and engage the niche? Spend time figuring out the demographic of your selected niche. Where do the people who are in that niche market congregate? How can you best reach them? How can you benefit them in ways others are neglecting? Develop a plan.
3. Engage the niche. Address the niche leaders and community through cost-effective avenues. Form relationships first and then begin to address their needs. Everything you do should be done in the context of authentic marketing and relationships. Become the buzz in the niche, utilizing the bonds you form with members. Develop testimonials with every success and use campaign marketing to hit the audience from many different angles. Become the only logical choice for their travel opportunities.

Chances are, you will quickly realize that not far out of your reach is a group of potential clients just waiting for you to grace them with your presence.

How Niches Relate to Blue Ocean Strategies

Think back to our discussions of Blue Ocean Strategy. Niche marketing by itself is not Blue Ocean, but blue ocean strategies will assist you in developing a powerful niche practice. To develop a true Blue Ocean Strategy, it is necessary to create a value innovation so creative, so filled with WOW factor, you leave all competition behind. Certainly your chosen niche market will eliminate much of the competition. But if you only then operate in a “business as usual” fashion, your strategy will lack the dynamic potential of true Blue Ocean Strategies.

Remember not to take the idea below as a fully formed business plan “out of the box”  but let’s look to another example, knowing you can accomplish the same exercise with any niche.

Let’s use a niche I have recently been studying as an example – genealogy. If you list your ten closest friends, the chances are pretty high their last names reveal something of their ancestry. Genealogy is a field in which most of us at some time or another take an interest, if only in passing. What if your travel practice specialized in Genealogy Travel? Standard travel agent fare would be booking the cheapest flight and a hotel to small town in Ireland, maybe giving the client a destination guide and a bottle of wine. Bon voyage! Not much of a plan or business, though. You, however, are a Blue Ocean Strategist. You create tremendous leaps of value instead.

Here are some possibilities:

• You provide clients with a white paper on Genealogy.
• You seek out a local expert in genealogy and sponsor quarterly or monthly seminars on how to conduct genealogical research.
• Perhaps you even start a club and your clients and potential clients become “members”.
• You arrange a special program through Ancestry.com for your club members to begin tracing out their family tree and establish a relationship with one of their ProGenealogists to work with interested members.
• You assist members to utilize the services of AncestryDNA.com to discover family history through genetic ethnicity.
• You form relationships within your niche with a tour operator to work with your clients and provide customized tours in key locations with a variety of accommodations and transportation offers.
• You research the location of records for clients and days when public records are available for your clients to access.
• You do some background research to assist clients to locate the right villages, the right churches and public office location for records. You arrange for local assistance for the research effort.
• Upon returning home, you assist clients in preparing a presentation of what they learned for others in your club to view and enjoy at the next meeting.

Remember, the addition of each of these services is meant to enhance the billable value of your travel planning practice. No discounts here, no rebates. No competition. Naturally, it is important to choose a niche market for which you have affinity. You can use these same principles to develop value innovations for your own niche whether it be golf, birdwatching, photography, music or any other possibility. For creative minds there are no limits!