Travel Masters Podcast
Founded by travel goddess and CEO of Small World Big Fun, Cindy Minor and sales training expert Morris Sims, The Travel Masters Learning Community (click the link and join us there too) is here to help you grow in the world of travel and achieve greatness!
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Travel Masters Podcast
Mastering the Art of Travel Marketing: Insights for Boosting Your Business
Ready to transform your travel business with expert marketing insights? On this episode of Travel Masters, we're joined by Tim Fitzpatrick, president of Rialto Marketing, who shares his remarkable journey from wholesale distribution to becoming a leading marketing consultant. Discover how effective marketing strategies can be the game-changer your travel business needs to generate awareness and attract leads. Tim delves into the symbiotic relationship between marketing and sales, explaining how marketing efforts draw in potential clients while sales efforts turn them into loyal customers. Learn how staying top-of-mind with your audience ensures your travel services are the first they think of when planning their next adventure.
But that's not all—Tim also tackles the topic of niche marketing and trust-building. By focusing on specific interests like specialized trips to Iceland, you can attract a dedicated client base without losing broader business opportunities. Tim emphasizes the power of repeat business and strong client communication, ensuring that satisfied customers keep coming back. His passion for travel and personal experience with destinations adds an authentic touch to his marketing approach, helping you build stronger connections with your clients. Tune in and equip yourself with the tools to become the go-to resource for travel planning through smart, trust-focused marketing strategies.
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Welcome to the Travel Masters podcast. We're here to help travel advisors and travel agency owners get what they really want from their business. I'm Morris Sims and I'm going to be your host for our podcast. I'm an ex-chemical engineer turned life insurance agent. I got to tell you selling life insurance was a lot more fun for me than being an engineer. After a few years, they asked me to teach other people how to do what I was doing. And well, long story short, we wound up in New York City for 20 years. That was quite a change for a young Alabama boy. I retired after 20 years as the vice president and chief learning officer, where my team and I trained over 12,000 agents and their managers to be independent business owners and sales professionals. Now I'm not one to stop working, so I started my own business and I was blessed to find a sweet spot with travel professionals that I was able to help. Now I've got several travel agency consulting clients and I'm the co-founder of the Travel Masters Learning Community, where we provide opportunities for travel professionals to become more effective, efficient and to get what they want from their business.
Speaker 1:On this podcast, I'm going to be interviewing guests that I believe are going to have a message that can be of help to you, our travel professional community and I'll do some solo episodes as well with some other stuff that I really think can help you and your business. So, with all that said, hey, let's get this party started with today's episode. What do you say? Tim Fitzpatrick is our guest today on the Travel Masters podcast. Tim's the president of Rialto Marketing. I've known Tim for a couple of years now and I tell you what he's one of the most brilliant minds in the world of marketing that I've met and I'm really proud and excited to introduce you to Tim. Tim, welcome to the show, morris thanks for having me, man.
Speaker 3:God, I got big shoes to fill after saying that, so dang.
Speaker 1:Why don't you take, like you know, 15, 20 seconds and tell us about you and how you got into this marketing thing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, gosh, I you know. So I am a marketing consultant, advisor and outsourced or part-time marketing executive, and so what I do is I help clients build or upgrade and then manage their marketing engine so they can get where they want to go faster. And we do that by focusing on three areas of marketing strategy, which I think of like fuel planning, where we're outlining the vehicles that you're going to use, and then leadership, where either we jump into the driver's seat or we help guide and advise clients so they feel feel comfortable being that driver to get those vehicles to the intended destination. So you know, I started my professional career in wholesale distribution, grew that business.
Speaker 3:I was partners with my dad for nine years. We sold it, got out of that and when I decided to get into marketing, it was just like man. Marketing is so important because if we don't have marketing generating awareness and leads for our businesses, we're a best kept secret and we're going to go out of business if we're in that boat. So you got to have marketing super important. So that's why I decided to jump into it and that's what I'm doing with marketing.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's great. That is super. Well, tim, as you and I have discussed, our audiences are made up of a bunch of wonderful travel professionals, travel advisors, travel agency owners, and marketing is something that you just have to do in any kind of a sales organization like this. And while that is, in today's world people don't like that word, that four-letter word, s-a-l-e, but in reality we're all in sales, brother. Best salespeople I know are mothers of toddlers and teenagers. Best sale I ever made was to Mrs Sims, and that was about 40 some odd years old now, so that was a pretty good sale, pretty good retention on that sale. Anyhow, the fact is we are all in sales and that's what we're talking about here. Any sales organization where you have to go out and find people to talk to requires some kind of marketing, doesn't it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. The way I look at it is. Marketing comes on the front end. It generates warm leads that then get passed over to sales, and sales picks up that conversation from there, and so they're. They're separate, but they are very much intertwined and they need to be in alignment with one another, otherwise you're going to run into hurdles that are going to slow down your growth.
Speaker 1:I look at it and I think about marketing as attracting people to the business and then sales picks it up from there and actually puts them into the sales process, where we start building a business relationship and trying to help them solve their problem, which that's all sales is. I'm going to help you solve your problem. Let me figure out what it is and how I can best help you solve it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know one of the simplest definitions of marketing that always stuck with me was that it's getting someone who has a need or a problem you can solve to know, like and trust you. Bingo, that's it. And so we're staying in front of those people until they reach that point where they need to solve this problem that you can help them solve. Because, in the case of travel agents, we're not traveling 52 weeks out of the year at least most of us aren't and so we're not always in need of that travel agent. But when we are in need of that travel agent for the one or two weeks or three weeks out of the year that we're booking a vacation, who are we going to think of? And if you're not top of mind, they're not coming to you. And so the job of our marketing is to get in front of those people, stay in front of them, get them to know, like and trust us, so that when the need becomes great enough, they think of you and that's where they go.
Speaker 1:I've heard all sorts of things over the years, Tim. Most recently, somebody said in teaching a class on marketing that I heard it takes 10 touches, if you will, 10 times, for you to reach out and touch somebody. It sounds like a great slogan, doesn't it? Reach out and touch someone. It takes 10 times before they're going to actually be ready to engage and do business with you. Prior to this, I've heard seven. I don't know what the magic number is, but the fact is the one thing you do in whatever platform for marketing you want to use, the one thing you do isn't going to make it work. This is a long-term kind of a deal, isn't it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the way I think about it is. Marketing is not a light switch that you just turn on and off when you need it. It's a flywheel. Right, you've got to feed the flywheel consistently. It builds momentum, and once it builds momentum, as long as you keep feeding it, you're going to be okay. But if you stop feeding it, then it's going to take that much longer to build momentum back up, and so it's just something that we do consistently over time.
Speaker 1:So what do you start? I mean, if I'm out there and I'm a travel advisor or an agency owner and I've Two cases, two scenarios, I guess, that are interesting to me. One is the travel agent or travel agency owner who's been working themselves very, very hard to build a business and they've gotten to a level of business and feel like they've kind of hit a plateau and we need to do something to give them that kickstart and get them moving forward. And the other is the fairly new independent consultant travel agent who is out there, you know, walked into this business thinking social media was going to be their one and only thing they had to do. They're finding out rapidly that don't work. Where do these people begin tim? Where do you?
Speaker 3:yeah, how do we have to get? How do we help them get past it? So there's a there's a few things I'll share here. Um, hopefully the audience will find this helpful, but from a marketing standpoint, everything starts with your target market. You know who are you going to serve, who are the ideal clients that you want to serve, Because we can't target broadly. You know, if you're targeting broadly, it's just not going to resonate with people and, frankly, it's very difficult to be great at doing everything. Right. We can't be. We're not great at doing everything.
Speaker 3:You know there's when you think about all the various trips and travel experiences somebody can have. There's no way you can be really good at all of those, and so I think you need to niche down and pick something that excites you right, and that you really love. And so a couple of things to think about here. One, if you're an existing agent, right, and you've been doing this for a while you've worked with clients. I call them the three power questions who do you love working with, who are your most profitable customers and who are you getting great outcomes for? They took this trip and they're like oh my God, that is the best trip I've ever taken in my entire life.
Speaker 3:When you ask yourself those questions, you've got this subgroup of clients that you love working with, you made good money off of it and they were super happy. It's that group that you start to look at, like, where are the commonalities Right? Are they families? Are they, you know, retired couples? You know what are the demographics around it, you know? Do they tend to be higher income people? Are they middle income? Where are they at?
Speaker 3:And what you may also start to find is they went to very specific areas, right, and they, or the types of trips, and I think it's there that you can start to dig deeper and go gosh, you know, there's a lot of commonalities, Like I'm finding that some of my best clients were these types of people and they took trips to this specific area or this specific type of trip. Right, you know, an ocean cruise, or or small river cruises, or they were trips to Italy, whatever it may be. It's there where you can start to go. Okay, you know what I'm going to focus on ocean cruises or I'm going to focus on helping people that want to go on trips to this specific area.
Speaker 1:I'm going to focus on trips to uh, to, to newfoundland, yeah I mean, you know where it could be? Wherever right, yeah ireland, greece, whatever, yeah, greece alabama I mean, you know, maybe not but okay.
Speaker 3:So if you're a new travel agent, I think you can go through a similar process, but you're not going to be looking at clients because you don't have any clients at that point.
Speaker 3:But I think what you can do there is think about some of your past travel experiences. Right, have you traveled to places that you really loved, that you would love to help people have that same experience? Or are there places you would love to travel that you haven't been able to go to yet and you're like gosh, I want to be the best at trips to Australia. So that's what I'm going to start doing and just take a pick. Now you can also look at where, if you're new and you haven't worked with clients, you can also start to look at hey, I don't have profitable clients yet, but if I was going to sell certain types of vacations, which ones are going to tend to be more profitable for me, and that can also help hone in on gee what types of trips might I want to focus on? Right, because there's nothing wrong with making money. If you don't make money, you're not going to be able to help people.
Speaker 1:That's the reason we're in this business, in any business, in the first place is to generate gross revenue. Tim, a couple of questions for you, I guess, to start out with here. When you're looking at that brand new agent and you're looking at, I like to think there are two things that we're looking at here. What's the profile of the individual, the person that you believe you can build a relationship with and have them trust you? You mentioned trust earlier and I still think that's probably the basis of any good relationship, a business relationship or any other relationship for that matter. Trust is what makes it all worthwhile. So, who are the kinds of people that you believe you could build a trusting relationship with? And then kind of narrow that down to some extent.
Speaker 1:And sure, I love the idea of where do you like, where do you want to go, what kind of travel is important to you, and we niche that down. Here's the point. Once you've niched that down, let's take an off the wall kind of a thought and somebody out there is going to say it's not off the wall, it's what I do. Off the wall for me. I'm going to focus on trips to Iceland. Yeah, and that's going to be my niche. I'm going to focus on trips to Iceland using this cruise line and we're going to match up an ocean cruise with events in Iceland. Iceland, how do you pronounce it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, iceland, yeah, iceland, I think that's great, that's wonderful, I'm glad you're going to do it. But what do you do when somebody calls you up and says I've got four kids that I want to go to Disney World? Do you tell them sorry, no, I don't do. I only do Iceland, I don't do Disney. No, you don't have to do that. No, you don't. I've always said that you may have a niche, you may have a strategy, you may have a specific idea of what you want your business to do. But if somebody walks in your door and says I want to buy an alligator, sell them a dadgum alligator.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right yeah.
Speaker 3:Or alligator, sell them a dead gum. Alligator, yeah, right, yeah, or is that off off play? Well then, the reality is like, when we say focus, it's just focusing on marketing efforts. Right, to attract specific people. Once those people start to work with you if you did a great job, you know, I mean, they may not be going back to iceland every year, but they still want you to handle their vacations because you did such a great job and there there's nothing wrong with that. You can continue to work with those people.
Speaker 3:But the people coming in on the front end are attracted because you have such a specific message and you have expertise in a very specific area, right, you know it's like do you want your general practitioner doing heart surgery? No, right, you want a heart surgeon to do it. And so you know that specificity. You're still going to attract other people and then you can choose to work and you know, look, maybe you're so busy that you do go. You know what, I've got somebody else that specializes in this and I'm just going to refer you to them. And you know they pay you a referral fee or a commission, you know, so you don't always have to to take the business that comes to you. You can choose, but we're focusing our marketing efforts because it becomes much simpler when we focus.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and when you focus? Gates and Buffett both said the most important skill in business is being able to focus, because otherwise you never can go down deep and really learn anything about any part of it. But the fact is, when you focus, you're attracting people to that thing, as you said, but you're not limiting yourself in any way shape, form or fashion. This is we're not saying you should limit yourself. We're saying do this to focus your time, your efforts and your resources, money in these areas to attract the people that you want to attract.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know well, I think I could do a great business doing trips to river cruises in Europe. Have you ever been on a river cruise in Europe? No, well, why do you think that might be? Well, somebody said it might be good. You need to do something that's going to excite you and bring you pleasure and get you going, because otherwise it's hard to get up every day and keep going.
Speaker 3:it's just kind of the way it is I certainly think there's probably an advantage if you've traveled to the area. I don't think it's a prerequisite. No, yeah, but I think when you have a conversation with the potential client, you're like you know, when I was there last, right you know, or my last trip right, that's gold.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's just out gold. And you know, the other thing you mentioned, Tim, when you mentioned trust is something that I'd like to remind folks of. The people who have done business with you once will do business with you again. Yeah, and in fact, isn't it easier? Wouldn't you rather go to somebody who already trusts you and has already built some kind of a good relationship with you because of business you've done? Don't you think it'll be easier to be there when they want to travel the next time, as compared to finding a stranger on the street and building trust with them from the get-go?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. And the other thing is and I don't know these stats, but I'm sure they're out there, you guys may even have them you know, like the average person, you know how frequently do they go on vacation and where do they typically go, because once you've worked with clients, you're not stop. You don't stop communicating with them, right? You continue to communicate with them and, based on when they last traveled, I think you can probably get a pretty decent idea of when they might travel again, or the, or the specific times of year where people tend to travel more, and those are great opportunities to continue to touch the people.
Speaker 1:That you've worked with? Yeah, I think so, I really do, and because, again, it all relates back to the word you used, tim, which is trust.
Speaker 2:Well, that's all the time we have for this week. Folks, Stay tuned for next week when Tim and Morris continue their conversation on marketing right here on the Travel Masters podcast. Make it a great week. Go meet somebody new you.