Inbound Marketing in Travel Trade Industry - Research Proposal Example

Inbound Marketing in Travel Trade Industry Problem ment: Whether inbound marketing is the best marketing practices in travel trade industry, and what is its impact on the growth of global tourism business. In the travel trade industry, the primary stock is not any product but the services that are being traded, and the traders being the tour operator trade in various ‘travelling packages’. The tour operators sell their packages through some third-party agencies to their customers through inbound marketing. The Tele-callers in the agencies are trained professionals who handle the ‘customer queries’ and convince them to buy the travelling packages. Inbound marketing holds a major share in the total sales of the packages. It is considered as the best marketing practice nowadays, as customers usually have lots of queries and wants to plan their vacation with every minute detail. The queries are higher if the vacation is planned for an unknown destination and should be handled with professional methods. Inbound marketing Tele-callers are trained for this sort of queries handling. They interact directly with the customers to convince them and make them buy the provided package. Customer satisfaction and selling and marketing of travelling packages, are the two major features that makes inbound marketing the best marketing practice in the travel trade industry. (Sharp, 2003, pp. 90-99) In today’s world, to remain in the competition with other companies, a company is bound to have its customer service to maintain healthy relationship with their clients. With the internet and tele-media the process of marketing and selling of every product has found a new way to reach the common mass. Inbound marketing became the best possible way to convey required messages to the customers, which they cannot ignore. Inbound marketing provides the best opportunities to the companies who want to seize the customers who get in touch with them by converting their simple inquiries into profitable sales. The main task in inbound marketing is to detain new leads and reach out to those customers who are trying to buy their product. In case of travel industry, inbound marketing provides options to the existing or non-existing customers for choosing their destinations and facilitates them with different attractive packages to make their vacation enjoyable. They try to convince the customers in every possible way and make them buy their offered package. These strategies help the business to grow and reach new prospects in the competitive environment. The most important aspect of inbound marketing for a travel trade company is to present the service packages attractively in order to attract the customers who are calling them, and when the customers get interested they seize them with their attractive sales offers. (Sharp, 2003, p 90-99; McNamara, n, d) Challenges/Opportunities: Challenges: In the last few years the travel trade companies have facilitated their clients mainly with inbound marketing, providing all necessary help for solving their queries. The private as well as government oriented travel companies are providing customer care to their clients to match their expectations. With the growing internet awareness among common people, the inbound marketing is reaching new heights and facing new challenges and competition among themselves. The companies are trying to introduce new strategies to cope up with the challenges. The travel companies face very tough competition, from their rivals, and finding a proper way of marketing their services becomes quite tough for them. They try to make their services attractive with cost minimization strategy in mind, but the sale process requires proper marketing and advertisement of their service products. They also try to make their offers and packages better in comparison to their close competitors. Everyday new offers are introduced, making the competitive atmosphere tougher for companies’ survival. Hence, each company tries to do something innovative to seize the targeted clients. It’s a well known strategy of enterprises to maintain a 1:1 relationship with their clients. In today’s world, with the growth in volume of business, it is a tough challenge to understand the customers’ mentality. Inbound marketing of services involves proper need analysis of their clients and providing best suited services to them. For this, passive Tele-callers interact with their clients to find their exact needs and their budget to fulfill it. Accordingly they offer them their services. For example, a client opting for a foreign tour with high demands but low budget is quite hard to handle. The major concern from company’s point of view is to see the level of client’s satisfaction, inbound marketing has the responsibility to cope up with expectation of clients and see they are satisfied at the end of the day. The challenges mainly faced in this context is linguistic, as interacting with people from other countries involves problem of communication and understanding of languages. The inbound marketers had to communicate in the language which the client is comfortable with so that the conversation becomes friendly. A friendly atmosphere must be created during the conversation to make the clients clarify all his problems and needs. These types of problems are optimized with professionals, concentrating on particular regions of the world. They take training and learn the accent of that region to come up with a proper interaction with the client. (Needles, 2009) cross cultural communication factor are important to be dealt with. Every client might not be comfortable with English and hence options for some chosen variation in language might help. This will require trained personnel. Inbound marketing also faces the challenges of being trustworthy to their clients. As the inbound marketing in travel industry involves dealings with clients who stays abroad, the trust factor is very important in this type of business to happen. So, the inbound marketing strategies that are followed by the companies consider trust as a major factor in performing business in travel trading. To build up trustworthy atmosphere the company should have possessed strong goodwill and created a brand name for itself in the industry. So, the quality of services should be of very high standards to generate publicity for the company. There are number of telemarketing frauds reported in daily news which affected the inbound marketing and trust of clients in the telephonic interaction has reduced nowadays. Inbound marketing faces challenges in terms of achieving their targets at given amount of time by the tour operating companies. The work process in the inbound marketing is mainly based on the interactions of clients and marketers, thus efficiency of the marketers play major role in generating business. For this purpose the marketers were given efficient training to make the client comfortable in the conversation, so that they can discuss the problems and suggest best remedies and offers. (Didonna,1997) Inbound marketing in travel industry also involves targeting the group of people most likely to buy their services. As for example, the teenagers like to visit happening places where as, holy places are mostly visited by old aged people, so the marketing is done keeping these facts in mind, and offering suitable services owing to client’s age and his likings. Marketing of travelling packages, in context of inbound marketing is also a challenge, as tastes of customers varies with their region of origin and to identify their exact taste and preference is very important from marketing point of view. For example, a client residing in a region of cold climate might not prefer going out for vacation in another cold region, then for that the inbound marketer should offer him travelling packages of warm climatic region. Then there is difference of tastes in different customers some would opt for hill station whereas, some would go for sea beach areas so the marketers had to arrange for packages that are best suited to their clients. These strategies if followed properly by the marketers then the chance of closing the call rise. A challenge for marketing travelling service is to self-analyze and see whether the service is best, among the other similar travelling services prevailing in the market, or not. If not, then a research is done to rectify the drawbacks and made the service more fruitful. Brand name is very essential in inbound marketing of travel services as it is the name that represents the goodwill of a company and generates trust in the market. It’s the brand name that attracts foreign customers to call for service of the company. So, it is a challenge for the company as well as the inbound marketers to live up to the expectations, which its brand name creates. If the brand name is very high then its inbound management should be more efficient in dealings with the customer because the brand name is that which is judged by the customer and not the inbound marketer’s performance. This results in a hard challenge for the inbound management to always maintain the clean reputation of the company. To maintain their position in the market or to move up the order is also a challenge that a company deals with. Hence, it pushes its management personnel to work hard to increase their goodwill and reputation in the market. It is obvious that a top ranked company will generate more sales volume than a company with a low profile. The costs of outbound marketing are much higher than the cost of inbound marketing but they have more sale conversions. Hence, inbound marketing face challenges inside the company itself. They had to come up with new innovative selling strategies to get their business running. The inbound marketing process deals with the customer database and raw leads, to increase their sales. Sometimes the raw leads do not provide much help to the inbound Tele-callers as this leads can be fake or their database might not have been updated. Hence, the Tele-callers find it difficult to reach them, and their objectives are not fulfilled. Going out for a vacation which is located abroad is a very costly event and it is not quite affordable for middle-class people. Hence, the targeted group becomes very narrow and creates a challenge for the inbound Tele-callers to sale their travelling packages to this group. Climatic conditions of the destinations in the travelling packages are also cited as a problem in travel trade industry. It creates a challenge for the inbound marketing to convey the proper information regarding the climatic conditions of the place, in the package, to the clients to make the decision making easier for them. Opportunities: The way of conducting business for travel trading industry changed with inbound marketing. In past few years new opportunities have built up with growing social networks that provided optimized content of packages. This made selling process in inbound marketing much easier than before. In today’s competitive world, the companies focus mainly on customer interaction and pulls maximum benefit out of it. The main advantage in inbound marketing is that a customer chooses the company and is ready to share his desires and requirements with it. This gives inbound marketing a real opportunity to have a personalized communication with the customers and analyze their needs. Through various means like web, customer care, sales agents, etc inbound marketing gets the opportunity to directly interact with the customers who are showing interest in their products. Inbound marketing gives opportunity to the company to understand each clients needs and deal with the sales process accordingly. (Needles, 2009) In travel business there is major opportunity to sale packages for destinations where some important event is going to happen. The event’s name tends to pull tourists from different parts of the world and make calls to the inbound services of travel agencies. For example, events like Olympic draw tourists from all parts of the globe to the city where it is going to happen. Every country that are participating in Olympic send their representatives, players and support staff and their bookings are done by inbound marketers of different travel trade companies. This generates a lot of publicity to the city as well as the travel agencies around the world which helps their future sale in years to come. These help the travel trade companies to reach out to people across the border and extract future business. This type of events also helps the business of small scale or low profile companies to grow and create a name for themselves in the global market. Inbound marketing in country’s having lots of tourist attraction have better opportunity to flourish and develop their business than the country’s having less. The inbound marketers focus on highlighting the points of tourist’s attraction in their travelling packages. This engages and attracts the customer to visit the place increasing the chance for a successful closing of the call. With the focus on infrastructure building by every country, the links between vast places had increased. It is easier to travel to remote places now than before. This encourages tourism business in every part of the globe. People have started thinking to go to those places previously which were considered difficult to reach. This gave opportunity to the travel trade companies to arrange travelling packages for these types of destination also. Now it is up to the inbound marketers to convince their clients to visit these places. With the increase of more and more tourists visiting such remote places will increase the tourism business, helping the inbound marketers in long-run. So, this is an opportunity for the inbound marketers of travel trading companies to encourage more and more tourist to buy packages for visiting these destinations. The inbound marketing in travel industry may be carried out through a number of ways using the websites. The following illustration provides the available options which the inbound marketing process may use for marketing and advertising the brand of the travel agency. (Parnell, 2009) Management solutions: Solution Overview Web sites and call centers are the most effective inbound marketing channels that help to deliver the necessary messages, in real time, to their engaged customers or prospects. So, the system of inbound marketing in travel trade industry must increase its efficiency level to make the task of reaching them easy for their customers. To conduct real-time marketing in the travel industry, following set of management solutions are given: Highly manageable, real-time decision: The strategies followed for interaction with clients and prospects by the marketers should be flexible and easily modified in real-time decision making. The strategies followed must be easily manageable by the marketers for closing the sale. Self-learning and arbitration: To determine the best offer or package for each particular client or prospect, a configurable Bayesian algorithm should be used with the combination of integrated offer arbitration. Role-based user interfaces (UI): In the inbound marketing process unique user interfaces (UI) should be used by marketers, operational managers and other support stuffs to avoid complications and have intuitive user experience. In sighting of reports and analyses: To improve marketing results all reports on marketing performances should be studied after regular interval of time, to develop new marketing strategies if the sales process is experiencing a downturn. Deployment of audit is another solution to analyze the work performance Marketing operations management: In inbound marketing, the back-office management should have budget tracking tools to control their expenses. It should have tools to track the workflow of the marketers and a proper system of storing important data. Integration with outbound marketing capabilities: Coordination of inbound and outbound marketing can be done with a single technology to build up a single strategy for the betterment of customer’s relationship with the company. Customer awareness: Marketers should have the ability to listen carefully to the needs of the customer. For this they had to study the behavioral history of the customer online and offline to identify the actions of the customer. These indications help the marketers to identify potential customers and time of closing the sale. ( Unica, n.d ) Solution Benefits With these Inbound Marketing Solutions, the companies want their marketers to improve the sales volume and their performances. Some basic benefits that can be extracted from the application of these solutions are discussed below. Inbound customer interactions: A marketer is usually benefited from the combination of past and present information he gets from the customer. This helps him to make his present interaction with the customer, convert into sale. Cross-channel customer dialogues: Cross-channel customer dialogues which are created by the combination of marketing strategies in outbound marketing and effective dialogues from inbound marketing are extremely benefiting in today’s scenario. Optimize customer relationships: A marketer should treat a customer according to the state of the customer’s relationship with the company. This also helps the marketer to identify who is his potential customer and who is not. Increase flexibility and reducing cost: Management should increase the use of various automatic marketing processes to increase flexibility in work and reducing wastage and management cost. This requires better visibility into inbound marketing activities by the management. ( Unica, n.d ) Lesson learned: After studying the whole scenario of inbound marketing in travel trade industry, it can be said that inbound marketing is an essential part in smooth running of travel business. It not only helps in sales process but also in solving customer queries by interacting on a 1:1 basis with them. The inbound marketing becomes more essential in tourism industry with the increase of global business and their business meetings held all over the world. In today’s busy schedule it is not possible to arrange a tour manually in a short notice so, people tend to go for travel agency packages to get fruitful arrangement. It is easy for them to call a travel trading company and buy a tour package from them. This procedure is time saving and they don’t have to bother about reserving tickets and hotels for their tour. It is quite obvious in the present age to come across frauds in every business. So to escape such cases in inbound marketing activity one should always gather as much information as possible from various sources before going for a buying event. From inbound marketers point of view they should be completely transparent about every aspects of the travelling packages so that, the customers don’t have any issue to complain. This will lead to publicity and will generate goodwill for the company. During the interaction of the marketer with the customer, he should be extremely careful and attentive to the words that are exchanged. The interaction between the marketer and the customer is very important as this result in successful closing of the call. So it is learned that the inbound marketers should have the ability to listen and react accordingly with the customers and prospects for the successful closing of the call. Flourishing of inbound marketing in travel trade industry depends on various factors. The work performance of marketers as discussed above is one of the major influential factors then there is quality of services they are selling, their dealings with the customers, etc. The companies in tourism business had to compete with other companies having similar packages, which affects their sales volume. To improve the sale volume the travel trading companies should design their travelling packages with exclusive features. This exclusivity of services will attract customers to buy their offer packages and will boost up their sales volume. It is learnt that trust factor plays a major role in inbound marketing of travel trading. The travel trading companies should focus on giving high quality services to their customers so that they get some publicity for the travelling packages which they are offering. The satisfied customers will publicize their brand name among friends and relatives that might generate future sales for the company. The inbound marketers of the travel trading company might get calls from friends and relatives of existing customers if they are satisfied with the services, provided to them by the company. Another lesson learned from the above discussion is that, companies should introduce new exclusive products to grab the attention of customers. With the up gradation of tourism structure everyday, companies should have regular research on the similar products prevailing in the market. This will help them to rectify their flaws and come up with better products and services. It is also understandable with the context of inbound marketing in travel industry that major events happening in a country will boost up the revenue generation from tourism. The inbound marketers will have many opportunities to increase their sales owing to the event. This will help them to grow their business and create a name in the market. This will also give the travel trading companies a global exposure which will create space for their future sales. Why I care Inbound marketing in very essential in today’s busy world where there is no time to spent idle. People find it easier and safer to go out seeking for a travel agency rather than handling themselves all the arrangements to conduct a tour. Travel agencies provide all the details in their travelling packages to make the choice easier for a common man. If a holiday vacation is planned very urgently, then making all arrangements manually becomes quite impossible. Or if there is any urgent business meeting or event to be attended then people opt for travel agencies, and by calling the inbound marketers they can easily avail their services. All they have to do is to find a proper inbound marketer who can help them in their need, and this is the area where the inbound marketer, of a travel trade company, plays his part. The inbound marketer grabs this opportunity with both hands and delivers all possible help to the customer calling. This is why it is necessary to have inbound marketing practices in travel trade industry in present day. References: Didonna, N. (1997). How a travel-industry call center excels. Business service industry, 1-2, Available at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3700/is_199709/ai_n8780324/ (accessed on December 8, 2009) McNamara, C. (n. d). Marketing – A commonly misunderstood term, Field guide to non-profit program design, Marketing and evaluation. Available at: http://managementhelp.org/mrktng/mrktng.htm (accessed on December 8, 2009) Needles, A. (2009). The inbound marketing/ Marketing content Management crowd-A fourth camp? The Propelling brands, Available at: http://propellingbrands.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/the-inbound-marketing-marketing-content-management-crowd-%E2%80%93-a-fourth-camp/ (accessed on December 8, 2009) Parnell, K. (2009) Inbound Marketing is a Money Maker for Any Size Business, available at: http://images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3572/3485563410_903d2ab9dc_o.jpg&imgrefurl=http://keithparnell.com/index.php/tag/gordon-biersch/&usg=__XhbD8CQDFBaCy5QB8KwWcGC47zU=&h=401&w=499&sz=19&hl=en&start=8&tbnid=QuPU4xE41Z5TpM:&tbnh=104&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dinbound%2Bmarketing%2Btravel%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG (accessed on December 8, 2009) Sharp, D. E, (2003). Call center operations: Design, operation and maintenance, Digital press,90-99, Available at: http://books.google.co.in/books?id=0ZdG1qF2XvYC&pg=PA96&dq=challenges+and+oppertunities+in+inbound+marketing&lr=#v=onepage&q=&f=false (accessed on December 8, 2009) Swift, R.S. (2000). Accelerating customer relationships, using CRM and relationship technologies, Prentice Hall PTR, 33-35. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=zDhMMsq-rlsC&pg=PA33&dq=inbound+marketing+challenge&ei=Y5oXS7bUJJDskwSivpTYCw#v=onepage&q=inbound%20marketing%20challenge&f=false (accessed on December 8, 2009) Shevlin, R. (2008). Everything they’ve told you about marketing is wrong, Lulu.com. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=k5C_x2udaAYC&pg=PT14&dq=inbound+marketing+problems&ei=yJwXS8q9IoL8lQS77dCSDA#v=onepage&q=&f=false (accessed on December 8, 2009) Unica, (n, d). Inbound marketing solutions. Available at: http://www.unica.com/solutions/inbound-marketing-solution.htm (accessed on December 8, 2009) Read More