Great Customers are the Fix for Everything
Whether you manage a real estate brokerage, digital marketing agency, software company, e-commerce retailer, or travel agency, your business is your customers.
If your customers are not good, your business will suffer, as you might already know. And when you’re not acquiring the most qualified, enabled, and stable customers, real business challenges begin to surface. Too often, and I hope this isn’t you, we capture the easy leads or the low-hanging fruit, often via a poorly funded marketing strategy. Unfortunately, the low-quality lead funnel turns into an insidious threat to your company.
What we need to recognize is that customer acquisition affects every area of a company’s operations, not just immediate sales.
No One Likes Bad Customers
Throughout the years, I’ve seen salespeople and customer service people complain about some leads and customers. They don’t like the low-quality ones that get caught in the traffic funnel. They waste time and energy, demoralize, and create further friction in the company. Unfortunately, all new businesses suffer from this issue as they climb the quality ladder, given they haven’t yet established a quality brand themselves.
What’s implied, is that good customers should appear like magic via low-funded marketing campaigns and companies that haven’t proven themselves.
Well, they don’t. And a big PPC campaign can just flood your agents with low-quality, price-sensitive and indecisive shoppers. High-quality leads in contrast are more confident and certain of their intent and are financially enabled to choose based on their desires.
There are processes and content changes you can make to discourage low-quality leads — to say “we’re not the company for you.” In fact, this exclusivity is a big part of what I do in content strategy — to attract well defined, high-quality prospects.
This all highlights the importance of using high-quality marketing and respecting your own obsession with your ideal customers. Give them the best customized and helpful content and use high-quality graphics, imagery and content experiences. Low-cost marketing approaches often lead to low quality customers. You get what you bargain for!
Bad Customers can be a BIG Liability
It’s important to keep in mind: Bad customers waste time and resources, invest less in your product/services, don’t utilize the key value of your product/service, and end up leaving bad reviews of your company. This means they’re a repeating entry on the liability side of your balance sheet.
If we focus on the travel businesses specifically, as an example, we get a closer look at how poor-quality customers ruin our business. If we instead insist on marketing and promotional strategies that attract exclusively high-quality customers, who believe we’re the only company for them, we find our company reaching its peak in operations, revenue, long-term value, and customer loyalty. And good customers encourage you to sell trips, destinations and experiences that good customers typically buy.
Good Customers are a BIG Asset
Good customers as you’ll see here, are more than a better stream of revenue — they’re the lifeblood of a vibrant business that will go on forever, profitably, and with a happy agency staff.
Let’s explore how attracting high-quality leads or qualified new customers can benefit each area of your travel company through each business challenge:
Managing a Large Client Base:
Benefit: High-quality marketing provides more well-targeted prospects to streamline client management allowing for better segmentation, personalized service, and less churn and friction with prospects and customers.
Building and Maintaining Online Brand Credibility:
Benefit: New customers attracted through quality, effective marketing help enhance credibility through positive reviews and testimonials, and boost overall brand reputation. It also helps create valuable brand ambassadors and followers who extend reach into the web and social media marketplaces. And promoting within high quality travel sites elevates your travel brand.
Evolving Traveler Expectations:
Benefit: High-quality, reliable, enabled customer leads often have specific expectations, allowing travel agencies to tailor services and enhance customer satisfaction better than competitors.
Handling Last-Minute Cancellations:
Benefit: Attracting quality loyal customers can reduce cancellations, as enabled/loyal clients will honor commitments and provide advance notice if plans change.
Dealing with Strong Competition:
Benefit: targeting high-quality leads encourages you to differentiate your travel agency from the crowd with unique offers to specific travel audiences.
Long Sales Cycle:
Benefit: high quality leads often require less persuasion, promotion, or incentives and it’s easier to access them during all points in the sales cycle (buyers journey).
Logistical Management:
Benefit: well-targeted customers leads to more predictable demand patterns, making trip logistics easier to manage through better product/service planning, communication and resource allocation.
Maintaining Service Standards:
Benefit: High-quality leads whether from online sources or word-of-mouth referrals create more confidence, trust, and they appreciate service quality and standards and will participate without bringing grief and infractions.
Data Management Issues:
Benefit: Attracting quality leads allows for more accurate and insightful data and analysis (real paying customers), leading to improved insights into your niche customer preferences and behaviors.
Cash Flow Management:
Benefit: New customers contribute to consistent revenue streams and low collection costs, helping stabilize cash flow and allowing for reinvestment in the business.
Adapting to Technology Changes:
Benefit: High-quality leads can be nurtured through personalization and automated systems, reducing the burden of slow manual processes and allowing for smoother transitions to new helpful technologies.
Regulatory Compliance:
Benefit: A solid customer base provides the financial stability needed to invest in compliance measures and training, and reduce legal risks.
Seasonal Demand Fluctuations:
Benefit: Attracting a diverse range of high-quality traveler leads year-round helps mitigate the financial turbulence of seasonal trends with a wider range of packages, partnerships, and a more consistent flow of revenue.
Effective Marketing Strategies:
Benefit: Quality new customers gained through targeted marketing campaigns make marketing efficient with a higher ROI and allow the hiring of specialist talent who can make the company differentiated as the best.
Customer Satisfaction Issues:
Benefit: High-quality leads are more likely to want exactly what your company offers leading to improved overall satisfaction and repeat business.
Managing Supplier Relationships:
Benefit: Strong travel marketing that delivers more, well-targeted customers allows for stronger negotiating power with suppliers, as increased business volume can lead to better deals and expanded travel experience products.
Utilizing Marketing Automation:
Benefit: Engaging high-quality leads through personalization and automation increases impact, engagement, persuasion and intent matching, which improves conversion rates.
Competing with Major OTA’s Online Booking Platforms:
Benefit: High-quality leads generated through good marketing separates small agencies from impersonal major online platforms, who gather lower quality, price-sensitive, non-loyal customers.
Coping with Increased Inquiries:
Benefit: Targeted lead generation creates inquiries from genuinely interested and enabled prospects, giving travel agents more time to spend converting them into customers.
Taking Action to Improve Your Customer Quality
Since every area of your business will be improved, it’s wise to build a plan to optimize your marketing strategy to attract these amazing customers.
You’re looking to do it affordably, which is precisely why I am the best resource.
📞 Contact Gord at 416 998 6246 for a free review of your digital marketing and how a new approach will make a big difference.
