Unlocking the Power of Creativity
As a travel business owner you’re not really paying for marketing execution anymore. AI and marketing software are responding to that need.
The real weakness or gap is with creativity and imagination in your marketing and promotion. More focus needs to be placed on developing the creative powers that will make your business “the only one customers will ever want.”
I spoke previously about the power of ideas in travel marketing and empowering creative staff and how we need to respect travel marketer’s imagination more. Imagination creates a unique differentiation to create new points of value to travelers.
This power of creativity doesn’t just happen. It’s important to create a nurturing environment where they can be adventurous, experience novelty/excitement, learn in the real world, and be emotionally capable of creating and crafting exceptional quality travel content.
A Few Value Points to Consider:
- real joy, enthusiasm and presence infused into your content
- a real person to relate to, connect with online, and remember
- photos/videos/social posts
- customer-testimonials, quotes, perspectives and real customer engagement
- real location expertise and insights
- more credible and trusted advice to travelers
It’s more than job skills and credentials. It’s about professional development, even for those who seem like they’re masters! Because it is difficult to create content the catches attention, makes impact, and stays in reader’s memories. And creating that quality take immersion in the travel experience. It’s not just authenticity. It’s the joy of travel, which is infused into your content and your brand.
Your creator’s enhanced work-life and personal lifestyle will magnify the quality and quantity of travel content they can produce. And some may be able to perform more valuable marketing tasks. While on the surface, some might feel it’s hedonistic pursuits, and that freelancers don’t do much work, they just have fun traveling.
Well, they can do whatever they want as long as they’re generating awareness and high quality leads. For growth minded travel companies, travel experience is a vital investment in the staff who will deliver your value proposition to your customers. Employee development in travel is an important subject, so let’s dive in!
Creativity is Now Your Most Important Asset
Any genuine, credible advertising or travel marketing agency or branding consultant will focus on creativity — to find more powerful messages to get more reach, impact and convert more prospects. I worked with a Toronto marketing agency that had consultants and staff unearth some cool creative ideas for campaigns. They were entirely focused on making the client’s brand shine.
And I worked with a Boston brand consulting agency where creativity was even more important feeding client’s brand identity and their brand image. One project which was very clever was for a moving company in Boston. Their new slogan became “Relax and Get Moving.” It was brilliant, given moving is stressful for families or businesses, and customers needed a little push to get over their fears and inertia.
Such simple messages can be a hit with customers. Of course, nothing lasts forever, and business owners like you have to come up with new branding and promotional ideas to keep your business thriving.
The key point is in the creative powers of your branding consultant, marketing staff, and your website’s ability to create reach to a large, high-quality audience and deliver the right message to customer prospects and brand fans.
It’s your marketing/creative producers who keep your brand and offer fresh and alive. And how your people feel and experience their work will deeply affect the outcomes of your campaigns and customer loyalty.
That’s why Google was so successful. Their headquarters, which I visited in 2005, was considered lavish in its catering to employees. It was the dawn of a new unique way to build a great company. The free food, expansiveness, flexibility, floor to floor slides, social places for employee engagement and friendships, and more sent a strong message of relaxation, freedom, and limitless productivity that made that company into the most important company ever. The focus was on how good employees should feel. They studied what made employees great and adopted a strategy to make their employees feel good.
Recently however, Google has changed. The new management has been seeking “superstar” engineers eager to learn and adapt (says CEO Sundar Pichai). However, he was weak on saying how he intends to support such superstars, other than imposing big demands on them to be the best and produce. That message is not of flexibility and support, but rather of subordinance and expectations. Certainly, that introduction to Google makes the company unattractive to creative talent.
Nurturing Your Own Creative Talent
If you impose rigorous, commuting, and in-office scheduling as your priority with low wages, few resources, and low support, you can see how things might begin to spiral downward. It sends a message of limited returns, low value, and ultimately — a brick wall. There’s not much to rally around and grow enthusiasm.
Luscious, healthy gardens with nutritious fruits, vegetables and gorgeous flowers need fertile soil and be tended to. And that means the real goal is in personnel management — keeping your staff motivated, enthused, and committed to the excellence they will produce.
It’s this way in every industry and sector, but more so in the travel/vacation sector. Creative, empowered, and optimistic, relaxed employees deliver the message of positivity and satisfaction to your employees. It’s what they feel and believe that gets transmitted to customers. It’s that aura of the joy of travel that comes out in customer engagement, the authenticity of which is clearly felt. You can’t fool your customers. They know.
Strategies Managers Can Use to Boost Staff/Consultant Imagination and Creativity
Employees don’t know about any of this. They will never have the confidence and insight to do this on their own. They rely on you for guidance and getting the maximum productivity out of them. How about creating a process that might innervate and build these amazing capacities within them? The ROI will be outstanding.
- Break Their Routine: Ensure your creative staff are traveling, breaking the daily grind, habits, and stagnation. Real travel to locations they believe in and can relax in, disrupts daily patterns, improves sleep, increases activity and exploration, pushing them into novel, unfamiliar situations that stimulate creative thinking. Being immersed in these novel environments activates different cognitive processes, new perspectives, dissolves emotional blocks, and encourages innovative ideas. Research shows this unleashes powerful brain chemicals and renewed creative powers.
- Turn them Into Intrepid Explorers: In order to create a customer, you must be one yourself. Moving your creators to locations helps them live the experience of an intrepid explorer, and everything connected to that. Help them learn the love of travel and why it’s so important. Ask them to record their thoughts, emotions, and visions as they travel, to which they’ll compare to when they are back home in routine mode. And the difference is the reason why travel is essential.
- Make them Embrace Sensory Experiences: Encourage them to immerse themselves in the sights, sounds, tastes, and textures of your targeted travel destinations. Such bathing in the sensations there activates powerful, positive emotions launching them into a positive frame of mind that spawns vivid copy, photos and video. Ask them to describe everything in more detail and to imagine what the essence of a place is (e.g., greek islands, Costa Rican volcano, desert paradise, San Francisco cable car ride, or Swiss train ride).
- Make Them Engage with the Cultures of your Travel Markets: In a relaxed state, they’ll become willing to engage genuinely in local traditions and customs, to access stories of locals and your customers. They’ll gain insight into what travelers really value and enjoy in those distant cultures and geographies. This will spawn new ideas for content pieces including social media and blogs.
- Force them to Enjoy Moments of Solitude: A key benefit of travel is their escape from routine, stress, and a lack of self-possession. Their travels give them precious time alone to appreciate themselves and their lives. It’s time for pleasant reflection and reconciliation, which precede personal growth. A walk on a peaceful beach, hike up a mountainside, social party with other travelers, or boat or train rides help in this reconciliation process, thus freeing their minds for the powerful creativity that will well up in them.
- Overcome Fear and Challenges: Navigating travel obstacles—such as personal fears, language barriers or unexpected detours—enhances problem-solving skills. These experiences boost confidence which spawns more creative thinking. With such successes experienced, their mental and emotional negatives dissipate further, leaving a fresh mind for creativity.
- Cultivate Their Awe: Encourage them to experience breathtaking landscapes, cultural events, and manmade engineering marvels to open their minds to magnificence. This is related to spirit, ambition, purpose and the power of “we” to drive them to bold expressiveness and higher productivity.
- Encourage Exploration: Make them feel exploration is part of their career development and a source of fresh inspiration. With your input and guidance, they can be moved into destinations and experiences that yield more value for your content marketing needs (stories, insights, people, places).
These are 8 simple but powerful ways you can empower your travel content creators, and ensure they won’t want to leave your company — that your firm is the only one for them.
This is the glue of business relationships, and the more you nurture and keep the glue fresh, the more value your creator can deliver. In fact, it increases over time and in some cases, these people can become your travel ambassadors creating a powerful human connection to your company and travel brand.
All of this road to success is within your powers. You determine what outcome you reach. Hire real talent and power them up!
📞Contact Gord to launch a more creative way to market your travel company at 416 998 6246.