As a new travel agent, developing a strong brand is one way to build familiarity with potential customers. Your clients are trusting you with their travels, and their confidence in you is critical for bookings, especially when it comes to new customers.
Consumers think about brands almost like they think about people—they attribute aspects of personality to brands and develop strong opinions about which brands are good and bad. A reliable and dependable brand image is a valuable marketing asset to your travel agency. To produce a useful brand image, you must consider the overall strategy for your business.
Knowing Your Brand
Acting as your brand’s Chief Marketing Officer, you have the power over what your brand will be. Strategizing about creating a brand that fits within your vision for your business is the first step toward creating a strong brand image.
Fitting your brand image within a larger marketing strategy requires some upfront planning. One method to position your business for the future is the SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Strengths and Weaknesses address the present: What does your current business do well? Where could it improve? On the other hand, Opportunities and Threats are focused on the future of your business: Where could your business grow? What could stifle that growth?
Take some time to consider the big picture for your business before diving into branding.
Conceptualizing Your Ideal Brand
Drilling down on a particular brand identity requires thinking about your niche. Your brand should guide consumers to understand your niche. Suppose a travel agent has a brand that’s romantic, opulent, and tranquil: you might guess that they specialize in honeymoons or anniversary trips. This brand identity leads consumers towards that particular niche.
With your niche and SWOT analysis in mind, it’s time to start brainstorming about what associations you want consumers to have with your brand. Spend five to ten minutes jotting down adjectives that you feel describe your ideal brand. When you’re done, circle the three that best encapsulate the brand identity you’re striving for. These brand keywords can help guide the creation and refinement of your brand’s identity.
Establishing a Brand Kit
In the world of marketing, a brand kit contains all the visual assets a marketer needs to represent themselves. Typically, this includes a logo, a brand’s official colors, and fonts. Beyond visual assets, brand kits consider the tone that any official writing representing the company should take. Brand kits can also include slogans and taglines for companies that emphasize them in their marketing material.
A brand’s visual branding assets are its color palette, its logo, and its typography. A brand’s colors and logo often go together—it’s unusual for a brand’s logo not to feature any brand colors. If you already have a logo and haven’t decided on brand colors, picking a prominent color or pair of colors from your logo is a fantastic place to start.
What's more, there’s no need to go crazy when selecting brand colors. Just one or two colors will do. If you’re choosing two colors, ensure that they complement each other and represent the type of travel you sell. Once you have this palette established, you can feature it on your website and other digital marketing content like email newsletters and infographics on social media.
As for your logo, it should also be uniquely yours – standing out from the crowd is an important aspect of a great logo. Consumers who’ve seen your logo before should recognize it without having to wrack their brains. Your logo needs to be simple enough to recognize and recreate while maintaining uniqueness.
Typography, or font choice, is another aspect of visual branding. There are nearly infinite fonts out there. Like your brand colors, you’re going to need them for your website and digital content you create. It’s best to choose just a few fonts (a heading font, a subheading font, and a body font at most) and stick to them. Body text fonts should be easy to read and unobtrusive – if you want to go with something showier, keep it for headings. You can just have two fonts, with one being for headings and subheadings, the other for body text, where the majority of your content will be written and read.
Putting It All Together
Branding is an important part of marketing for new and established businesses alike, but it truly excels when considered in the context of your business’s market niche and your future business plans. Your brand is one of the core parts of your business that clients and leads alike will recall, so it’s important to give the right impression.