I have been talking with a couple of businesses owners that say they hate marketing.
Maybe you are one of them. I understand where you are coming from. You would like for everyone to just acknowledge your quality and chose you as the best alternative in the market.
Without marketing, without selling, telling no one about yourself.
That would be ideal I agree. If people had perfect information about the world and be rational in their choices, then no marketing would be necessary.
Everyone would already know what to choose and what will serve them best.
But we will never live in this world. At least not you and me.
So I would like to show you a way how you can enjoy marketing your business.
If you are a business owner, you are also a marketer.
This is a fact.
Wherever you go, whoever you talk to, you are marketing yourself and as a result, your business as well.
If you are like most business owners, you probably enjoy talking about the experiences you create for your clients.
The service you offer, the effort going into your tours, the struggles you overcome to prepare the best tour ever.
This is marketing.
You are a marketer.
So where is the hate towards marketing coming from?
Is there a reason to hate marketing?
Let’s say your business has more clients you can serve.
You do nothing extra to market yourself, just doing your tours well. Everything is going mouth to mouth, the word spreads and you get positive reviews, business is going well.
And it’s working to a level where you are satisfied and don’t want or need any more of it.
You have people raving about your tours and they share their amazing experiences with enough other people so you have a steady source of people you are changing the lives of.
Because this is what people pay you for…the impact on their lives, the experiences that make lives richer.
But what if you are not at the level you want to be? Let’s say you have some extra capacity.
You have been telling your story about the amazing service you offer; the effort going into your tours… but… the business is just not flying.
Does that mean your product is not as good as the person who has more clients than he can serve?
We don’t know. It could be.
Or maybe you haven’t yet found the right way to serve the people you want to serve.
It will be clear what I mean soon
Sometimes you have enough people on the tour, sometimes you can’t sell anything,… It’s a rocky road
You think to yourself that the quality of service you offer should be enough for you to sell everything and be successful.
But unfortunately, it’s just not.
Something is missing. There are people coming in your doors but it’s not enough.
You want to sell more tours; you want more people in line to go with you.
But to do that you have to take a step further.
Now we come to the part you hate.
You have to do something extra.
You have to market.
My goal with this article is to flip your thinking around. So you can enjoy every part of the marketing process you are creating.
Let’s start here.
Another fact.
Marketing doesn’t mean spending big sums on Facebook ads (or TV ads, or…) trying to convince people to buy your crap.
It doesn’t mean begging for a mention in a local newspaper.
Marketing means creating the product people want and giving it to them.
Making them see, that it will change their lives.
That it will serve them well.
You are not selling just a tour to a client.
You are selling them a better version of themselves.
You are a tool in their life. A helper.
Always think about the transformation of your client to a better version of themselves by going on your tour.
Make them see and feel what their life could be like on your tour and after the tour because they have you and your tours (and what you do for them) in their mind.
How will they feel, how will they regard themselves?
They won’t be a boring couch potato anymore but an adventurer, traveller.
They are becoming a person who enjoys life, is seeing the world, has new experiences.
So what does it mean if your business is not where you want?
How successful your tour company will be is a simple equation:
SUCCESS = IMPACT CREATED X NUMBER OF PEOPLE IMPACTED
So If your business is not where you want it or think it should be, the problem is one of two things:
- You are not impacting enough people;
- Not impacting people enough.
Now you may ask, but how do I impact more people if they are not coming to my tours?
Now, this is a much better question than “how do I market to more people?” Or “How do I get the word out?”
HOW DO YOU impact more people?
Do you see what happened here?
You stopped thinking about marketing as something bad but about impacting the people you are trying to serve.
That’s it.
Stop thinking about marketing as pushy, salesy, scammy practices.
That’s not marketing.
Think about marketing as impacting people.
Taking them where they want to go.
Marketing is about showing where you will take them and creating the trust you can take them there.
But make a promise you will take them where they want to go.
Talk in their language.
Stop talking about what you do: “I create tours with good food on nice places“ but what you do for others, how you make them feel about themselves “I make people feel alive by creating experiences they will never forget.”
They want the change you are offering.
You are serving them. They are getting value from what you are doing.
Marketing is about creating change.
So you as a travel business owner, do you want to impact, help and change those you can?
Do you want your people to become a better version of themselves with your help?
Or will you let people choose a worse product, a worse service?
You cannot let them! That would be a disservice to them.
So how can you stop them from doing that?
By sharing!
By creating an impact even before money exchanged hands.
By marketing.
Stop being selfish.
Marketing is empathy for your clients. For the people, you are serving.
If you are selling enough tours, it means your marketing is working. It means you are serving well. Making an impact.
If your business is not doing well, it means you need to serve your tribe more.
How do you serve your tribe?
You probably already know what they value, what they like, why did you attract your best clients.
If not, you have to do your research.
But you need to give.
You need to share your story about why you are doing what you are doing.
You need to show people where you want to take them. How will they feel after going on your tour? Who will they be?
You need to educate. You need to give value.
If you just think people should find you and just book a tour with you because you are so awesome, you are selfish.
You are not giving them anything.
You are not prepared to share yourself with them.
Not willing to invest your time, effort and (maybe money) to make a change and impact on them.
To discover what they truly and deeply want and give it to them.
What is the goal of marketing?
To tell people where you will bring them, how you will bring them there and why.
And they believe you.
To convince them to go in their pocket, hand you money and say “Yes, take me there”.
So they crave the change.
This is marketing.
This is an impact, this is service.
As a business owner, you cannot hate marketing.
How can you hate delivering service to people that want and need it?
Delivering and creating value for the people that see value in what you are doing.
To the people that want the change.
That’s what marketing is.
Imagine you run a Facebook ad or a Google ad for your tour. 2 things can happen:
- The ad is working. People see the value in your tours and what you present to them, what you are doing, what you bring to the table and they buy your tour. Why do you think you are doing something bad here? Those that bought the product are seeing the value you are offering. You made a difference in their lives! You created an impact.
- The ad is not working. You impacted no one. No calls, no bookings. Nobody experiences your amazing tours, it changes nobody for the better, everything stays the same. You are not in service of anyone.
What is the better option?
Change or no change?
There are people that want, need, desire what you do.
You are letting them chose a lesser product by not trying to serve them.
Everything you ever bought created value for you at least in that second when you chose it.
Why?
Because it offered you a change for the better.
You tried on a shirt in the store and you looked and felt great in it.
You bought some crap on eBay because you saw yourself using it and becoming slimmer and fitter. Maybe it broke the next day, or it is still laying in the garage.
But in your mind, you saw yourself using it and become a different, better person. Skinnier, more attractive.
If the product delivered or not doesn’t matter that much at this moment.
Your tours deliver.
Your goal is to inspire emotions as the eBay crap inspired them in you.
And then prove to the people rationally that you can deliver what they are dreaming about.
These are where you reviews and years of experience in the industry will do the work.
That’s it. That is the job.
So the solution to market if you hate marketing is….to stop viewing it as pushing yourself into the people but seeing you are helping them, impacting them, serving them by offering your product.
Let’s take the last example in the car industry.
If you buy a BMW instead of a Renault, Toyota, Opel or Mercedes it’s because you imagine driving a BMW makes you feel different, it fits with who you are and who you want to be.
From all the choices you chose BMW because they are the closest to what you want, what you desire. This means they created value for you. If BMW wouldn’t exist, you would buy a Mazda. At this moment for you, only the second option.
But why didn’t you chose Mazda now?
Because it created less value for you. So if BMW didn’t exist, you would have to choose a less good option. And if Mazda didn’t exist, you would buy a Volkswagen…which would be even less worthy to you. And so on for every single thing, you have ever bought.
Think about it this way: BMW provides 75 units of value to you, Mazda 70 and Volkswagen 55. If you had to buy a Mazda, you would lose 5 units of value, if you had to buy Volkswagen because BMW and Mazda don’t exist, you would lose 20 units of value. Just like that.
Or maybe BMW exists but just doesn’t market. Is not trying to serve people enough.
People are buying more Mazda’s.
Is that what you want in your case? That person would choose the second-best because they don’t know about you?
What I would like to show is that marketing is not something bad.
Business owners that need sleazy sales tactic come from ME ME ME attitude that can’t make them successful in the long run. No chance, the house of cards will fall.
Marketing is almost like magic because it can change and impact so many lives.
Think for a second, what if you served everyone perfect for your product? If you served all the people you can.
Would you be making a huge change?
You bet!
And by making the change, business success follows.
Now it’s just about taking the correct steps.
Hope this was helpful. Would love to hear what you think.
Lan
