During the Marketing Summit, attendees participated in interactive panels, workshops and breakout sessions with their peers, all designed to help accomplish their marketing objectives. The headquarters team, along with travel suppliers and third-party partners, also provided marketing insights and fresh ideas which franchise business owners could implement into their business and marketing plans.
“We are constantly striving to provide our network of travel advisors with the best ways to stay ahead of the ever-changing marketing landscape,” said Alicia Linden, director of marketing for Dream Vacations/CruiseOne. “We understand that innovation, customization and consumer insights in marketing are key when growing a small business, and at our first-ever Marketing Summit, we made sure to address relevant best practices and equip our travel advisors with the latest tools, assets and content to help them increase visibility for their business, generate new leads, and retain loyal customers via engagement tactics.”
Dream Vacations/CruiseOne also unveiled new marketing resources at the summit, giving franchise owners more ways to stay in front of their new and existing customers. Travel advisors now have access to an automated post-booking tool that sends surveys via SMS text messages or email to clients and prompts them to post reviews to the travel advisors' Google My Business, Facebook or Yelp pages. In addition to boosting reviews for their business, it also increases their visibility on search engines, giving them credibility and validating them as travel experts to their future customers.
The Marketing Team has also updated customizable assets available to travel advisors via the Dream Vacations/CruiseOne intranet. New assets include print ads, flyers, web banner ads, notecards, vouchers, social posts and more. Not only is the design and copy updated, but also the look and feel of the brands. To keep up with consumer trends, QR codes have been placed within assets, so advisors can provide customers with seamless access to their website or any URL of their choice. This is a huge benefit for travel advisors since they can customize and personalize assets as they see fit for added flexibility to market their business while also sustaining brand standards.
In order to more effectively market the products travel advisors are selling, Dream Vacations/CruiseOne is also putting a stronger focus on video content. In addition to having access to more than 200 professionally produced videos created for travel advisors’ branded websites, Dream Vacations is also encouraging travel advisors to create their own videos about their personal travel experiences to share and engage with their clients via social media.
“We learned so much at the Marketing Summit - from new customizable assets and how to use them - to leveraging our great reviews on social media - to hearing from cruise line marketing experts on how to target different types of travelers,” said Karen Quinn-Panzer, Dream Vacations travel advisor and Marketing and Sales Committee co-chair. “There were also many ‘ah-ha’ moments for all of us as we discovered what is working well across our network of agents during the interactive breakout sessions with our peers.”
