. As
well as promoting their service to end users. Similarly, tour operators will
want to ensure that travel agents sell their services in a positive manner, and
will therefore want to advertise to the agents the benefits of selling the
tours perhaps inn terms of higher commissions, while advertising a totally
different set of benefits to the end user. This type of promotion is referred
to as `into the pipeline’ promotion. The crucial task is to asses accurately
the needs ad want of intermediaries, as opposed to actual consumers and, design
promotional messages accordingly.
There are a
number of promotional tools available to the tourism marketing manager which
can be combined to create effective promotional programs. Sales promotion via
brochures, point of sale display and even video cassettes play very important
roles as does advertising. Visual media is perhaps the only way to advertise tourist
destinations properly. Whatever means are used, it is important to focus on the
following:-
·
Clearly identified segments
·
A unique selling proposition
·
Well defined target audiences
·
Creative use of media and media scheduling to reach audiences; and
·
Monitoring and evaluation of promotional effectiveness
Tourism
promotional messages should always focus on the benefit attainable by the
consumer for choosing a particular resort or a tour operator, selection of
attractive market segments at the earlier segmentation stage should lead to
greater chances of choosing the right message to target.