Creating and Promoting Special Offers

There are two parts to this topic:

Creating offers and packages
Promoting special deals - staying within the law

Creating Offers and Packages

Creating offers and packages should be a central part of your regular marketing activities, whatever your business type.

Discounted and value-added offers serve several essential purposes: they catch customers’ attention, raise awareness of your business, increase sales, help you increase business at slower times and, if you link up with another business to create a ‘package’, allow you to widen the range of customers you appeal to.

Experiment

Below are some tips that are well worth reading if you’re thinking of planning special deals. But, even with the best planning, how can you be sure you’ll get it right?

Luckily, North East tourism businesses have unique opportunities to experiment at very little risk! Most of the ATPs and ONE North East Tourism allow you, through Desti.ne, to upload and change your special offers as often as you like. These are then promoted through the area and regional websites and through PR. So if you think you’ve got a good idea for a deal, get it up there and see what response you get. Then, when you’re sure you’ve got an offer, or set of offers, that works for you and your customer base, consider promoting them more widely.

What to bear in mind when planning special deals

Consider the following to make sure you put together deals that really work for your business, scroll down for more about each:

Decide what you want to achieve
Give a sense of good or added value
What’s the effect on your bottom line?
Get the customer’s attention
Create incentives to book or buy
Access more (free) advertising and marketing
Maximise the PR possibilities
Expand your range of customers through links with other businesses
Beware the packaging pitfalls

Decide what you want to achieve

Before you start coming up with offer ideas, you should decide what you want your offer to achieve. Should it: raise awareness of your business, win more customers, win back old ones, get more sales in March or Monday to Thursday, attract more families / older couples / business customers / international visitors?

When you know what the offer will do for your business and what sort of customer will buy it, you can focus on creating a special deal that meets both your and their needs. Keep the customer firmly in mind: what are their special requirements, interests, likes and lifestyle? What will they find appealing? Which days of the week/months of the year are they most able to travel or visit? Use this information to decide on exactly what deal you want to offer, but never lose sight of your own business objectives.

Ensure that you can fulfil the offer – never offer something you can’t actually deliver, but also ensure you’ve got the capacity and that can you answer all calls, emails and website requests promptly and professionally. So many businesses design good offers, but then don’t have the systems and procedures in place to make the most of the responses they get.

Finally – make sure you can properly meet increased demand if the offer proves popular! Can you ramp up capacity, staffing and supplies if necessary?

Give a sense of good or added value

Offers don’t necessarily mean discounts. Discounts – 2 for 1, children free, 20% off, come back for half price – are always attractive, especially in this current financial climate. But discounts basically add up to value: the customer is getting more for their pound (or Euro, or dollar). You can achieve a similar effect by adding something, rather than taking the price away: a free bottle of wine, unlimited rides on a major attraction, a free guided tour, a special themed event.

Exactly how you achieve this depends on the nature of your business, and whether you are adding value alone, or by working with another business, eg accommodation plus a guided walk, dual entry to attractions, cinema and restaurant deal etc (see below for more on this).

Deciding whether to drop the price or add in a benefit is a decision only you can make. Discounting can seem like the simple option, but take care that it doesn’t spark off ‘price wars’ – competing businesses feeling that they need to lower their prices too – that could end up seeing you, or another operator, cutting margins so low that you are squeezed out of business. Discounting can also sometimes have a de-valuing effect. If done incorrectly it can give the customer the impression that your service isn’t worth its ‘normally advertised price’ and you can lose the advantage of the customer feel-good factor if they begin to perceive the discounted price as the ‘real’ one.

What’s the effect on your bottom line?

Whatever your approach, make sure you’ve thoroughly costed the various parts of your deal and the implications to your business. Then experiment (on an Excel spreadsheet for example) with different levels of take-up, to see what the effect is on your profit and costs. With higher levels of take-up, you may need more staff, more stock or more supplies, but you may also be able to access better economies of scale.

Then try tweaking the price to the customer by a few pounds (or pence, depending on your business type) and see what effect this has. You must be sure that you’ve got your pricing absolutely right – even amounts which are small to the customer can have a significant effect on your bottom line.

Experimenting with different levels of charging and success can help you understand whether a deal is a good idea, and where you might want to cap take-up.

Get the customer’s attention

Once you’ve settled on your deal, you need to design the promotion of it. How you style your offer, in terms of colours, fonts, images and text, is almost as important as the offer itself. Above all, keep it simple but striking – most people just scan a page or web page. You want to attract attention and stand out from other businesses, but you want the right attention.

Keep two things firmly in mind: who your offer is aimed at and the quality of your business. Whilst it is important to be eye catching, thing like colours and fonts all give consumers subconscious clues as to the quality of the business and the experience on offer. For bigger promotions, consider working with your web or graphic designer to come up with a style that reflects your audience and your business quality, and it may be worth working with a copywriter to get words that really sell an offer.

Bear in mind also the media you’ll be advertising in: your own website, your online marketing partners’ sites, newspapers, magazines, flyers, brochures etc. Each one has different constraints of space, but they should all have a similar ‘house style’ and all should have strong calls to action (see below).

Finally, make sure your offer, and the advertising and promotion of it, is fair and legal. You must not mislead the customer, or misdescribe your offer. Free, for example, must really mean free and your conditions and criteria cannot be so tortuous that the customer cannot understand or comply. Read the next part of this topic for full information about how to keep within the law when promoting special deals.

Create incentives to book or buy

Special offers can turn a browser into a booker or buyer. However, you must make it easy for the customer to a) see the offer and b) actually buy it. Don’t hide offers away in the hope you’ll get a full price sale – all that will happen is customers will get fed up of searching for the deal and go away. And don’t get customers excited about a deal but confused about how to follow it up. Make sure your booking systems and processes make it easy for customers to buy, and that staff are fully briefed and know how to ‘sell’ to casual enquirers.

In the wording or form of your offer, include plenty of calls to action. This simply means getting the customer to actually do something: ‘book now’, ‘click here for more information’, ‘visit our website’, ‘phone us for more information’, ‘print off this voucher’, ‘leave your email address and we’ll send you a reminder’. Including strong calls to action helps to move the customer along the buying curve.

You can increase the likelihood of a customer buying by making the offer limited or exclusive in some way - ‘book before the end of March’, ‘for visits in April’, ‘for the first twenty admission tickets each day’, ‘for families who have pre-booked’ etc. But don’t over-do it. Offers that are too limited can make you lose credibility. If the chances of anyone actually being able to qualify for the offer are too small, the customer will see it as a ruse rather than a genuine deal.

Access more advertising and marketing

If you are going to the trouble of creating a package or special deal then make sure you update your details at all of your advertising channels. Your commercial advertising partners will almost certainly offer special facilities for uploading and promoting your deals, usually at no further cost, as they know special offers attract more customers and generate more sales through their channels

Similarly, the Area Tourism Partnerships, VisitBritain and One North East Tourism (www.visitnortheastengland.co.uk and associated micro sites) all specifically promote special offers through their websites and their PR activities, at no extra cost. Upload your offers through Desti.ne and change them as often as you like. Not only will you be found through the usual search and browse facilities, but you will additionally be featured on special deals pages and in the results of searches for offers. In addition, really good deals will often get mentioned in the copy and, sometimes, promoted on the home page. Just as importantly, all the above regularly contact travel journalists (once a month or more) with the latest and greatest offerings in the area, and if these are good enough, a travel writer will investigate and write them up for a daily or weekend feature. Contact your ATP to find out more.

Some of the ATPs also run passes, like the visitTeesValley Happening Pass http://www.visitteesvalley.co.uk/site/happening-pass and the Tourism Tyne and Wear Discover Pass http://www.visitnewcastlegateshead.co.uk/site/discover-pass . If your business isn’t already participating, get in contact with your ATP to see if and how you can.

Last, but certainly not least, as a key part of its marketing strategy, VisitBritain is running the Value campaigns. They are spending a total of £6.5m on marketing Britain as a great value place to be to the USA, Canada and Europe. They are actively looking for special offers to promote through targeted campaigns in these countries, intending to deliver more customers to the UK. Don’t miss out on these free opportunities – visit VB's marketing planner and enter ‘value’ as a search term to find the value campaigns.

Maximise the PR possibilities

In addition to what your marketing partners may undertake, do your own PR. If you’ve got a particularly good deal, let your local newspapers and radio know, by issuing and sending a press release, and consider offering free tickets/free nights etc as a prize for them to feature. If you’re doing something very unusual, contact your local TV station too. Bear in mind that stories featured locally can sometimes get taken up nationally.

Don’t forget to network: tell local tourism businesses and suppliers you work with about your special deals, and offer to keep your customers informed of theirs. The more we offer customers in our region, the longer they are likely to stay and the more they will come back.

Plus, most importantly, tell your local tourist information centres (TICs). They spend all day long advising potential and actual visitors about what to do and where to stay. Keep your local centres up to date with your offers and don’t be afraid to contact TICs further afield if your offer is relevant. Our region is small enough for visitors to easily move around in pursuit of great places to see or stay.

Expand your range of customers through links with other businesses

You can increase your appeal, and open up to a wider range of customers, by creating offers in tandem with other businesses. Unless customers are very familiar with an area they all face the same basic challenge: what businesses are out there that meet their needs and interests; which ones offer the best quality and value; and how will these fit together to create an ‘itinerary’ that makes the most of their time and budget. Make it easy for customers to pursue their interests and buy, by creating packages that solve these challenges for them. Examples are:

a ‘package’ of accommodation or attraction plus an activity, eg a guided walk or cycle, an adventure activity, a trek on horseback, a round of golf, fishing permits, a boat trip etc
a ‘package’ of accommodation or attraction plus a lesson/series of lessons, eg cookery, painting, music, crafts, dance, theatre etc
a ‘package’ of accommodation plus an attraction or entertainment,eg a theme park admission, entry to a local festival or to see a show, exhibition or talk etc
multiple attraction entry,eg multiple admission deals, particularly with a theme or on a trail such as: family days out, art and heritage, locations in a book or film, connections to an historical event or famous person, spiritual tourism or genealogy etc
anything (accommodation, attraction, activity or other food business) plus food and drink, eg special deals involving cafes, restaurants, food markets, food festivals, specialist suppliers or growers, vineyards, breweries etc

Beware the packaging pitfalls

Tourism operators are often put off developing special deals with other businesses because they are worried about the Package Travel Regulations. In practice, there is a lot you can do without falling into this category. To be classified as a package under the Act your deal must:

last at least 24 hours or include overnight accommodation
include any two of the following three:
- travel
- accommodation
- another service eg a lesson, an activity session, a guide etc – where this forms a significant portion of the offer

It must also be pre-arranged and sold at an inclusive price that is cheaper than buying the elements separately (unless it is sold at the same or higher price but you describe it as a package, or lead your customers to believe it is a package).

Even if you do create a package under the law, complying with the Act is not nearly as difficult as you may think and doesn’t require huge sums of money put up in bonding. Read Package Regulations for full information.

Advertising, Marketing & PR