How to Grow Your Travel Business (4 Essential Strategies)

Within any sector, a business that maximizes how much market share it holds, compared to its competition, is going to have the advantage. In all but the most radically new markets, there will already be mature and established operators. Among the most straightforward and proven ways to increase market penetration is through targeting the clients and customers of these larger organizations.

This is because more established and entrenched players tend to be too large to properly serve all the specific needs of all their customer groups. Creative and insightful marketing and advertising to reach these lesser-served demographics can quickly expand your user-base.      

Using the consumer connectivity and smartphone telco market as an example, most users are loyal to a particular brand. Consumers get comfortable with a particular set of features or a smartphone’s OS, and it takes a lot to tempt them away to an entirely new product family.

The most reliably proven way to penetrate this kind of market is not through a like-for-like feature contest (such as trying to favorably compare your smartphones camera to that of the competition) but to strategically offer the most affordable prices or rates, the most attractive packaged deals, or stacking advantages for loyal customers. 

1. Get competitive 

Unless you’re bringing something entirely new to market, which customers can’t easily compare against those of your competitors, then a better price is going to be the main motivator for switching to your offering.  How can your business provide a comparable level of service while reducing overheads, minimizing expenses, and streamlining workflow efficiency?  

While competing on price, you also need to be competing for attention. Those ‘lesser-served demographics’ will be the customers most ready for a cost-motivated switch if they feel their needs are being recognized. The more you can personalize their advertising experience, the more effective it will be. This is often achieved through content such as blogs and social media for the consumer audience, or white papers and case studies for the professional market.   

2. Connect your people 

As the workplace increasingly goes digital and personnel are more mobile that ever, businesses need to streamline even the most fundamental parts of their operations to maintain efficiency and foster growth. One of the most effective and future-forward ways of doing this has been to move your workforce’s communications on to an eSIM platform.   

Embedded SIM (eSIM cards) are the technological successor to traditional physical SIM cards. They’re directly integrated into communication device’s hardware and have been included in most generations of Apple and Android devices for the last few years. Their main advantage is that an eSIM can be programmed and have its setting altered remotely, referred to as ‘remote provisioning’, which sounds like a simple feature but has profound advantages for businesses looking to expand.  

One of the primary advantages of eSIMs is the ability for a business to remotely activate and manage any of its employee’s devices. With an eSIM, businesses can provision and manage devices without having to physically ship SIM cards. This is particularly helpful for organizations looking to scale at short notice and have employees in more than one location.  

Telco partners like 1GLOBAL can completely remove the technological and logistical barriers that used to hamper businesses looking to grow and stay agile. For any organization operating in more than one region, managing multiple international Mobile Network Operators and their contracts was hugely challenging, especially as the standards for reliable, advanced, and secure services continually evolve. 1GLOBAL offers a uniquely global, centrally controlled mobile platform that provides a unified service for workforces of any size, all under a single contract and with consistent security wherever your people go. 

Using a technology partner like 1GLOBAL will drastically reduce roaming expenses while upgrading your staff to significantly more efficient domestic usage. Eliminate bill shock with 1GLOBAL monitoring and alerting platform that, on average, reduces roaming bills by 60% and domestic costs by 20%. 

3. Reach more users 

An essential part of growth is expanding the reach of your existing products or services to a new market. The two ways to find that new market is either by physically going somewhere you’ve not been before, or by reaching entirely new people in the areas you already operate in. 

Reach more users: go global 

Of the two, the bolder option is to find new international areas where your industry is just beginning to penetrate. Discovering a ‘new world’ for your business could be wildly profitable, on the scale of introducing the iPhone to the BRIC markets for the first time. A regional expansion may also offer opportunities beyond simply more customers, as a wider scope may mean access to lower supplier costs, expanded talent and hiring pools, and more vertical integration of your supply, tech and resource chains. 

However, expanding into new regions means unique challenges every time. Understanding a market's needs and preferences is a sophisticated undertaking, requiring significant investments of time, research, and building local partnerships. A business needs to ask some very fundamental questions, including conducting dependable and actionable research to prove the new region even has a viable demand for you. 

Reach more users: go digital  

Alternatively, finding new distribution channels does not necessarily mean whole new locations, and this is especially true for the telco industry with ever more virtual and digital products.  Just a quick look at the rise of media streaming services illustrates how even well-established blue-chip companies with multi-regional presence and premises are also constantly pressing to meet digital demand and expand their online services and offerings. 

While research and a comprehensive market strategy remains essential, digital expansion into markets means not having to invest in all the apparatus of physical stores, plants, and operations. The more you can securely digitize your catalogue of products and services, the more scope you have to reach new groups of customers. Technology partners such as 1GLOBAL can help you expand your digital service portfolio with products such as fully branded eSIM that can be sold as part of your existing customer offering, without any additional development or investment at your end. Check the end of this article for 1GLOBAL links to find out more.  

4. Innovate your product 

Offering a better product than your competitor feels like the most obvious way to grow, but in practice it’s not necessarily the most efficient route. In terms of return on investment, updating an existing offering is by far the better way to maximize retention and revenue per customer.    

User retention is a critical factor for fostering growth across the telco sector. Continued user engagement translates into recurring use and revenue generation through subscriptions or in-app purchases.  Investing the same amount of money into creating a loyal user base is significantly more cost-effective than spending the same amount on acquisition of new customers.   

Studies indicate that the conversion rate for new customers falls within a range of 5% to 20%, whereas the success rate for upselling or cross-selling to existing customers can reach 60% to 70%. A 5% increase in retention leads on average to 95% higher profit. This is why it’s just as important (if not more so) to innovate your product to keep customers active and engaged as it is to acquire them in the first place.   

Updating a product or service can mean incorporating new features, modifying the positioning or presentation, or combining it with another offering.  Effective product development revolves around leveraging customers' unmet needs and desires as a source of inspiration for new products or features. Valuable insights for the next successful project can often be gleaned from customer feedback, complaints, or direct interviews. For a quick and inexpensive way to find out what they want, simply engage your customers though social media posts. While this will lack the granularity of expert research and analysis, it will serve to point you in the right direction.   

As a successful example, a market-leading neobank recently innovated their core platform by integrating 1GLOBAL technology to provide users with a totally new service ready to connect from launch. With a single update the neobank seamlessly installed 1GLOBAL tech into its own app, already used by millions of customers, and started offering an eSIM connection for worldwide roaming data, all under its own brand.   

The banks’ customers had complete visibility and control over their data usage, including the ability to top-up even when already out of data, with reliable coverage in 200+ regions. More than 200,000 of the bank’s customers had already signed-up for roaming data plans with the first week of launch, providing each with tangible savings benefits.  Customers then stayed within the bank’s app for longer, an entire new revenue channel was enabled, and increased loyalty drove adoption of the wider product range.     

This still-ongoing partnership with 1GLOBAL shows that to achieve sustained growth, innovation must prioritize expanding utility for users.  By focusing on delivering tangible value and solving real-world problems through digital telco, you can build and expand a loyal customer base.