How To Build Your Personal Brand as a Tour Guide
- Personal Brand
Having your personal brand is beneficial regardless of your specialty. It gives you five advantages that improve your competitiveness as a professional:
1. Trust and loyalty of customers, as people tend to interact more often and more willingly with real people, rather than with companies or organizations;
2. Belonging to a community, as your personality will attract professionals with the same interests and values;
3. Quality feedback, as (once again) people tend to write a review when another person, not an organization, asks them to do so;
4. Constant development, as promoting your brand will encourage you to learn;
5. Recognition, as your audience will expand over time. Especially if you are represented on social networks.
Well, how to create a personal brand as a tour guide?
Step One: Choose Your Niche
What are you good at? Maybe you are an excellent organizer of gastronomic, cultural, walking tours, or car trips. Try to express your specialization in a few sentences or words so that your potential customers can understand something about you at a glance.
Of course, you can be versatile and flexible, but almost everyone characterizes themselves that way. Therefore, highlight one or two features that will draw attention to you.
Step Two: Join a Community
Don’t hesitate to ask for advice and learn from professionals who inspire you. Look for thematic public channels on Linkedin, YouTube, and other social networks to keep up with trends and build connections.
Do not consider your colleagues as competitors, because you are working in the tourism industry, where the number of customers is unlimited!
Step Three: Declare Yourself
Create a portfolio and make it publicly available. Tell about your education, share your professional experience, and post real photos from your tours and reviews from your customers, if you have any. The more open you are, the more trust you get!
Step Four: Offer Your Services
You can have a perfect portfolio with a description and beautiful photos. But if there are no specific offers, people may not understand that you can provide them with tour guide services. Therefore, it is better to mention what exactly you can do. And, of course, share your contacts (email, messengers, etc.).
In addition to the above, creating your brand is a matter of time anyway. It requires knowledge and experience that you can acquire only after constant work. We hope this article will help you to start forming your public professional image.
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