American Marketing Group (AMG) announced new education and
marketing programs during its annual conference in Boca Raton, Fla.
AMG is the parent company of Travelsavers, Network of
Entrepreneurs Selling Travel (NEST) and the Affluent Traveler Collection, among
other brands.
AMG is launching Travelsavers & NEST University, an
online resource that will house all training opportunities
available to agents. It will house supplier certifications, webinars, niche
market training and certifications from AMG brands, bringing everything
together for the first time.
"Education is extremely important to us," said
Nicole Mazza, chief marketing officer for Travelsavers, NEST and the Affluent
Travel Collection.
Mazza said the company has always offered various forms of
training and education, but this is the first time everything will be brought
together into a full university. It is expected to launch in the fourth quarter
of this year and the first quarter of 2019.
AMG also has upgraded Distinctive Destination Weddings. It
now has a lead-generation program, training courses and certification, plus a
consumer-facing website that agents can customize and use for lead-generation
purposes and analytics. The sites are powered by AMG's agency website solution,
OnlineXpress.
Agents can use the websites to build profiles for the bride
and groom and communicate with wedding guests. They also have unique content
and more editing capabilities than before, and more calls to action have been
added to every page of the sites.
A new marketing program, Journeys, has two parts:
Destinations by Journeys, featuring a different region of the world each
quarter, and Lifestyles by Journeys, which highlights types of travel like
romance or cruise.
The program has direct mail and digital components, as well
as pre-created social media content, a consumer website for agents to capture
leads during the life of the promotions, and an agency-facing website with
access to content.
Mazza said AMG wanted to provide agents with a variety of
marketing options to suit their individual needs.
"We want to make sure that we have marketing programs
that really gear into what is unique about that agency, what they are selling,"
she said. "We don't just do an umbrella marketing program."
Under Journeys, all marketing pieces will have consistent,
unique branding. The goal, Mazza said, is for a client to immediately recognize
when they have something that came from their travel agency.
Finally, AMG announced a new tool for Travelsavers and NEST
agencies, Lead Dash. The technology works in conjunction with supplier data to
identify open credits an agent's clients might have with suppliers, and prompts
agents to follow up with their clients about those credits.
Mazza said the program was developed after AMG conversations
with suppliers revealed there were a number of credits going unused. Agents
frequently said they simply forgot about the credits, so Lead Dash was
developed to solve that problem.
Lead Dash is being released to all Travelsavers and NEST
agencies following a beta test last year.