While doing my regular SEO reading this month, I came across a really useful article which questions whether a website’s copy or sales staff is better at closing the deal. Our principle has always been that it’s a combination of the two, but the article makes a very interesting point, namely that in the case of tailor-made and niche holiday companies, a mediocre site could actually be doing a worse job of selling holidays than a poor site!

This may be a slightly strange idea to comprehend at first, but the principle is this: By their very nature, tailor-made holiday specialists deal exclusively in products designed individually for each customer. Therefore the web purchasing element of the site is largely redundant, and the best a website can do is to describe the holidays and list a series of sample itineraries to help inspire customers.  Once inspired, the site should encourage visitors to call for more information, for holiday planning advice and for bookings.  Now, a mediocre website may list its holidays with bland sounding itineraries which don’t sell the true magic of the holiday, meaning that your customers will not be inspired enough to pick up the phone and let your salesmen take over. A bad site on the other hand, may have little information or itineraries and would force a few customers to pick up the phone to discover what it is that you offer – at which point the sales staff take over. Neither of these will do magnificently, but it’s a sobering concept to realise that your website copy could hurt your sales quite so significantly.

The truth is that to succeed in the tailor-made holiday market, you need both your website’s copy and the sales staff on the phones to be at the very top of their game.

With competition in the holiday market so strong these days in the online arena, you really need to ensure that your web copy offers something better than the opposition. Every holiday site talks about their quality service/great prices/strong knowledge, to the degree that it has almost become white noise to the reader. What travel websites need (especially the niche tailor made variety) is something unique and compelling enough for readers to move from the web browser to the phone to talk to one of your experts.

So rather than talking in generic and factual terms, it’s vital that niche holiday operators simultaneously show off their unique knowledge and make the place sound as tantalisingly emotive as possible. You can talk about some of the exquisite local delicacies, about the pristine golden beaches and turquoise waters, about the incredibly colourful coral reefs and fascinating wildlife – whatever the main selling points of the region you’re looking to promote are. All of this must, of course, be immaculately written – both stylistically and in terms of grammar and language - and this is where many perfectly good companies fail: either by just putting any old copy up, or by using the same overly-complex content as used in their brochure. There’s a key difference between online and offline copy: the latter is designed to be read at length in comfort, while the former needs to be punchy and to the point.

If your copy has done the job, it will have succeeded in encouraging the visitor to pick up the phone, and then it’s time for your sales staff to take over and strut their in-depth knowledge of your product and ensure that the sale is made. If the copy has performed at its best, the sale should be far easier to finalise thanks to the warm up work your website has done.

So the answer to which is better - your sales staff or the copy on your site?  They’re both vital, but your website’s copy needs to be of a high standard to maximise your call centre staff’s potential. If you can warm them up with some mouth-watering copy, you’re halfway there to making the sale!