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Guild Webinar: Marketing Yourself
August 11th, 2025 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
This is a webinar aimed at all members in that it will cover some of the basics of marketing.
These include:
- Generally, how do people find you to employ you?
- Where are you prepared to work and what work are you prepared to do? Work doesn’t always have to be “abroad” but can be “local”.
- How easy is it for people to find you and engage you?
- The importance of having your own website and why – some of the basic fundamentals to understand how search engines work to find your website and you.
- Linking with another party’s website (e.g. The Guild’s website if you are accredited)
- Using social media – you should have a strategy as to how you use it.
- Other means of marketing / promotion
- Review sites like Tripadvisor and Google Review
- Not underselling yourself!
It will be fairly generic in the sense that many of you may be doing specific things which generate good business – maybe you have already thought of how they fit into the bigger promotion / marketing picture, perhaps you haven’t.
It will also cover using the “Find a Guide” listing on the Guild website. Whilst this is aimed primarily at Accredited Members, it is still going to be of interest to the wider membership in how to ensure that your potential customers can find your specialisms when they are looking for the very same thing. For example, if you claim to be able to cover “Operation Overlord”, you are not likely to get many hits if you just list your expertise as “WW2”. You need to understand how potential customers search for battlefield guides! In the Guild, we get many requests for guides from potential customers willing to hand over their money but they cannot find guides with the specialisms because you haven’t adequately listed them!
I have been leading on improving the Find a Guide pages on the website, looking at what members have been saying about themselves, so I have a pretty good idea of those members who are likely to be found by potential customers and those who will not be. (I promise that I will not embarrass anyone by their entries!)
We will have a look at the taxonomies of Tour type capacities, countries which can be serviced and the wars, battles and campaigns covered. Understanding how these work is key!
So, this is also the opportunity for Accredited “Badged” members (and aspiring Accredited members) to get up to speed with what they need to do with their listing to make it work for them.
I don’t claim to be some expert marketing guru in that it is something that I have made a career out off. But I did spend more than 30 years selling my professional services in a previous career and I can assure you that I always had to look at from where the next work was coming and selling myself and the business. After retiring from that first career, I started a guiding business from scratch, setting up a website to take bookings online, generally and specifically promoting myself, and in 9 years I have done nearly 500 tours, mainly from guests direct, but also from tour companies, other businesses and military units. I also have a 5-star Tripadvisor rating (some 180 plus reviews) which I know contributes significantly to new bookings.
If there are members with professional marketing experience who might like to contribute their thoughts / insights in the webinar, please get in contact with me ( governance@gbg-