The Ultimate Airline Marketing Guide

What does ‘marketing‘ sound like to you ?
Selling a product ? Sure ? Then think again.

Marketing has a much bigger picture behind it. Innovative marketing means using your creativity to make something influential, and then using that influence to making money from your product.

The innovative marketing techniques that I am going to introduce today will help your airline bypass your competitors and generate great sales, as well this kind of marketing will also be very economical and never hurt your bottomline. It costs the same for bad advertising as much as for great advertising.

Before moving on to the techniques, let’s keep in mind the following rule of thumb -

Stress The Benefits .
Yes. Sell with benefits and not the features. Instead use those features to support the benefits.
Never try to overstress your customers by showing the features in your product, instead show them what is in those features for them – the benefits. Use those benefits and always strike directly to your customers’ emotional root .

How to extract that emotional root ?
For example, consider marketimg your new Economy Class seat with a 34″ pitch.

Feature : 34″ pitch

Why is it there : Providing a bigger legroom

What’s in it for them : Lets you travel in comfort

Emotional Root: ” Travel in comfort with our new economy class seat and avoid getting packed in an airline with a small legroom ”

The following two extra factors will help increase the visibility in your product and will also help you to achieve the true potential of these techniques

1. A Unique Selling Point
– Why should someone fly with your airline ?

2. Guarantee an Offer
– Customers need an assurance that they will not be compromised by selecting your airline. Be it lower fares, better safety or guaranteeing their guitar will not be broken – you need to assure them so as to why it is better to fly with you. FedEx started by guaranteeing ‘Overnight delivery’ and the price did not matter.

We will be focusing on two key methods of marketing here – media and word of mouth.

Here are the techniques of marketing that an airline should consider.

Internet

i. Social Media – Social Media includes blogs and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

a. Twitter – Twitter is one of the world’s fastest growing social networks and can be considered one of the key ‘free marketing’ grounds.
Create a Twitter profile for your airline and set someone to update that Twitter profile continuously. Be personal, helpful and open. Talk like a person instead of a company. When you have a great number of followers you will have one of the greatest weapons of ‘free marketing’ to sell any of your products. Keep in mind, the right balance on Twitter is 95% personal and 5% sales. The complete Twitter process and a complete marketing guide on achieving the best from Twitter can be found here .

b. Facebook – Facebook is currently the world’s largest social network and your marketing on Facebook needs to be more fan oriented. Create a Facebook Fan Page instead of a profile and have more direct viral marketing than being helpful. This will add to your brand value and help pitch your product as one that is with the community.

c. Blogs – Blogs are the oldest and the most popular method of social media. Am I going to tell you to start a blog ?
No. Instead start a Blogger Relations Program. This could be called Word of Mouth marketimg 2.0 .
Why is it ?
Every blog serves to a unique readership of its own – a tribe, or a fan club – and this readership tends to always believe in, and trust in, what their blogger tells to them.
A Blogger Relations Program involves gathering a set of bloggers in your niche ( in our case – consumer airline bloggers. Blogs like FlightBlogger will not work despite how great their content is because they are aviation enthusiasts and professionals focused ) sponsoring this community and in return, getting loyal, genuine reviews on your product published at their blog. Their genuine reviews will create great brand awareness of your airline among the readers and will make your airline the first choice for those readers. This process will cost minimal, but the returns will be invaluable.
Nokia Corporation, the world’s leading phone manufacturer, has been doing this excellently for a few years and the results are exceeding expectations.

ii. Regular Websites – Advertising in regular websites was the previous Web 1.0 trend and is a slowly dying kind. It will cost a lot in some cases, but just these eyeballs will not bring you a great revenue as many people are using adblockers nowadays and even the very few who see them click on them rarely. Hence do not advertise at a big website unless it is a really good deal. Instead try to advertise at some popular blogs or travel magazine websites which have a bigger readership from your local region, which will only cost a fraction of what you spend for a ‘big’ website.

Mobile Advertising

i. SMS Advertising
SMS, or Text Message, advertising is a truly up and coming advertising phenomenon that has a great success in generating sales. The success of totally advertising supported mobile networks, such as Blyk, is an excellent example to this.
There are two ways you can advertise via SMS
a. Creating a database of customers’ mobile numbers and using a third party service to message the customers
b. Messaging directly via the mobile network

Method ‘a’ has the advantage of targeting a selected user base, but collecting the numbers could be a little troublesome. If you opt use method ‘b’, select a service which will use your advertisement as a sponsorship instead of a direct sales attempt, which could otherwise result in your messages being considered as spam by the receivers. A good example is the service called Budget SMS offered by Sri Lankan mobile network Dialog. In this service, users can send SMS at half the cost of a regular SMS and your advert will be added to their messages. AirAsia used this service prior to their launch of services to Sri Lanka and I am sure this advertising method did a good contribution to the 40,000 seats that had been booked even before the launch of flights.
There is also a great advantage in Text Message marketing as there is less spam. A recent research found that only 10% of texts were spam, compared with 65% for email.
Whichever of the above SMS advertising methods you may use, always make sure to include a phone number or a web address in your message, which will act as a ‘Call of Action’ to the readers because phone numbers and web addresses can be directly accessed from the message in most modern phones.

ii. Mobile Web Advertising
You might remember that I wrote an article on the value of a mobile website to your airline, this is where it becomes most important.
Mobile web advertising is is placing advertisements in web pages built specifically for mobile devices. This type of advertising has a higher clickthrough rate because the size of the webpage is usually created to fit a mobile’s screen size and hence users will never miss your advert.
There are many companies that will do mobile web advertising for you such as AdMob, but Google also does have a mobile version of its popular AdWords service. Always direct the links to a mobile website of your own.
It is no wonder that a recent study by IAB-UK showed the UK mobile market has grown by an astonishing 99.2% year on year.

Standard Media

Standard Media – ie Press, Radio and Television still have a big user base, specially in developing countries. In order to achieve the maximum out of marketing your product on standard media, just follow these few simple rules

1. Advertise your product in the local language – The most of airline advertisements I’ve seen here in Sri Lanka are in English, but the reality is that most locals do not have a sound knowledge in English. By promoting your product in the local language, you will not miss out on this large ‘chunk’ of potential customers.

2. Respect the local culture – This is of specific importance when you’re serving Asian countries. Having a bad advertisement that might seem to conflict with the local culture could have a bad effect on your brand. Being a brand that respects the local culture will naturally earn the respect of the local community.

Family Specific Marketing
The best marketing that you can get is genuine, word of mouth marketing. We’re going to target various age groups of a family here. The basic principle I’ve used here is that a family will always travel together .
We will target two specific age groups for this kind of marketing.

i.Kids – Kids can have a great effect in a family’s decision making and if a child repeatedly asks his parents to travel on a certain airline, the parents will rarely refuse. So how to do marketing for kids ? Simple. Offer them ‘toys’ they would like. This toys can range from some aircraft stickers to lunch boxes to small model planes. You can also ask your crew to pay a little special care and love for kids. The loyalty that you get from young travellers will last long as we all tend to be loyal to characters and products we fall in love when we’re small.

ii. Elders – The other influential age group in a family is the elders. They always tend to travel with people who respect and value them. If you can offer these elderly travellers with some extra care and make them feel special – you can have a group of passengers who will always prefer to travel you and do a great job in spreading that word of mouth among similar age groups. The most rewarding part is they will always prefer to travel with you even if their family travels with a different airline.

Finally,
Keep it Simple

Make your complete marketing procedure simple. Simplify your products so that your customers will never be confused. Simplify your advertisements so that your customers will clearly understand the call to action. Simplification is the next cornerstone of effective marketing.

When you successfully follow the above marketing techniques, you will transform your brand’s image into a respected and close-to-heart entity in your customers’ hearts . It will help you achieve a great number of loyal passengers, so much so that you will not need a frequent flier programme to tie up your customers. The tactics are also really very economical as I promised early on .
They might seem simple, but they are yet so powerful. Good marketing is about making a good relationship.

This is the fourth installment in an article series called South Asia 101, a tutorial series on how to achieve successful airline operations in South Asia. Today’s article was written in a more global manner since these tips really apply to a global audience and can be effectively used in any market, by any kind of airline, be it legacy or low fare.

P.S : The above article has been solely compiled from my mobile phone. I would really appreciate to hear your feedback. Since I am still learning, I would really appreciate to learn my mistakes too. Please feel free to leave a comment. You can contact me here

About The Author

Leading airline consultant and entrepreneur. Reach me on @AirlineIndustry on Twitter.