Flight or fancy: Flying in a new directon

Airline marketing is undergoing an exciting, unpredictable and creative stage. Facing sophisticated passengers with higher expectations, airlines worldwide are now equipping themselves with advanced tools to conquer the digital marketing revolution and launching mobile campaigns that link the online with the offline world.

Digital marketing and O2O campaigns
Content marketing and target marketing are the key trends in digital marketing promotions, especially for the airline industry. Through a content marketing strategy, we don’t only simply convey our brand values or sales messages, we also want to establish relationships with targeted customers and spread the messages more effectively.

Leveraging the big data we already have plus what we have sourced from outside, we can segment our customers more precisely by their background and behaviour preferences. This enables us to timely adjust or create tailored content to attract customers to purchase products that suit their needs and further expand our customer database.

Moreover, an O2O (online to offline) marketing strategy strengthens the integration of the overall campaign and increases the effectiveness and noise of the campaign. Yet, this tactic cannot be successful without the support of content marketing and target marketing.

Recently, Hong Kong Airlines created effective online and offline campaigns to further promote its first and only direct flight service to Kumamoto, Japan.

By tapping Kumamon, the popular black bear mascot of Kumamoto, we launched a street promotion event to increase customers’ awareness of the new route. With interactive and up-to-date Facebook posts, teasers, videos and event page information, it successfully engaged fans to participate in the activities.

This campaign created an effective marketing promotion for the new route launch and uplifted our overall ROI. Not only was it effective in monetary terms, this campaign also enhanced Hong Kong Airlines’ brand image.

Stand out from competitors
Nowadays, pricing is not the only competitive factor in the airline industry. Airlines have to differentiate themselves from competitors through strengthening brand image, service quality and perception from customers.

The most important factor is brand flexibility. With the way consumers are getting information having changed drastically, airlines have to be highly flexible to adapt to the market changes and make the most of digital marketing to offer high quality services and products to customers in a timely manner.

Changes in the airline regime
Thanks to the fast-growing internet world, we foresee airline e-commerce sales will increase rapidly in the next few years. The average percentage of e-commerce sales in the aviation industry in foreign countries is nearly 40%. However, Hong Kong is only about 25% so there is still much room for Hong Kong to expand.

Also, ancillary revenue will become an important component for airlines. More airlines are developing non-ticket sales strategies to uplift the overall revenue for the company such as duty free sales or baggage charges.

The writer is Ming Chan, general manager of brand centre of Hong Kong Airlines Limited.