Air Transport
Article | July 26, 2022
What are the aviation marketing questions B2B audiences are asking in 2021?
It is always beneficial to study the market scenario and your competitors when starting a new marketing plan. It provides you with a better vision and explores opportunities to become the best in the market and which marketing approach to take. Before you start planning your marketing in aviation, there are a few things you should sort out first.
So, start your strategy by taking note of some important marketing questions!
Important Questions to Create an Aviation Marketing Plan
Are aviation businesses doing more or less marketing in 2022?
What are the best-performing aviation marketing campaigns?
What marketing strategies are unused in the aviation industry?
What are the international aviation marketing trends?
Which social media do aviation marketing professionals use for marketing?
How do aviation professionals plan the finance for marketing?
How do market leaders optimize their websites and build a brand image?
Keeping these questions beside you, follow the tips to create a prolific aviation marketing plan.
Tips at your Fingers
Tip One: Things to do—Image Vs. Words
Usage of images (visuals) has become influential to do marketing in aviation. While the industry has always focused on verbal content, both are equally important, but in different marketing ways. Let’s understand the following:
SEO: Images can’t do well when doing optimization. But words are the main component in optimization in blogs, articles, whitepapers, webinars, and more.
Social media: Images are becoming more perusable and are more understood by audiences. Whereas words are compelling to get more visitors to the website.
Website content: In this, both usages of images and content are important to connect with the audience and market well.
It’s crucial to watch the latest aviation industry trends to plan your marketing efforts. Referring to that, you can make the most of materials using images like:
• Display & explain products
• Create presentation showing numeric data
• Create videos out of content
• A sales presentation
Remember, now prospects are emotionally persuaded to purchase products and services. This will lead you to grab more and better aviation business opportunities. You have to be quick and pick up to make the deal yours. Being interactive in your image creation is the better way to show your audience your ideology.
Tip Two: Create One Idea at Once
Any marketing plan should start from one idea at a time. To proceed with it, think and consider— “what is the one thing you want your audience, visitors, or potential targets to understand and get solutions for?
It is necessary to analyze first because most marketing sales professionals remain muddled with the motive behind their marketing efforts. Therefore, it’s better to refrain from yourself and try to ideate one concept at a time. In other words, everything you create should support that ONE idea!
Tip Three: Branding is key!
Branding is visual. Visuals appeal to prospects in the aviation industry.
Is your brand instantly recognizable to your prospects? If not, you need to pay more heed to it.
Your brand is more than any other asset that communicates your story.
A creative and reflective brand image is one of the impactful aviation industry trends most aviation professionals focus on. It’s vital because visuals have an appealing factor. In addition, the professionals in the aviation industry, engage and trust information displayed than told to them. So, create a visual brand image that tells a story.
Another most important thing is to add testimonials to your brand. Yes! Video testimonials are much more potent because it comes from your prospects. Make a “wish list” of prospects you would like to get a testimonial from and add it to your website!
Tip Four: Campaign it! With RIGHT message
Before you head towards creating campaigns for marketing in aviation, remember that every campaign needs these three elements:
• A great list
• A great offer
• And a great presentation
If any of these elements lack the motive, you won’t be successful. An example of it is a general digital magazine advertisement. It has a numerous list of subscribers, beautiful design, conceptualization, but no specific offer or a call to action. The reader won’t take any interest in responding to that particular ad. Such campaigns face severe failure!
But if your campaign has the base of these elements, you can expect a good ROI for your business.
Tip Five: Social Media Secrets
There is always some information hidden in the news or something that your community or industry talks about. So, it is good to keep a watch on such matters to generate good content. Social media is the most preferred platform to do such activities today.
You probably don’t have time to get involved in every social media channel. So, it's better to involve in one channel than to be on multiple. So, watch the new, set up analytics for key topics important in the industry, and let inspiration spread in the form of information through your marketing materials like infographics, slides, images, and more.
As Hootsuit studied on social media usage by marketing leaders, let’s have a quick look at which social media do aviation professionals use for marketing mostly.
LinkedIn
Rare: 0%
Monthly: 31%
Weekly: 25%
Daily: 57%
Facebook
Monthly: 13%
Weekly: 9%
Daily: 20%
Twitter
Monthly: 17%
Weekly: 14%
Daily: 25%
Instagram
Monthly: 4%
Weekly: 11%
Daily: 3%
YouTube
Monthly: 21%
Weekly: 14%
Daily: 10%
These indicate that your competitors mostly use LinkedIn and Facebook channels for marketing because aviation professionals are most likely to be using these channels frequently. If you produce interesting information, you can build a strong online audience.
Tip Six: Bag the deal with 15 Second Sales Presentation
Sales & sale—do it the right way!
What do you say when a prospect asks you, “What do you do?” Here your 20-second sales presentation works in a roomful of sales-interested prospects!
Sale is a process. If you have the proper steps to follow intelligently, you will have much better results. But remember, it should be contented and compelling to the right people, but non-pitchy.
Follow these tips to deliver a fantastic presentation within seconds:
• Reflect your USP (unique selling proposition)
• Your company’s tagline
• Keep it amazingly short
• Avoid usage of over hyperbole— for example “We have most unbelievably wonderfully grand aviation products for you”
• Be concise, professional, and elegant
• Use non-technical language
• Tell benefits than features
• Use examples when necessary
Deliver an approachable, responsive, and simple presentation that makes your prospect say, “Tell me more about that!”
Apart from this, sales are also about passion. And if a prospect senses your passion for what you do, they become much comfortable with your offerings!
So, do your homework. Prepare for it in advance. Know everything you can about the prospect; its company, services, mode of work, and more. Then have a faithful and specific objective in mind for each sales call. This will find your prospect’s best interest to discover more, take the conversation deeper, and thus, no one can stop you from getting the deal done.
Tip Seven: Plan an Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar is crucial when it comes to marketing—branding, sales, and relationship building.
Providing highly informational content to your prospects allows interacting.
To simply put, your calendar is the best cover page. It will help to align the process of marketing items such as:
• Planned campaigns
• Webinars
• Seasonal events
• Launches
• expenses
Planned marketing will bring fascinating aviation business opportunities and will stimulate the aviation industry growth.
Tip Eight: Be Financially Strong!
This is a crucial part. Finance is what your top management wants to see. It is easy to come up with a huge, long, unproductive, and unrealistic marketing plan. However, planning a reasonable one that is capable of bringing success and probability together is truly an art. So, ensure to make an advanced one with a monthly income statement and include assumptions you make.
Marketing in aviation is growing fast and is not expected to be sluggish anytime soon. With the rising aviation industry trends, it's easy to see opportunities beyond 2021. Therefore, all you need is an all-inclusive plan by following these tips. They will help you learn online aviation marketing solutions to increase traffic, ROI, brand image, and of course, raise conversation rates.
After completing your marketing planning, read further to get familiar with using effective marketing strategies that will bring effective change to your business.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are some of the tips for creating an aviation marketing plan?
Aviation marketing has nothing different from other marketing ways. It is just you need to pay attention to the range of audiences is in the aviation industry. However, here are some more tips:
• Optimize your every content generation
• Display your potential to the audience
• Pay attention to ads
• Leverage paid ads
• Do email
What is the importance of marketing in aviation?
Aviation not only deals with passengers; it includes businesses to make money. For that, marketing plays a vital role in making people aware of product selling or providing services. It drives awareness of products, creates a brand image, builds trust among buyers, and provides valuable information to the audience in various forms using various channels.
What is the difference between selling and marketing?
Selling makes money directly from the prospects. While marketing is all about serving solutions and satisfying prospect needs. The method includes different stages—planning, analyzing, monitoring, execution, promotion, and distribution.
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Do email"
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Defense and Space
Article | June 8, 2022
The UK government has announced that from 11th February, fully vaccinated passengers arriving into the country will no longer have to take COVID-19 tests on arrival. The news follows the removal of pre-departure testing for fully vaccinated UK-bound passengers this month.
The relaxation of testing measures is something the aviation industry has been actively campaigning for, as it removes barriers to travel. Just today, IATA distributed a press release advocating for similar moves to be made by further governments. It cited a study focused on the UK carried out by Oxera and Edge Health which found that because Omicron is now highly prevalent in the UK, “if all travel testing requirements were removed there would be no impact on Omicron case numbers or hospitalizations.”
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Business Aviation
Article | December 28, 2021
Experience is Everything—human or mechanical. But Get it Right.
"AI's potential doesn't solely lie in its ability to improve business efficiency. Rather it lies in its ability to bridge the gap between businesses and customers. AI-powered communications enable for surged personalized and strengthening of information, stimulating customer trust and customer experiences."
- Kevin Gosschalk, CEO, Arkose Labs, in a conversation with Media 7.
Whether you make payments with a single tap in apps, ask Alexa to instruct in your smartphones, select Google assistance to find flights, or connect to airline companies, digital transformation is omnipresent. So, the appreciation comes naturally for how today's digital atmosphere transforms and affects our lives in every way.
Yes, you heard that right!
Using Google assistance to find flights is not the new way the industry uses AI. Instead, it has enhanced its way of AI usage into its process and operations. Like other businesses, aviation businesses are catching up well in using data and technology. With the help of these, they now create more compelling and prompter customer experiences.
The developments and revenues in the global aviation industry are skyrocketing. The industry expects almost 8.2 billion passengers to fly around the world by 2037. The rising numbers are because of digital transformation. The most interesting thing is aviation now has to manage high expectations of digital-savvy customers. It will be even more interesting now!
Before the blog breaks into discussing the futuristic airline customer experience, let's look at the flashback of the past customer experience scenarios (challenges) that prevailed in the airline industry.
Past Customer Experience Scenario in Airline
The aviation industry in 2018 recorded 4.4 billion passengers flying around the world. Furthermore, according to the IATA reports, the count is anticipated to reach 8.2 billion by 2037. But the industry is increasingly lacking behind in customer experience.
Complex booking procedures and missing out on the best flight offers because of complex app/website navigation and other potential customer services are issues raised in air travel today. Apart from this, customers also raise concerns over inflight infotainment systems. The systems merely do their job. Therefore, as many airport terminals are still empty, customer service representatives are working harder to overcome such issues.
As the industry has stepped into the fourth industrial revolution, AI rewards the best experiences for travels and other airline customer services. Now, airline marketers can find diverse AI-based digital solutions to sail through the cloud. And the findings are quite remarkable.
Let's come to the part where you will know how AI is helping the aviation industry scale its customer services.
How Can AI Enrich Airline and Scale Customer Services?
Airlines that leverage AI customer experience have had a significant advantage during the pandemic time. Their insights have been put into enriching the entire aviation business. Let's understand the 'how.'
Get Multiple Output in Seconds
When the demand for air fly rise, offering immediate services for customer handling teams becomes stressful. However, with AI, instances like this get a perfect solution.
AI can handle an infinite number of customers' demands at once. By leveraging AI-based digital solutions, you can scale up fulfilling airline operations in seconds. As a result, teams in your firm can easily diminish the increased demand for services and serve remarkable customer experience.
The benefit of AI can also be seen crosswise support channels. For instance, WestJet's ticket volume surged by 71% on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp during the beginning weeks of COVID-19 disruption in North America. However, the airline kept its response time low as its virtual agent Juliet ultimately resolved 87% of tickets.
Identity New and Trending Issues
Aviation is an industry of challenges. Issues and obstacles keep knocking on the door of airline companies. In such cases, AI informs if there are any trending issues over channels. For example, during the COVID-19 outbreak, new onboard safety issues and questions towards social distancing surfaced for the first time. However, airlines have never come through about social distancing. So, by leveraging AI, they created a responsive plan for customers. They communicated the same through AI-enabled solutions on websites and applications.
In response to the coronavirus, Gartner suggests that companies should use chatbots in digital channels to focus on the most ordinarily asked questions to give solutions for customers.
Feedback Analysis
Air travel can be stressful at times, even for frequent and experienced travelers. For example, it could be passport-related or booking tickets, baggage checks, ticket prints, arrivals, departures, seat assistance, etc.
So, by analysis of data, artificial intelligence in customer experience learns about these pain points of airports and flight experiences. In this way, customer experience can be improved and enhanced simultaneously.
Then comes feedback. Using AI for feedback analysis, airlines can research the market. It can make informed decisions related to processes and operations.
"AI systems can quickly allow airlines to discover opportunities to intervene in the customer journey and turn a miserable experience into a delightful one. It also allows companies to respond faster in a synchronized and regulated way that is uniform with the business's values. Ultimately, we want to understand how an airline can fascinate a customer as well as where there is an abrasion in the customer journey and figure out how to fix it,"
- CEO of PureStrategy Inc. Briana Brownell
Briana highlights the growing relevance of natural language used in AI. Understanding technology in the processing and analysis of customer experience data thus allows businesses to explore the customer journey in their own words.
For example, ANIE, an AI assistance, can help customers find, book, and pay for flights.
Effective Communication
The speed of responsive communication to customer queries is highly considered to resolve issues. For example, airport issues like flight delays or baggage loss crop up quite often throwing. As a result, travelers usually get into a state of nervousness. However, when they do not get a response or explanation to their problems, they start considering other airlines for their future trips.
In these cases, AI software deployment can speed up and simplify services, automatically enhancing airline customer experience. In addition, effective customer emails with exact information can also solve significant issues and streamline employees' workflow using natural text.
Another way to automate and improve airline customer experience is chatbot development. Today, many airlines enhance their customer support with AI-powered chatbots on their websites and mobile applications.
The Business Insider’s research report says that by 2022, over 80% of airline businesses are likely to have chatbot automation implemented in operations.
These chatbots help passengers with bookings, managing flight schedules, and updating customers about general flight information. In addition, they can post queries and other types of assistance to get quick responses.
Self-Services at Airports
Easy self-check-ins, ticket booths, and overall communication (from booking to destination arrival) add to the comprehensive AI-based digital solutions.
The pandemic forced the aviation industry to witness the extraordinary rise of numerous contactless technologies. So, airports are now more focused on providing self-services for customers. These include contactless payments, luggage checks, robotic assistance for queries, and more like these.
Self-service systems in airports are critical automated systems. AI technology is installed to automate passenger journeys without any hurdles.
Today, airline companies and airports implement an end-to-end solution using artificial intelligence in customer experience to facilitate smooth passenger air travel and operations. In case of point, Delta Airlines, one of the world's largest global airlines, uses intelligent systems such as Fly to Gate by Thales. The system works with biometrics technology. The employees use it for the document scanning process to recognize and verify passengers at security checks.
Such technology reduces passenger check-in time and improves customer experience.
Future of AI Customer Experience in Airline Industry
There are many shreds of evidence that customers increasingly want a personal touch with their communications. They adore personalized services. Even airline companies are seeking profound connections with their customers. And this is the right time to act by offering personalized customer experiences.
Today, AI makes it possible for the entire airline industry to enhance customer experience with automation, provide self-service solutions, ensure safe air travel, and more. Technology is a powerful tool for airlines to make informed decisions that they couldn't take in the past few years. Now airlines can make decisions faster on essential decisions such as on pricing of tickets by analyzing data, enabling secure authentication of customers than before.
Ultimately, the success of artificial intelligence in customer experience is driven by having a deep understanding of different customer segments. By harnessing the power of conversational AI, airline businesses can improve their ROI, nurture long-term customer relationships, metrics being the core elements.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can airline companies improve their customer experience?
To improve customer experience, airline companies can follow these ways:
Focus on knowing the target audience
Meet unique and specific customer needs
Keep customers engaged on social media platforms
Make smart customer-targeted decisions
Be responsive towards customers
How does AI play its role in aviation concerning customer experiences these days?
AI plays a crucial role in helping customers in aviation to find the correct information more efficiently. It actively helps analyze customers' data and recommend services based on their browsing preferences about flights.
How does AI improve customer experience?
AI enables the power to strengthen customer engagement, encourage activities, and improve customer retention. Although not a replacement for human beings, it does help increase the efficiency of serving — like answering frequently asked questions, providing the correct information, and being available 24*7.
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Meet unique and specific customer needs
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Article | April 20, 2020
The coronavirus outbreak has put airline customer care teams on the front lines. Airlines that have adopted artificial intelligence are alleviating some of the stress that their customer care teams are under.
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