Air Transport
Article | July 15, 2022
The global airline industry is currently going through unprecedented financial damage. A few factors contributing are high operational costs, increased security costs, low customer satisfaction, low revenue, and frequent dynamic shifts in air travel.
Hence, it’s a high time for airlines businesses to resolve their multitude of issues for its economy to recover. To leverage this goal, the industry should leverage its most high-volume asset—analytics. Analytics will help drive the airline industry's growth rate in the coming years.
It’s because, Developing new data applications will bring a handful of digital marketing opportunities in the next five years. And these applications will bridge the gap in the industry.
Welcome to the New Age of Analytics
This topic of discussion is not new. But the new thing about analytics is that it is changing the airline industry data collection process. Analytics has become an essential part because the pandemic has forced countless non-digital airline businesses to shift to online operations.
Advanced analytics with innovative data technologies is becoming popular due to its numerous applications. To name a few, it provides smart management abilities and a proper decision-making system. So, to get a hand over this, marketers should have a razor-sharp focus to upgrade their analytics.
With advanced analytics, airlines can deliver the right information to the right audience at the right time. And when customers access the right information efficiently, they turn into prospective clients. In addition, by using analytics as part of online operations, airlines can survive without a dedicated offline presence.
With the digital transformation happening in the aviation industry, it at a turning point. The situation now is an “adapt or die” one. This policy is generating opportunities for airlines that are making significant changes to their current old business model. However, such a transformation is only possible when analytical technologies are fully adapted. This way, marketers can easily capitalize on operating online by being agile and have adaptable tools.
How can Marketers Adapt Analytics?
As a marketer in the digital era, you need to organize data with the help of technology. By organizing data, you can easily collect data from channels such as social media, loyalty programs, and other online forums. Here are some to use Analytics to empower digital transformation:
Power of Personalization
Digital technologies offer marketing and sales opportunities in direct and indirect channels. For supplies and buyers, this means they can establish greater contact with consumers. It will result in a significant way to sell and buy more products. However, you can take customer interaction a step further by offering personalized offers and discounts with analytics.
Investing in Loyal Customer Base
The most important digital opportunity comes from loyalty programs. Offering it can provide marketers with substantial amounts of customer information. Additionally, there are three other focus areas where you can use analytics:
Partnership with leading technology providers
Enhancing content
Cost maintenance
Investing in these customer-centric areas using analytics will gradually deliver proven results.
Empowering Strategies using Analytics
The next step is to develop a comprehensive data platform strategy by including a data integration layer. By combining traditional and new data sources, this layer will make a flexible and more accessible data architecture to scale airline industry data. This will allow marketers to gain insights into their changing customer behavior.
Hence, adding a data integration layer will also need considerable effort and investment to deploy a cloud platform, an analytic-data-warehouse layer, and a team that maintains the data platform.
So, what are the Exact Ways Analytics is Going to Help Marketers?
Cost reduction:
The advanced airline industry analysis will help in making cost reductions. Whether it is from fuel consumption, deploying technology, or smart manufacturing, analytics can solve cost-related issues at once. For this, airline businesses must deploy AI systems with machine algorithms, which will help marketers to collect the exact data. Then they can easily analyze the estimations and can reduce them as per the requirements.
Customer Satisfaction
The addition to cost reduction, predictive analysis can help by keeping customers up-to-date in real-time. You can enhance Customer satisfaction by promoting offers based on their demand. Once you can have genuine insights and information about your customers and understand their behavior beforehand, you can approach them with the right message, solutions, and services by giving the right reason to invest.
Most importantly, predictive analytics will help speed up the response rate to customers' queries and solve them in no time. Today the response speed matters because airline customers are constantly shifting their travel behaviors. As a result, they now seek customized approaches compared to the traditional approach.
For example, Delta Airlines deployed advanced predictive analytics with AI. They optimized their operations through innovative customer services. Delta Airlines invested a whopping $600,000 for automation software installation. The investment was successful as they were able to access their data effortlessly and were able to connect with their customers by offering them multitude of offers.
Performance Attributes
Today, airline companies need prompt and accurate performance measurements to take critical, appropriate, and timely actions. Big data analytics can automate certain daily activities. The activities such as prospects' queries, website visitors, landing page hits, and more can be watched daily or weekly. With big data being so effective it will also help you understand the core ingredients for revenue generation. In the end, such advancement will stimulate airline industry data growth.
Risk Protection
This is of utmost importance for the airline industry's growth rate. You can develop various innovative models and strategies and avoid risks while implementing them using Advanced Data Analytics.
The risks could be like a data breach, technical factors, organizational operations, customer data, and more. To counter back these risks, you should have proper strategic or annual safety objectives. Advanced analytics have higher levels of excellence that alleviate performance drifts. It will also help you to achieve and maintain through a proper monitoring and testing system.
For example, British easyJet has diminished its operational challenges using AI. With the help of IT, it used data science to improve its pricing strategy, manage inventory, and lowered risk factors. As a result, the company observed an increase in profits of almost 20% in 2021.
What’s Next for You with Analytics?
Marketers should be astute and apprehensive about Analytics. Understanding the upcoming trends of analytics are vital. In addition, the current situation also demands a holistic approach that supports technology (digitalization). Having appropriate approaches will lead you to stand out in this competitive industry.
Taking advantage of data for your existing or potential customers can help you to recognize more information about their activities. So that you can include more innovative techniques and can attract potential leads before they are gone. With technically sound data analytics you can experiment with different customer-centric strategies like:
Building responsive landing pages that get fit in every screen
Being more flexible with your prospects and enhancing interactions either through social media or a website.
Creating platform-specific content to improve customer interaction.
The strategies mentioned above will help you in collecting more data and curating on-demand content/information. By adopting these strategies, you can provide a data-backed open online platform in which you can easily connect with your customers.
Once you have grabbed the technique for your digital marketing needs, tapping big data solutions will be a much better way than before. Therefore, it is crucial to keep legacy thinking aside and welcome innovation onboard.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the importance of analytics in the airlines business?
Analytics play a vital role in airline businesses. It helps in cost reductions, which could result in investing in better ways. Also, data helps to avoid breaches, provide safety measures, collect huge amounts of information, and enhances operational functionalities.
Does analytics require proper strategies to function in an airline business?
Yes! To implement analytics in your airline business, you need a strategic approach. Analytics provides statistical analysis. Using it, you can investigate and analyze business performance and give insights about improvement as well.
What are the different types of analytics used in the aviation industry?
There are three types of analytics that airline businesses use:
Descriptive analytics: It tells the current business operation
Predictive analytics: It shows what could happen in real-time
Prescriptive analytics: It shows what should happen in the future.
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Air Transport
Article | July 26, 2022
Hit by the impact of the COVID-19 slump, airline businesses are enduring a major crisis no matter how recognized they were before. The crisis has pushed airline businesses to re-look at how to manage and operate their operations. It even includes re-positioning in the airline industry’s competitive market landscape.
In a time like this, you need to delve deep when you update your airline brand positioning strategy. Your marketing team will have to be versatile and adapt to a new set of planning strategies. They should be mindful of aspects to reduce risks and overcome challenges that the pandemic caused. It’s time to rise again through hindrances that affected your airline brand image to go down. Let’s throw some light on why brand positioning in marketing has become necessary now.
Importance of Re-positioning of an Airline Brand
Brand positioning in marketing is receiving snowballing attention in airline marketing today. Adopting versatile branding concepts creates optimism to provide value to products and services. And such concepts help products and services to perform well on various distribution channels.
The values play an active role in brand positioning and so in re-positioning. Since customers’ activities have transformed in the new era of digitalization, deciding afresh on values will help you position your brand for the future. The branding must include a proper blend of physical and emotional values to make the brand both powerful and meaningful.
When faced with challenges, it’s natural for even large airline businesses to become unrecognizable by customers. Thus, showcasing your brand as unique as possible becomes hard-hitting to differentiate from the competition. In that case, the idea of re-positioning requires consistent branding strategies. The strategies can help in many ways. A few of them are maintaining customer loyalty, encourage awareness, and showing customers your presence in the market.
Therefore, to build deeper relationships with customers by re-positioning your airline brand, there are some important steps to follow. The stepwise guide will help in creating a competent brand positioning framework development. But remember, the framework should be defendable for growth.
6 Steps to Follow: Re-position your Airline Brand
Determine your Values
Start by considering the values that will represent your airline business brand. By finding the values, it will make you different from the rest of the competitors. Especially in a case where you are going for product marketing or service as an ordinary in the market or marketing it extraordinarily.
Your aim gives you essential insight into what and how to go with the brand again in the new normal. Thus, try to analyze and research aspects of your competitors as well.
We fight every day to stand out. We know our customers like to sound and feel authentic about brands. So, we believe that instead of building a complex picture of our airline brand (where no one will be able to understand), we prefer humanization.
- Kevin Krone, the Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Southwest Airlines.
In realizing this aspect, your marketing team can innovate by creating campaigns to improve brand image.
Identify the Competitors Surrounding and Research
After recognizing the brand values, it’s requisite to analyze competitors serving in the market as you. You can do it by performing competitor analysis. The analysis will help to decide how better you can do in creating your brand positioning strategy.
To start with it, there are different methods for determining your competition. They are:
Do a thorough competitor research
You can take guidance from your sales team to study what and how competitors develop their distinctive ideas with sales. Then, identify them through in-depth market research on their tactics of positioning their brand. To conduct it, include the following points into your research:
What are the services or products competitors do offer?
What are the brand positioning strategies they are using to ensure success?
What is the current position of their brand in the market?
It will be easy for you to set your aim to re-position your airline brand by putting these considerations forefront.
Take Feedbacks from customers
Connect with your existing and potential customers. Try to know what services or products they are considering according to the present scenario.
Use the power of social media
Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Quora, Facebook, and other online forums offer interaction with consumers. You can ask questions about products and services. Use these forums to discover competitors in your role.
Find your Brand’s Uniqueness
Building a unique brand image (by keeping a similar aim as before) will make you different from the competitors in the airline industry.
We are the same exact airline that we were before. We are not walking away from our DNA.
- Kevin Krone
Your well-researched step on competitors will help to learn about branding patterns in the new normal. In addition, by looking at their weaknesses and strengths, you might get a chance to know your strength. This aspect will make your brand unique.
Develop a Re-positioning Statement
Once you know your customers' thoughts, you need to develop a statement that portrays your message. If you aim to convey that your business offers the best services or products in the market during the current economic slump, then it’s imperative to keep a razor-sharp focus on a brand positioning strategy.
For example, you can include your ROI data. Use it as a statement in online paid ads, social media platforms, campaigns, emails, and other marketing methods. By doing this, you will be able to grab your existing and potential customers’ attention. And see how potential ones become loyal towards your business in no time.
There’s no definite way to re-position your existing airline brand in times of the pandemic. But there are some crucial ways to do it. The ways are customizing efforts enable significant chances to offer quality services and products to reach customers.
Test your Re-positioning Statement—if it works!
Once your re-positioning statement is formed, it’s time to test it. Try to do experiments with the help of feedback collection from customers. The feedbacks should cover if they are conveyed with the right message. Therefore, in this way, you can know whether your brand achieved its goal or not.
As you invest effort and time into re-positioning your airline brand, it’s helpful to keep in mind the type of consumers, demographic segmentation, and verticals. These verticals provide a deep insight that content and its aim remain advantageous to your brand.
Develop your Brand’s Reference Frame
Your brand’s reference will be an accurate way for customers to perceive it in the right way. Having a genuine brand positioning framework today is vital for re-positioning. And with the help of an on-point brand development strategy, you can plan it extraordinarily. Once you have created the frame of your brand, it is advisable to keep a focus on reaching achievable goals.
Successful Re-positioning Efforts Drives Growth
As you are aware that a strong branding of an airline business makes all the difference when you enter the market, similarly, re-positioning also makes a difference when you have to outshine again amid challenges. So, having a definite approach will ensure success for your brand and drive growth amid the ongoing pandemic challenges.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can airline businesses improve their brand image?
An airline business runs with a multitude of functionalities. Every function plays a responsible role in improving the brand image. Thus, some crucial ways are discussed below:
Create the right message which should be synonymous with brand value or perspective
Stay in contact with customers through various marketing ways
Keep track of strategies and implementation
Turn data into intelligence
Keep an eagle eye on competitors and their activities
Keep employees in the loop
What are the best branding strategies for airline businesses?
The best branding strategies for airline businesses are as follows:
Cost control strategies
Social media campaigns
Creative advertisement
Loyalty programs
Use power of influencers
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Stay in contact with customers through various marketing ways
Keep track of strategies and implementation
Turn data into intelligence
Keep an eagle eye on competitors and their activities
Keep employees in the loop "
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Air Transport
Article | July 6, 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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Air Transport
Article | July 26, 2022
A New System That Aims to Create Carbon-Neutral Aviation
Scientists have achieved an amazing breakthrough in the development of carbon-neutral fuel for the aviation industry. An aviation fuel production system that uses water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide has been put into action. Its design was published on July 20th, 2022, in the journal Joule. The dream of achieving carbon-free aviation could become a reality with this development.
“We are the first to demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain from water and CO2 to kerosene in a fully-integrated solar tower system.” - Aldo Steinfeld, Professor, Study Corresponding Author, ETH Zurich
The aviation industry accounts for approximately 5% of the global anthropogenic emissions that contribute to global climate change. The industry heavily relies on kerosene, commonly known as jet fuel, a liquid hydrocarbon fuel derived from crude oil. There are no clean options to power commercial flights on a global scale at the moment.
Production of Synthetic Kerosene
This breakthrough, with the help of solar energy, makes it possible to produce synthetic kerosene from water and carbon dioxide instead of crude oil. The amount of CO2 emitted during kerosene combustion in a jet engine equals what is consumed during its production in the solar plant. It is what makes the fuel carbon neutral, especially if the CO2 in the air is captured and directly used as an ingredient, which could be possible in the near future.
As part of the European Union's SUN-to-LIQUID project, Steinfeld and his colleagues put forward a system that uses solar power to generate drop-in fuels—synthetic alternatives to fossil-derived fuels like kerosene and diesel. Solar-produced kerosene is consistent with the current aviation infrastructure for allocation, fuel storage, and use in jet engines. It can also combine with fossil-derived kerosene, according to Steinfeld.
High Hopes for the Future
Steinfeld and his team began scaling the construction of a solar fuel manufacturing plant at the IMDEA Energy Institute in Spain half a decade ago. The plant has 169 sun-tracking reflective panels that redirect and concentrate solar radiation into a tower-mounted solar reactor. This concentrated solar energy then powers redox reaction cycles in the reactor’s porous ceria structure, which is not absorbed but can be reused. It transforms the water and carbon dioxide into syngas, a customized mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. This syngas is then injected into a gas-to-liquid converter and is finally converted into liquid hydrocarbon fuels such as kerosene and diesel. Steinfeld and his team are working on amping up the reactor’s efficiency from the current 4% to more than 15%.
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