How Airlines are Nailing Influencer Marketing?
How Airlines are Nailing Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing campaigns can do more than just sell products and services like advertising does. It is a powerful strategy to generate brand awareness, drive conversation around a brand, create a powerful brand image among other things. Influencer marketing can be an effective strategy to target audiences in other domains. Today, we will take a look at how influencer marketing for airlines can be an innovative strategy to generate brand awareness and top of the mind brand recall.
In 2015, Air France, Air New Zealand, Cathay Pacific and All Nippon Airways collaborated with travel and lifestyle influencers to tap into new audiences by creating rich and varied content for powerful brand messaging. Their approach to influencer marketing for airlines is unique and innovative as they went one step beyond travel influencers and collaborated with lifestyle influencers as well to incorporate their brand in several categories.
Influencer Marketing for Airlines – The Campaign
The objective of this campaign was to build brand awareness by partnering with top social media influencers across myriad of platforms to reach new audiences. The brand wanted to leverage the influencers’ creativity to create engaging content with the purpose of driving profitable action. These airlines collaborated with food, fashion, travel and wedding bloggers among other lifestyle categories. Together, they developed an authentic, aspirational campaign messaging and integrated the brand into the influencer’s content organically.
As a part of this campaign, content creators, bloggers, social media influencers shared aspirational content created around their own personal lifestyle in the form of photos and blog articles. Some of these influencers have a large and loyal fan following mainly because of the kind of content they create and share on a regular basis.
Prominent influencers in the campaign
- 100 Layer Cake (Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Pinterest)
- Tuula Vintage (Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Pinterest)
- Song of Style (Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Pinterest)
- Love & Lemons (Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Pinterest)
- Sugar & Charm (Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Pinterest)
- Design Love Fest (Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Pinterest)
The results of this campaign are staggering. The campaign had a combined social reach of over 8.2 million across Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. The total audience of blog posts related to the campaign garnered 5 million page views and 1 million unique page views in a month.
Some Examples from the Campaign
Song of Style for All Nippon Airways: In this article, Song of Style blooger talks about her recent trip to Philipines and Japan. She talks about flying with All Nippon Airways, their attentive flight attendants and the delicious food (along with its presentation) they serve in the business class.
Tuula Vintage for Cathay Pacific: In this article, Tuula Vantage shares photos from her trip to Maldives including some from her journey elegantly showing Cathay Pacific in the photos. At the end of the gallery she talks about flying with Cathay Pacific when she discusses how to get to Maldives, Hong Kong and returing home to Sydney.
Why Airlines are Partneting with Social Media Influencers?
The aviation and airline industry is a complex space. Airline companies struggle with differentiating themselves from their competitors. Airlines are constant adapting their marketing strategy to achieve a strong top of the mind brand recall among their target audience. In an article outlining the success of Alaskan Airlines in Business Insider, the author Ira Kalb wrote:
“you have to keep your brand in front of the public, and what too many companies do not understand is that people’s memories fade and younger prospects may not know the reasons why they should fly on your airline if you do not remind them.”
Influencer marketing for airlines is an area worth exploring especially when you consider the broad scope of the strategy and the goals that can be achieved. This campaign showcased the airlines in front of new audiences in a creative way, giving them a fresh perspective and aligning their brand image in a classy manner.