Trial and error is the key to marketing success, according to Skyscanner’s Alana Saphin-Polchleb, who has lead the metasearch company through a string of campaigns in the local market.
Speaking to KarryOn in Sydney last month, the Senior Marketing Manager said having figures and endless data can assist in building a campaign but until it’s tested there’s not knowing whether it will work.
That’s why she’s encouraging travel companies to follow in Skyscanner’s footsteps by launching smaller initiatives and not putting all their eggs in one basket.
“It’s important to test things out and see what works.”
Alana Saphin-Polchleb, Skyscanner Senior Marketing Manager
“You can have all the data in the world, which is great, but that doesn’t guarantee success.”
She said Skyscanner has a number of activities planned to build brand awareness in the local market, including a second round of its recent TVC campaign.
The first video campaign for the company launched in Australia earlier this week with 15 and 30 second clips.
Inspiring people to travel through inspirational footage, the videos ran online for two weeks as a test on how Aussies would respond.
Saphin-Polchleb said the trial gained ‘a lot of traction’ amongst online searchers and will be followed up by another two to three week campaign this month.
Check out the rest of our chat with Skyscanner’s Senior Marketing Manager below:
Skyscanner is increasingly growing in the local market, how has you achieved this?
We’re getting a lot of traction through new marketing campaigns, and different partnerships. At the moment we’re really focused on targeting people travelling over the holidays and boosting our niche segments like sporting fans, we’re targeting families, we’re targeting the young travellers and then the business travellers.
We’re really looking at segmenting the audience and how we can fulfill the consumers needs in that way.
What was your more recent marketing campaign?
We recently trialled a bit of video and we’re looking at doing that a bit more.
We had our first online video campaign in Australia and New Zealand in July, it ran for two weeks and it performed quite well so we’re going to do a second round. We used great footage from a Singapore campaign, split it up into a 30 second and 15 second video. It focuses on highlighting an escape from the everyday with beautiful inspirational footage. We’re trying to enhance those escape moments and look at starting another two to three week trial in October.
What was the aim of the campaign?
It was more about brand awareness and message comprehension. It’s important with online that you understand what the audience is trying to do – in the case of video, they’re watching online videos to escape at lunch or afterwork. So we gave them a video that allowed them to escape while showcasing the Skyscanner is capable of providing those types of escapes.
Do you have any challenges marketing to Aussies?
There is still a bit of confusion as to what we do. We have to explain that we’re not an online travel agent we’re a travel search engine, we don’t charge fees and the price you see on Skyscanner is the price at the end.
Once you explain all that, we get a really positive response.
Are people using your site on mobile or web?
Skyscanner is a mobile first business, but we do see a lot of people will do research on their phones and then secure everything via a desktop or laptop.
There’s still a lot of distrust consumers in the western world need to overcome when it comes to mobile but we have a login functionality in place that allows travellers to use their mobiles to search and then retrieve their entire search data via laptop or desktop at a later time.
They can also set up price alerts and receive notifications when costs go up or down.
