Those who work in the marketing industry today are very aware of the impact the emergence of digital has made to the marketing tool-kit. Transforming both the communications and marketing industry, the explosion of digital has seen many small and large businesses turning towards online marketing to increase profitability.As online marketing specialists at Bang Digital, a vast majority of our time is spent testing, evaluating and monitoring results from digital marketing campaigns and it is clear to us that while there is still a place for traditional marketing for some businesses, it is digital marketing that rules the roost when it comes to results. Reported to now be spending more than 70% of its marketing spend on digital marketing channels, it comes as no surprise to the team at Bang that Qantas has refocused their marketing spend to digital to increase profit.
In an attempt to drive efficiencies, increase profit and reduce costs in a market downtime, Airline giant, Qantas, has invested the majority of their marketing budget in digital channels. Said to be one of the best performing airlines in the world, the Qantas Group has been reported to be gaining profits, with a $522 million profit growth seen in the later parts of last year. In order to cement their increasing profit, CEO Alan Joyce, outlined the importance of investing in digital and data as a way to improve the customer experience and increase overall business performance. One of the biggest marketing game changes for businesses, including Qantas, is the desire to gather more and more data on customers. Gaining important information on their target market, the use of data allows marketers to personalise their message and target consumers on a more individual level based on their interests and where they’ve been on the web. Not only does this allow Qantas to cut through the influx of sales pitches, it will also result in conversions at a much higher rate. Through the employment of data powerhouse, Red Planet, Qantas trialled new digital media campaigns and the results were extremely positive. Coming in at four times more effective than traditional campaigns, Qantas has now made their digital marketing efforts one of six key priorities of the business going forward.
As part of its digital strategy to give customers faster responses and more relevant information through easily accessible channels, the airline has recently launched the Qantas Concierge bot. The service has been designed to save customers the time and energy involved in planning a trip and empowers them to self-serve from a virtual library of rich travel content. A portion of the marketing budget will be spent making the chatbot more user friendly and growing its capabilities to offer a full suite of concierge services over time. Qantas has also increased its investment in social media advertising and was the first airline to work with Facebook on advertising through the Instagram Stories platform.In correlation with the spend on marketing techniques, the $2 billion transformation of the brand involves plans to roll out Wi-Fi on a large portion of their planes, effectively putting them in front of their competitors in terms of customer entertainment. The addition of on board Wi-Fi will also work in conjunction with the brands digital marketing effort and will allow them to serve personalised content to consumers while they’re on board and drive advertising revenue. Before customers begin their inflight experience and get to enjoy the slew of digital technologies and personalised marketing on board, Qantas, has also acted to improve their overall website and mobile apps, in order to attract customers and create an unbeatable experience from the outset.
So should your company follow in Qantas’ footsteps and increase your digital marketing efforts? In a time where we are so heavily reliant on digital technology, it is easy to see that an increase in digital marketing can lead to an array of benefits. The use of digital marketing makes it easier for businesses to measure the true value add that is gained from their marketing efforts and makes it possible for marketers to isolate each step taken to acquire a customer and track profitability. In turn, it businesses are able to refine their investments and target them at generating higher quality traffic and thus turning leads into sales. In comparison, advertising spend on traditional media, such as television, not only takes a larger output to get results, it is also very difficult to measure and to those of us in the online marketing industry, what cannot be measured, does not exist. With this new transformation and digital marketing plan, it’ll be interesting to see how much Qantas improves its brand, image and overall service to flyers. With our experience in the online marketing industry, we think exponentially.
If you want to make the switch to digital marketing like Qantas, contact our expert team today so we can help make your next marketing plan digital.
Awards aren't everything. But we are pretty proud to be Perth's most awarded Google Premier Partner agency. Over the years we have been recognised by both Telstra and Google in their award categories, which are highly competitive. Here's a few of our PPC advertising accolades we are particularly proud of.
