4 Key Approaches to Digital Marketing in the Aviation Industry

Following the well-documented lull in aviation activity during the pandemic, the industry has experienced an inevitable boom in 2023. In fact, stats show that the market size has already returned to the pre-COVID levels from 2019. With this drastic takeoff in activity comes a serious amount of competition. The best means of making sure your aviation business weathers the storm is by implementing an effective, industry-focused strategy.

Here we outline four key approaches when approaching digital marketing strategy in the aviation industry:

Create a Cohesive Advertising Strategy

Any digital marketing professional will tell you that online advertising is essential to not only brand exposure but also for boosting conversions. This is no different when specifically referring to digital marketing in the aviation industry.

However, creating an effective online advertising strategy boils down to more than creating your ads and throwing them out into the online ether. The best place to start? PPC and social media advertising.

While these two online advertising channels work together seamlessly, they both come with their own unique benefits:

Pay per click (PPC) advertising allows you to target your audience based on their specific search queries. It goes without saying that this means that your audience already has high intent levels the moment they touch down on your landing page. For example, in the review that we conducted for Ethiopian Airlines, we streamlined their target keywords to focus on terms that were specifically relevant to the services that they offer. A must for anyone putting budget behind their PPC for airlines.

Paid social media advertising targets audiences based on their specific interests or past actions on your site. You can display your adverts to brackets of your audience that you believe would be interested in your offers, based on age, location, interests etc. Plus, with 4.48bn people worldwide using social media on a daily basis, you’ll be tapping into an almost endless source of online traffic.

Making sure you align your PPC and social advertising efforts both creates a sense of brand consistency and ensures your audience is being engaged across all relevant channels. In turn you can help introduce new audiences to your brand, both at the start of the funnel and at the stage of converting.

Propel Your Search Engine Presence

While having a well-oiled advertising strategy is important in the world of aviation digital marketing, implementing a strong organic presence is just as vital. Online advertising is sure to achieve those much-needed conversions. However, a solid search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy will build a digital legacy for your brand.

SEO is a means of building your aviation brand up to become a voice of authority within a specified field. That is, a voice of authority in the eyes of Google’s search crawlers. Any effective aviation SEO strategy has a multitude of moving parts to it. From the technical side of SEO – link building, tagging, website speed – to building strong, keyword-focused content for your site, everything has to be pointing in the same direction for the results to come rolling in.

In implementing this process correctly, you are sure to experience the long term benefits of your overarching aviation digital marketing plan. By pushing your position up the search engine results pages (SERP) you will experience an increase in organic traffic from search terms hand selected by your marketing team or travel marketing agency. This brings with it high-volume, high-value traffic for the foreseeable.

Land Your Content on All the Right Social Platforms

Organic social media is a must for modern digital marketing. Particularly when operating within a sector like the travel industry, where visual aesthetic rules supreme. However, there is more to an effective social media strategy than posting a host of pretty pictures in the hope that you get some likes. This all begins with the platforms that you are posting on.

Each post should be tweaked with the target platform’s characteristics in mind. Some of the most popular platforms to consider are:

LinkedIn – Professional platform with more of a B2B focus. Posts should be informational and prioritise company news.

Instagram – Highly visual and popular with travel brands. Not necessarily as vital for digital marketing in the aviation industry as it is for the likes of destination marketing, but still important. Posts should be focused on eye-catching imagery and effective hashtagging.

Facebook – Mixed bag from a stylistic standpoint, but tends to be a slightly older audience. Facebook is one of the better platforms for engaging with the community.

TikTok – Most popular with younger generations and very video-heavy. A strong choice of platform if you are looking to utilise influencers to promote your aviation brand.

First, select the platforms that you want to focus on before deciding on a style and implementing a long term social plan. Bearing future posts in mind as well as being reactive allows you to create a consistency that is crucial to any social media branding exercise. Keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming work with DiamondAir…

It is also important to stay up to date with the latest updates on each social platform, to ensure that you don’t drop behind the competition.

Personalise Your Retargeting Efforts

Retargeting is an essential factor in any approach to digital marketing in the aviation industry. Making sure you keep touch with your customer base is an ideal means of making sure they return for your services in the future. But it isn’t as simple as throwing the same content at anyone who has been on your site.

In order to build successful remarketing campaigns, you need to carefully take your audience’s actions into account. For example, platforms like GA4 allow you to build specific audiences based on how they act on your site, which can then be implemented within your PPC strategy. 

Using this data, you can send highly-specified advertising content to each of the individuals who have spent time on your website. So, if, for example, someone has shown interest in your business concierge services, you can send them reminders specific to the benefits of the service.

This also extends to email marketing. Your aviation digital marketing efforts need to go beyond sending new subscribers a newsletter. Build a customer flow depending on their actions and then make sure that you send the right deals to the right people. Personalised emails are a go to email marketing strategy in 2023, so make sure that you implement them into your plan.