Trends in Aviation Marketing Apply to Many Industries

EXLRT Insights tend to focus on sharing information about technology and trends that can be incorporated into any industry's marketing strategy in order to improve it. From personalization, to digitization, upselling and conversion trends to AI and machine translation, we've covered many new ideas when it comes to the marketing side of things. A recent survey and report by Diggin Travel just asked the big questions to 85 airline and travel marketing professionals and the results show that the Aviation industry is indeed heavily focused on these five areas for the foreseeable future.

Here are the top 5 trends in Aviation Marketing as reported by Diggin Travel, and some Insights where you can find more information relevant to that trend:

1. Personalization: 55% of the survey participants planned to invest in personalization in 2018. This is not a particularly new trend but it is slowly catching on as the technology side of things becomes more streamlined and understandable. One of the most important aspects of the marketing plan for most airlines, personalization is predicted to play a much larger role in airline distribution strategies by 2021.

You can read more about EXLRT's Insights on personalization in our articles:
Be A Personalization Leader: The What, Why, Who, When,Where of Content Personalization
Deliver Glocalized Customer Content to Win Globally

2. Digitization: How do companies become able to create personalized content in an omnichannel atmosphere? They need to digitize. Likely the main fact holding most companies back from achieving personalization strategies is that they need to be a digital company in order to achieve it. 54% of the respondents said that digitization and connecting the various touch points of the customer journey would have the biggest impact on their marketing strategies.

What do we have to say about Digitization? You can find out here:
The Customer Journey Doesn't Stop at Sales
Microcontent: Smaller Content Means Bigger Opportunities

3. Upselling and Digital Merchandising: The next biggest trend for airlines and presumably all other areas is to keep increasing ancillary revenue. Revenue generated by upsells and digital marketing strategies that give the extra options to the customers when they need and want to buy them. Retailers add bundled items "frequently purchased together" for ecommerce shoppers, hotel-booking sites encourage a room upgrade at a discount or link bookings to rental car or tourist attraction deals. Agile technologies are what will allow travel and retail businesses to continue to find new ways to offer upsells that are actually successful. We think AI generated content could be useful for upselling and digital merchandising.

4. Conversion Rates and Trends: There would be no successful business without conversion. Conversion Rate Optimization scored as the number four most important trend in Aviation Marketing due to the fact that it is a main component of not only achieving sales but also digitization and personalization. CRO provides the ability to understand online shoppers' behavior in order to deliver the experience and the products that they want. When companies are able to master CRO they can truly become digitized retailers. At EXLRT, we see the power of online reviews as a critical component to the future of online retail for airlines, hotels and attractions when it comes to successful conversions. Read more about that in our article, Reviews of the Future: Online Reputation Management and AI.

5. AI and Machine Translation: Perhaps our favorite trend justly due to the innovation and possibilities that it represents. Machine Translation has become a more and more reliable technology which makes globalization and personalization strategies that much more reachable. This trend isn't necessarily "taking off" in the aviation world as of yet according to the survey, but it is on many to-do lists. More than 23% of respondents saying they would focus on and invest in chatbots, artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data in 2018. We have talked about the possibilities of AI, machine translation/learning and chatbots in several articles. Read more about use cases and possibilities of the technologies in the our blogs Using AI to Perfect the Travel Experience, Top 5 Use Cases for Machine Translation in Travel, Hospitality and Retail and Chatbots and Machine Translation Provide Next Step in Customer Care.

These five trends don't only apply to the aviation industry. The travel industry in general has much to gain from executing marketing strategies based on these five areas. Brick and mortar retailers as well as e-commerce platforms will also see growth and security through applying these trends.