Did you ever wish to have your company advertisement on an inflight magazine? And you thought it was all about money, just engage an agency, and Voila, here are the results! Well, you can’t be more wrong.
There is a whole process that you need to create & follow in order to get the full mileage out of In-flight Magazine ads or any kind of print ad campaigns for that matter.
Here, in this post, I am going to tell you the process we created.
My Pain:
Print media advertisement was something we were doing for the first time and we sure had a lot of questions on our mind that needed to be answered before we can get going with it.
Here are some of those questions.
- We were not sure if investing on an advertisement in an in-flight magazine was worth it?
- We were not sure about our expectations in terms of Leads?
- We did not know how many inserts were required to make the advertisement effective?
- We had no idea on the overall expenses & ROI
My experience:
We were approached by a Publisher on the following offer for a full-page advertisement in various inflight magazines with magazine’s circulation details.
1. The Offer:
Indigo: Flights/day: 1500; Total Readership: 60L; Print run: 4L+; Cost Full Page: 6 L
Spice: Flights/day: 597; Total Readership: 12L; Print run: 2.5L+; Cost Full Page: 1 L
Vistara: Flights/day: 180; Total Readership: 5L; Print run: 2.2L+; Cost Full Page: 1.25 L
Go Air: Flights/day: 325; Total Readership: 7L; Print run: 1.5L+; Cost Full Page: 0.6 L
Air Asia: Flights/day: 150; Total Readership:4L; Print run: 0.8L+; Cost Full Page: 0.5 L
We zeroed on to Go Air Inflight magazine which is what our budget permitted.
But this is all just the crust of it, we had to dive deeper into the core with our own research to understand & answer the questions that have been lingering in our minds.
Hence, we went forward with the following process of answering some obvious questions.
2. Does anyone read inflight magazine today?
To validate, we initiated Inflight readership survey on WhatsApp group & twitter. Following are the results of the surveys.
WhatsApp:
Sent following message to 10 different WhatsApp group
“Guys need your inputs- I am considering placing an advertisement of TrustedStay in the Inflight Magazine. Considering Spice, Go & Vistara-
Did you in your last flight open the inflight magazine? Respond with Yes/No”
Result: 31 people responded. 70% saying Yes
The above response did look positive but age group was 50 Plus
So, we decided to do a survey on Twitter to get a better representation.
Twitter:
See the tweet and the results of the tweet for yourselves below.
Survey of readership of Inflight magazines ✈
Did you read one on your last flight?
— Ajay Dewan (@ajaydewan) November 13, 2019
Result: 130 people voted. Only 39% said yes
We know that twitter has diversified audience in-terms of Age. So, it was safe to assume that on an average 30% people read In-flight magazine. We felt its worth a try to advertise
3. How many advertisements should I plan?
We interacted with some leading marketing experts in our network. This is what they suggested
Ideal no’s for Impact: 12 Inserts in a year.
Acceptable no’s for Impact: 6 Inserts every alternate month.
Minimum no’s for impact: 3 Inserts consecutively.
Money down the drain: 1 insert. (putting just one ad is waste of time & money)
Result: We finalized 3 Inserts as our budget was limited
4. What should the content in our Advertisement revolve around?
We decided to conduct another survey to get insights from all our own guests as to what compelled them to choose a serviced apartment over a Hotel. This we believed would give an insight to create effective advertisement.
We picked up a sample of 100 existing customers who were repeat customers in our serviced apartment and sent following question to respond
We are considering placing an Ad of TrustedStay in An In-flight Magazine and this Survey Is One Crucial Aspect of that.
That is why, we have chosen some of our special customers to take part in the survey – who could give us better insights on Why customers choose Serviced Apartments over Hotels.
Please share Reason/Reasons in order of highest to lowest that comes to your mind.
Result: 22 customers responded
Homely Ambiance: Score of 36
Personalized Services: Score 20
Affordability: score 17
Homely Food: score 15
We were now clear on the what message to focus on.
5. What, in an advertisement, will make the customer to stop and look?
We manged to get a few in-flight magazines and 4 of us from our team sat and randomly browsed and shared results of which are the ads that prompted us to stop & look.
Result:
- Clutter free: We found the simplicity & less clutter prompted us to stop & see.
- Contest: And if the advertisement had a contest with an exciting offer, that could give us leads.
We then worked out a brief sketch with a contest for the advertisement. We were now ready to engage with the agency who could deliver us the best advertisement.
6. What should the contest be?
We decided to offer free one-night stay for early bird customer, across any of our 200 listed Serviced apartments in India
Customer Qualification: Various suggestions came like
- QR Code in the ad- read through mobile and apply
- Take a picture of the advertisement from mobile & apply
- Just WhatsApp using #TrustedStay to a unique no 8951089510
Note: The hashtag was changed from month to month to avoid it getting leaked
We felt “option 3” was the best and most convenient for customer in flight.
Once the customer responds then the customer is asked for his email ID. And a formal mail is sent to the customer confirming his qualification for the contest.
We then had to wait for the first 25 customers to confirm their travel plan and confirm booking.
7. Would the agency do any value ad, apart from just delivering a final advertisement?
After our survey & ground work we expected agency to deliver an appealing advertisement.
Agency gave us some excellent insights like
- They grounded our expectations by saying that even if you get 5-6 responses to the contest then you should be happy. Honestly, we did not believe.
- Their thumb rule for readership of one magazine was just 4 times the print volume. Means one magazine in its life span of 30 days in the flight will be read only by only 4 travellers. Another shocker to us.
- They suggested us to place the advertisement on the Right-hand side of the magazine. Because generally most of the traveler just skim through the magazine using the left hand while holding the magazine on the Right.
The agency then delivered us the following 3 ads. It costed us just Rs 15000 with PSD & PDF files along with print outs. Ready to be handed over to the publisher
Following were the three designs that we finalized for our 3 months ad campaigns.
Jan Ad Campaign Design:
February Ad Campaign Design:
March Ad Campaign Design:
8. How to get more Mileage out of in-flight magazine
Knowing that it could be a small segment of customer viewing our offline advertisement. We decided to extend out offline marketing activity and bring it online as well to gain more mileage. We brainstormed several marketing ideas and decided to go on with the following.
- TrustedStay Website: We added the advertisement to our website home page as a overlay so that every time a visitor visits our site, they know that a contest is going. This would help them remember to look out our ad when they are travelling in flights.
- Email marketing: We sent emails to our database of 35000 customers asking them to look for the advertisement of TrustedStay in the in-flight magazine and stand to win a free night stay in any of our properties in India. (You can check out Should small businesses do email Marketing? for more Email Marketing info)
- SMS Marketing: We also sent a 160-short message with the link leading to the contest landing page.
- Whats App Marketing: We made a message template with picture and asked everyone in the office to circulate in their groups.
- Facebook: We made derivative video ads from the Magazine ads and promoted to the air travellers.
- LinkedIn: Similar derivative video ads from the Magazine ads were made and promoted.
- Twitter: Similar derivative video ads from the Magazine ads were made and promoted.
We decided to run Video ads on Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn since Video Ads had the potential of reaching 10x more customers compared to image ads.
We spent a total of 35K on Social media campaigns to reach a total of 2,52,174 Social Media users with a 6% engagement ratio.
9. Results of 3 Ads released back to back starting Jan 2020 in Go airways.
Jan In-flight Magazine:
No. of travelers who Whats App us with the Hashtag & qualified for the contest were: 46
No. of winners who claimed for free stay: 4
Feb In-flight Magazine:
No. of travelers who Whats App us with the Hashtag & qualified for the contest were: 14
No. of winners who claimed for free stay: 0
March In-flight Magazine:
No. of travelers who Whats App us with the Hashtag & qualified for the contest were: 14
No. of winners who claimed for free stay: 3
10. Total Cost.
Cost of inserts for 3 in-flight magazines in Go air: 1,80,000
Cost of Advertisement creation by agency: 15,000 (3 creatives)
Cost of email marketing: 6500 (3 campaigns)
Cost of SMS Marketing: 15000 (3 campaigns)
Cost of Social media promotion: 35000
Cost of 8 free stay: 28350
Total direct expenses: Rs 2,80,000
My Conclusion:
If you ask me what was the ROI? I honestly cannot conclude. But yes, based on my past experience it does work in improving your Brand. My suggestion on spending on Sponsoring conferences or putting an advertisement in magazine is, just spend a portion of your marketing budget and forget it. It works trust me. Love to have your comments below.
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11 Comments
Great insight into marketing in general and advertising in the inflight magazine. Very useful to all businessmen, sales and marketing people..
Glad to know that you found it useful. Thankyou
Hi, Very interesting to read the blog, nicely articulated with data and analysis from a social media platform perspective. It gives a overall understanding before you venture into this type of an advertising and the yield by its investment.
Good insight for entrepreneurs who plan to use this medium of advertising
Thankyou Mr Vincent
Written in a professional manner. Serves the purpose.
Succinctly done.
Thanks for sharing the insights. In my view the sample size is too short. You need results for 4 quarters or so to compare expectations vs returns. Also good to establish metrics as to what we’re the expectations else you really don’t know what the ROI is, is very vague and more feels good kind of thing where it is costing real money.
For Brand Recognition alone seems like an expensive proposition.
I always thought that Inflight magazines ads were not very credible and the better place to run such ads are in a magazine where you are compared to your competitors and some industry expert writes about you is better ROI.
Dear Mr Tejpal. Thanks for your Inputs
Very impressive write up on effective use of inflight magazine for communication.
Thank you Mayank
A nice analysis .. choice of inflight magazine surprised me. Though your target customers are in flight but chance of reading magazine is dicy. I personally feel in flight magazine attract new passengers. Frequent flyers loose interest as same magazine is there for entire month. No of reads suggested by agency is misleading . Same person may be travelling again and again in same month.
You have rightly questioned the efficacy of print media. I personally feel for small business it’s an expensive proposition.
Nowadays I am active on LinkedIn. I think your all prospective customers must be on LinkedIn.
Few real videos , talks on hotel space , may be on covid impact , customers testimonials on regular and sustained basis can really help to grow at low cost. Some surrogate campaign is also help.
It has given us a lot of ideas for our customers, even though a different field. Well researched. Well written.