How BMI Regional is taking on Google and keeping social in perspective

When you are operating from ground zero, you have to move quickly but two years on and BMI's data driven marketing efforts are keeping it in the game. Pamela Whitby catches up with the airline’s marketing director

Over a year ago, Colin Lewis, BMI Regional’s director of marketing, took a somewhat contrary line to social media. While he didn’t go as far as to say that social strategy wasn't important, it wasn’t the most important, he told EyeforTravel.

A year on, we couldn't resist the question: is he any closer to believing the hype?

He laughs: “Actually I took a lot of abuse when I was talking at conferences and said guys this [social media] isn’t really our bag. You’d swear I’d taken their firstborn,” he says. “But as a digital marketing guy I had to look at my own data and it told me that our first focus shouldn’t be social media.”

I took a lot of abuse when I was talking at conferences and said guys this [social media] isn’t really our bag

Today marketers need to look much more closely at data and analytics to understand their customer base. For BMI regional this is predominantly male business travellers aged 35 to 55, who are working for themselves, for a small and medium enterprise or on an oilrig.

“They are not lying awake at night on Twitter or on Facebook to help make their decision on travel,” says Lewis. “They will be using an OTA, a metasearch engine or their own travel agency and not Twitter to a decision and I would defy anybody who says so.”

For Lewis then, social media is useful for three things:

1. Branding
2. Context creation
3. Customer service

Social media is useful for setting the context and telling the story of the business and BMI does use it for those purposes, but not for attributing a sale in the final part of the funnel. That said, Lewis admits that BMI has spent “a heck of a lot more time on social media in the past six months”.

Head scratching on Google search

So what other lessons has the company, which is still branding itself as a 70-year-old start up, learnt over the past year?

“Literally May, June and July last year was spent scratching our heads saying how can we deliver on this,” says Lewis, on the company’s efforts to rank higher in search results. Initially the firm didn’t spend a huge amount on Google Adwords to communicate and grab the customer if they were in the market for BMI’s destinations, because they knew that ranking higher in search was more powerful.

But results were pretty dire. On generic keywords on the airline’s main routes they were coming up below the 1,000 mark on Google search. Action was needed which Lewis says took a back-to-basics approach, working with external agency to do so. 

From an SEO perspective, you would normally go for:

  • Short-tail terms like ‘cheap flights’ or ‘flights to Brussels’, or
  • Long-tail terms like: ‘restaurants in Brussels’

“We decided to go after mid-tail results to capture anybody who was searching for something like ‘flying from Bristol to Aberdeen’ or ‘flights from Munich to Bristol’,” explains Lewis.

The process involved three phases that include:

  • A site restructure: URL amends of the whole website to ensure they were recognisable eg.www.bmiregional.com/en/flights/flights-from-bristol-to-aberdeen
  • Content revision: Restructuring directories and content: 114 page of content were written and published on new pages. Internal links were established.
  • Link acquisition: Through back-link building.

The result: All BMI’s destinations come up as number one or two in Google search for all mid-tail results, which has proved a far more powerful approach than Ad Words.

A virtuous circle

One big difference in BMI’s approach to marketing this year is how they approach various types of media: paid (Google Ad Words, Display), earned (coverage in independent media) and owned (direct channels like social media).

“Whereas last year we were thinking about what tool do we use, now we’re really thinking through how they relate to each other and creating a framework for that,” explains Lewis. It also about measuring results, which is now possible.

So if a bit of buzz is created around a campaign - as #rockstarforday did – then will it create noise, traffic and opportunities for owned media that could build a virtuous circle for paid search too. So for BMI’s Lewis the questions to answer go something like this:

  • What do we work on for paid media to drive acquisitions,
  • How do we create something for earned media to generate a create a buzz on social media to help convert or acquire customers
  • How do we communicate our brand voice on owned media?  

To find out more about BMI’s data driven marketing efforts join us in Amsterdam for Smart Travel Analytics & RM 2014 (Nov 24 – 25)

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