Being able to visualise, conceive and see through a successful online travel campaign is one thing, but can you analyse the results?

If you are looking to hire a marketing executive you need to identify two essential skills, one involves the left-brain and one the right brain.

1.  Left-brain ability to work with data and analytics: If you have the right data and analytics technology in place today then the success of your campaign is measurable. 

“Your initiatives either work or they don’t and you know because the numbers on the screen come up the next day,” says Colin Lewis, director of marketing at BMI Regional.  “I often spend two or three hours a day mapping conversion rates directly to sales, to campaigns, right through to an incredibly detailed 3,000 line spreadsheet matching everything up to come up with a conclusion of what works and what doesn’t at a top level, on a daily level and then on an hourly level.”

That’s very different from a few years ago. “The skills of the marketer today need to be something like 30% free marketing, 30% IT, 30% analytics and 10% politician,” says Jérôme Hiquet, Club Med’s VP of Marketing, North America & VP of Marketing & Sales, Mexico recently told EyeforTravel.

2.  A creative right brain: Speaking of having to be 10% politician Lewis recently had to convince BMI Regional’s creative, PR and social media agencies of a light bulb idea. BMI has a charter business, which carries premiership football teams, rock stars and corporate clients.

The Glastonbury Festival was approaching and Lewis decided it would be a good idea to run a campaign along the lines of: charter our airline to be a rock star for day #rockstarforaday. With the creative right-brain whirring he visualised a “fun and perfectly timely campaign” involving some “sexy pictures” of the aircraft and the destinations it flies to, a Twitter campaign with the hashtag ‘rockstarforaday’, a press release making mainstream news and the resulting buzz on social media. “Our PR agency, our creative agency and our social media agency all thought it was a bad idea,” he says. 

But the campaign worked. The day after Glastonbury started the Daily Mail ran a full-length feature about the campaign.

While it’s hard to measure the value of so-called earned media, Lewis says it’s all about a virtuous circle, thinking through the customer journey and in doing so creating awareness and consideration. In other words creating a framework where paid, earned and owned media feed off each with a good sprinkling of the right data.

“In this context what we were trying to do is create a buzz about the airline and our charter services. But funnily enough, we did actually get enquiries on the back of it!”

So essential skill number two is having the ability to visualise, conceive, convince and see through a campaign from start to finish.

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