Think AirAsia and remnants of the last cheap flight you took to Australia or South East Asia might pop into your mind. But did you know they are one of the first publicly listed entities to take heed of the mobile internet growth in the region?
That’s right mobile internet use is on the rise. In select markets all over Asia, mobile handset adoption goes beyond that of the home computer. As a result more and more companies are looking to implement the relevant changes in their marketing approach, attempting to design and deliver mobile-specific content while you are on the go; effectively creating a direct connection between them and the most personal of all electronic devices, the mobile phone.
Internet connectivity is fast becoming part and parcel of today’s upbeat lifestyle. Earlier this decade it was ‘search’ and more recently the YouTube phenomena took us by storm. It is beginning to look like it may be mobile’s turn to peak. In saying so,
advertising campaigns that run on TV, your personal computer or otherwise cannot simply be transferred directly for a mobile experience. It has to be designed for mobile first. Asia Pacific is expected to increase spending on mobile advertising surpassing that of anything the Internet may have to it against the growing giants of mobile content. Spending is estimated to surpass .9 billion in 2012. On the back of that it may still be early days but mobile audiences are fast becoming the staple for marketers.
Increasing the awareness of the AirAsia brand is slowly being regarded as a mission statement of sorts. To be precise AirAsia is looking to stir up interest in their ’Sleepless in three cities’ and ‘Beautiful island getaways’ campaigns across seven target markets – Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
After careful deliberation, AirAsia decided to call upon the expertise of Yahoo! to help drive desktop and mobile traffic to the AirAsia mobile website. The two companies worked together using a combination of broad reach and targeted advertising on Yahoo Mobile, bearing much fruit in the process. For all you surf and chat junkies on some of Yahoo!’s most popular sites and messenger, you may recall AirAsia banners popping up all over the place.
“Mobile is now an integral part of AirAsia’s overall marketing campaign. By using content-rich mobile marketing campaigns that attract and meet our consumers’ needs and wants, new and exciting opportunities are being created for our company,” said Carmen Wong, head of marketing, AirAsia. “Using mobile marketing, we are now able to build awareness and drive engagement with consumers at anyplace and anytime, seamlessly following them from the PC to the mobile Internet.”
The result? Over six million exposures in the seven markets they were targeting, all in under a month. “AirAsia’s first mobile campaign was a success thanks to Yahoo! Mobile’s expertise. In a short period of time, we were able to generate significant traffic to our AirAsia mobile website and enjoyed high click-through rates from users,” said Wong.
The mobile marketing campaign brought AirAsia increasingly high levels of user interactivity, displaying heightened interest amongst their key audiences. In just one month they were able to garner over six million exposures on mobile phones across the seven markets they were targeting. There was a high response from mobile users with a total of 108,405 clicks obtained, leading to a click-through rate of 1.78 percent. AirAsia enjoyed an average cost-per-click (CPC) on market value of $0.56 for this campaign.
“Yahoo! is happy to have helped with AirAsia’s first mobile campaign, which was successful on many levels,” said Matthias Kunze, managing director of Yahoo! Mobile Asia. “With a potential reach of more than 850 million mobile users globally, Yahoo! is well-positioned to help leading brands such as AirAsia reach their target customers. Yahoo! is focused on creating scale for advertisers, enabling them to tap into the rapidly-growing, lucrative audience of mobile consumers.”
By Jonathan Lim