Digital Flight Issue 11: [Case Study] How to Grow Your Aviation Brand with a Small Marketing Budget

Gone are the days when it was necessary to dump tons of budget into online advertising, event partnerships and five-figure monthly PR firm retainers and acquire an abundance of resources to grow a brand.

I've built my whole business thesis on the idea that B2B companies can build brand and engage with their (typically niche) audience by publishing unique, original content that cannot be found anywhere else, filling a void within the niche.

In other words, the playbook is now about owned media rather than paid or earned media.

Want to see how it’s done? Let’s walk through a real-world use case of how I helped airline revenue management company Kambr go from inception to acquisition by Amadeus in three years — the biggest travel tech company in the world!

Generate Brand Equity & Establishing Thought Leadership from the Beginning

The best piece of advice I can give is DON’T WAIT!

It’s common practice to be head down in product development, leaving marketing as an afterthought.

While general wisdom tells you this makes sense (no product, no company), you end up delaying the growth of your company by not establishing an audience and distribution from the beginning.

At Kambr, we gave ourselves a headstart by launching Kambr Media (a niche media site dedicated to commercial aviation) out of the gate.

Because Kambr was still mostly in stealth mode at the launch of Kambr Media, this added a lot of intrigue in the industry, which helped to gain early traction.

While the product was still being developed, Kambr was already attracting its core audience and building valuable brand equity.

It also opened the door for discussions with prospective clients, partners, and even competitors.

When Kambr was ready to publicly launch its software, there was already an established distribution platform.

This resulted in a campaign that garnered press clippings from A-level publications such as Business Insider, AdExchanger and Skift.

In total, the campaign received 117 total pickups and reached an audience of over 20,000,000.

As I explain here, owned media, earned media and paid media all feed into one another. In this case, the traction from owned media boosted the earned media campaign at launch.

Had Kambr waited to build an audience through content, its initial launch would not have been as successful, and its entire trajectory would’ve been stalled.

Connect with Your Audience & Satisfy Content Gaps with Keywords

Give your audience the content they crave. One of the core tenets of my communications philosophy is that traditional media massively underserves long-tail B2B audiences.

This was something we recognized in the commercial aviation space. The content available was a mile wide but only an inch deep.

Being at the intersection of technology and commercial aviation, put Kambr in a unique position to fill the content void of its niche audience.

One of the first tasks was connecting with both internal and external commercial aviation experts to learn topics and themes to cover and identify content gaps in the industry.

Then it was all about consistently publishing and collecting feedback from the audience to fine-tune content and find future inspiration.

Besides the direct feedback we received, a major signal for us was found in our web analytics data:

• Over 50% of our website traffic was from organic search

• Because of our content strategy (more on this below), our best content got thousands of views a month even long after publication.

• We were capturing organic traffic from a wide range of long-tail search terms relating to Kambr’s business and the aviation industry.

Content Development: Evergreen & Educational Content, Headlines & Consumability

Not only was knowing WHAT content to produce crucial to our success but also was HOW to produce it.

We focused on two primary types of content, often fusing them — educational and evergreen.

Educational

What is considered common sense knowledge is often useful information for someone else, especially in technical fields. There is a bit of “I don’t know, but I’m too afraid to ask” thinking.

In my experience, this is some of the best-performing content you can produce. People want to learn, especially if it helps them improve themselves.

Some of Kambr’s most viewed content came from basic terminology and tactics from the field of airline revenue management.

What’s great about this type of content is — that apart from maybe needing some occasional updating depending on the medium and topic — it’s evergreen, so its value will compound over time.

Evergreen

Evergreen content remains relevant over a long time, as opposed to trending content, which is a hot topic today but gone tomorrow.

At Kambr, we prioritized consistently publishing evergreen content, which created a compound effect over time. As outlined above, this was an effective SEO strategy and our biggest traffic driver.

Think of it like a high-yield content savings account. The longer you wait and the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it.

We doubled down on evergreen content by targeting different personas and stages in our sales funnel.

Our content strategy was about more than just lead generation, it was about supporting sales at various points in what was typically a long sales cycle.

Headlines

Headlines SHOULD NEVER be an afterthought. Focusing on headlines was a large part of our keyword strategy.

You must balance piquing the reader's interest, brevity, keyword optimization and being true to the content. The onus should be on keywords, headlines are not the place to get too creative.

A good practice is to write your headline ideas after finishing your content. Make this an iterative process until you land on the best headline. A lot of effort was put into headline development at Kambr.

It’s also important to understand the first 60 words in your content get indexed by search engines, so you’ll want to include your keywords here (without being obnoxious about it).

If you’re looking for assistance, you can use headline analyzer tools such as the ones provided by Advanced Marketing Institute or Sharethrough.

Consumability

Once users were drawn to Kambr Media, it was about keeping them engaged.

The average attention span of an adult is a mere 8.25 seconds.

This is where structure plays an important role.

Content must be easy for your audience to consume. This is where chunking comes into play.

The idea behind chunking is to break up your content into small consumable pieces, making it easy for the reader to scan and read.

It’s best to vary your content with applicable items such as images, videos, pull quotes and bulleted lists, along with bolding or highlighting noteworthy information.

It’s important that proper formatting is applied to headings, subheadings, lists, spacing, etc. To nail this, we spent a lot of time on the UX and design of Kambr Media (including building multiple iterations).

This not only helped our audience consume our content, but it also made it easier for search engines to index our content, furthering our organic search success.

Get the Experts Involved

We had our topics and keywords down and a strong structure in place, the next order of business was extracting knowledge and information. This is a common obstacle for content marketing initiatives.

At Kambr, we created a culture of learning, sharing and publishing content. If you’re looking for inspiration, consider these content culture pillars.

If content creation only involves the marketing team, chances are it will lack substance and depth.

Not only were our in-house domain experts involved with content — giving insights, sharing ideas and creating their own content — we also deployed an outreach program to get outside industry thought leaders involved with Kambr Media.

By presenting the expertise and opinions of outside professionals, Kambr Media became the voice of the industry, giving it an extra layer of credibility compared to if it only featured Kambr employees.

It also extended Kambr’s reach because Kambr Media contributors were keen to share the content they were involved in, creating a significant network effect.

Just as important, it alleviated resource constraints and allowed Kambr to efficiently and effectively publish content even with a small team and budget.

Kambr would not have achieved the same level of success without the contributions of others in the industry. And they were happy to contribute because they were provided a platform to share their thoughts and promote themselves and their projects.

This was a true win-win scenario.

The Results

All of this culminated in success in a relatively short period, even in the face of unprecedented challenges because of the pandemic.

The penultimate outcome was the acquisition by marketing leader Amadeus, but several other successes were achieved with a small budget and limited resources.

In total, seven figures of enterprise value were captured through Kambr’s content efforts, which included:

• Marketing qualified leads which were converted into deals

• Getting (free) press access to events where tickets otherwise would cost thousands of dollars.

• Getting Kambr Media content redistributed on leading trade publications where sponsored content typically costs 5 to 6 figures.

Additionally, Kambr’s owned media success accelerated paid media campaigns and helped identify Kambr’s core audience.

LinkedIn advertisements in particular achieved an astounding level of success performing at click-through rates of five times the industry average.

I must stress that this was only so successful because a granular audience was identified and targeted with content we already validated with that audience! Don’t run before you can walk when it comes to paid media!

Brand building through content was also fundamental in building relationships with key stakeholders:

• Sales prospects (potential Advisory and Software customers)

• Recruiting and employee retention (i.e.corporate branding)

• Fundraising (i.e. investor relations)

• Partnerships and Acquisitions

Kambr’s combination of outbound sales with a strong brand was fundamental in achieving commercial success.

More often than not, prospects knew of Kambr because of our content initiatives, which opened the door for sales and created a strong foundation for discussions.

What was most rewarding and most telling was the direct feedback we received from Kambr’s core audience. Beyond fulfilling commercial objectives, we were filling a gap with much-needed content. 

We received countless messages stating how useful or compelling information was, how content had been shared across teams and general gratitude towards Kambr Media.

This sounds great, right? Well, we have a unique opportunity for the Digital Flight Community.

Digital Flight Startup Marketing Services & Consultation

We’ve identified a clear marketing need among several B2B aviation companies, thus we have put together a special package exclusively for our community.

*Digital Flight Startup Package:

• Construction of high-level content strategy:

  • Short-term posting schedule.

  • Identification of key topics and themes.

  • Derivation of goals and KPIs.

• Weekly social media posting on one platform from the company account:

  • Includes researching content and industry.

  • One round of editing.

  • Basic graphical execution.

• 2 medium-form content pieces per month (blog posts, press releases, etc.):

  • Includes researching content and industry.

  • One round of edits per piece of content.

  • Basic graphical execution.

• Twice monthly reporting, syncs, and information intake with the team.

• Copy editing, reviewing and high-level consultation on existing content (up to three pieces per month).

COST: 3,000 EUR Per month

*There’s also room to scale this package based on your individual needs

I have space to take on a few companies at this special rate to help them build their content marketing and branding initiatives, applying everything I’ve learned working with numerous clients in the aviation space.

If you’re interested, reply to this email. Space is limited and will be reserved on a first-come first served basis.

If you’d like to get more marketing-specific insights, you can subscribe to my Niche Media newsletter here.