How KLM Airlines Marketing Uses Social Media for Winning Campaigns

When choosing to learn from others’ social media marketing campaign strategies, it is always helpful to choose the best of the best. Those that are most innovative and very eager to try lots of new and different ideas. And not afraid of a failure or two. KLM Airlines marketing certainly deserves to be in this camp. Real social media marketing innovators. They frequently come up when marketers are discussing the best in social media marketing.

They have been successfully executing their social media marketing plan for over 4 years, and their strategies have played a key role in their marketing and customer engagement.

If you’re not familiar with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, known by its initials KLM, is the flag carrier airline of the Netherlands. With headquarters is in Amsterdam, KLM operates scheduled passenger and cargo services to more than 90 destinations worldwide. It is the oldest airline in the world, still operating under its original name (Founded in 1919).

Their social media strategy is built around their company web site and 6 additional social platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, their blog, and recent additions of Foursquare and Pinterest.

Over the past four years, they have launched a number of social campaigns – some big, some small. They had a few failures along with great successes.  Let’s examine some of their more noteworthy campaigns.

KLM Surprise

Remember how great it felt the first time you got a social response from a brand you love or business you deal with? All the goodwill generated by their speedy response? Well, KLM decided to run an experiment with its social community, for people who check-in via foursquare for flights or tweet about waiting to board the next KLM service, and they called it “KLM Surprise”. The aim of this campaign was to bring random surprises and happiness to the boring wait for flights.

Here is a video KLM made on this campaign:

KLM’s social campaign involved a team of people identifying KLM passengers currently waiting for flights (and hanging out on Twitter), before researching each person’s social profile to find out a little more about their personality and destination. Given that information, they matched passengers to a surprise gift that they’d give before each person boarded their flight. The aim was to add a little surprise to create happy customers who have plenty of time on their hands to tweet their network about a great KLM experience at the airport. That’s a very cool social experiment. 

Meet and Seat

The meet and seat campaign objective was to offer passengers a choice of seat-mates by accessing each other’s Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. If passengers so chose to participate, their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles were linked to their check-in information which was shared with other passengers also choosing the service.

Of course, passengers don’t have to link up their profiles if they’re not interested but what if they play along and end up with someone who just wants to make a sales pitch? The answer is you could have ended up with a worse result by taking your random seating chance. What would be your choice?

Listening to customers

In another act of social media genius, KLM used Twitter to add a flight to its roster.

It all started when a Dutch filmmaker tweeted his disappointment about the lack of a direct flight from Amsterdam to Miami.  Specifically, he was looking for a hangover-reducing direct flight to/from the Ultra Music Festival taking place in Miami on March 21st, 2011.  A KLM rep rapidly responded with a wager – if the filmmaker could book an entire flight (351 seats) before December 6th, KLM would add the non-stop flight to its schedule.

Beyond all expectations, the resulting campaign Fly2Miami sold out the entire flight within 5 hours.

“We can rightly call it a first – the first time KLM deployed an aircraft following a request on Twitter,” replied Martijn van der Zee, VP of e-commerce at KLM.  “Social media are becoming more and more important to KLM to offer information and service to our customers.

I’ll say it again.  Talk about the GREAT ability to listening to customers, yes?

KLM Must See Maps

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is ramping up its digital engagement with KLM Must See Map, a friend-sourced destination map that combines social and print. 

Users create a map for a destination and ask friends for travel tips via Facebook, Twitter, and email. Facebook check-ins show which friends have already visited the destination, their tips on favorite places, and their locations. You can add your own tips, then order a copy of the map in print and receive it for free.

Up and running in 24 countries, the application comes from the Dutch agency Code d’Azur.

In this case, KLM’s goal is to enlarge its global e-mail database. “The KLM Must See Map campaign perfectly fits KLM’s ‘little act of kindness’ social media strategy,” says Viktor van der Wijk, Director Digital Marketing, KLM. Participants get a free personalized city map delivered at home and we receive their e-mail addresses in return. That makes a great win-win and that’s what KLM was looking for.

Tile and inspire

The KLM Tile and Inspire campaign sought to engage customers by soliciting tile image designs from them. The winning designs would be put on one KLM aircraft. The Boeing 777 with over 4,000 Delft blue images from Facebook fans is still flying around the globe! Let’s see … 4000 winners telling 20 of their closest friends about the experience, and then they each tell ten more friends. That is a great way to spread your message, isn’t it? Here is a great little KLM video on this campaign:

Twitter Social Care

Have you checked out KLM’s Twitter account lately? If not, go take a look at their banner ((https://twitter.com/KLM). You will find something really neat: the average expected response time for customer care. And it is updated every 5 minutes!

The company has rocked the customer service area for almost three years because it understands that there is no business without customers. The social media team gets the job done 24/7 on Twitter and Facebook, and fully embraces monitoring and improving their response time to customers.

KLM is considered by many to be the role model for social customer care. As a sign of just how truly devoted they are, they’ve added a live graphic on their Twitter page, updated every 5 minutes, which lets you know how long, on average, you should expect to wait for a reply from their Twitter team.

One of the largest airlines in the world, KLM  Airlines, is also considered one of the best in converting “Likes” into paying customers.  Part of their marketing success is their willingness to take bold yet calculated risks.  They are able to do this because they understand the customer buying journey.  The touchpoints along the journey a lead or existing customer takes as they experience the KLM brand and then, how KLM works to improve each touchpoint along the path.

What do you think of KLM’s airline marketing strategy? Winning social engagement with customers? We think so. Have any comments or questions to add below?

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of social media and word of mouth marketing. And put it to good use.

It’s up to you to keep improving your social media marketing efforts.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  

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