The Indian Institute of Digital Education is a holistic learning hub where students can master digital marketing, graphic designing, and coding within a span of only six months. Students are given hands-on practice, tests, presentations, and even a final project on anyone leading brand in which they curate a campaign, creatives, and even handle budget segmentation through media plans!

The following is a Make My Trip Project by IIDE’s very own digital marketers, Hitanshi Shah and Stuti Karia.

Make My Trip Marketing Strategy Case Study:

• About Make MyTrip

MakeMyTrip business model is an online travel company that was established in the year 2000 by Mr. Deep Kalra with his team. In the Make My Trip Marketing Strategy Case Study, we get to know This company began its India operations in the year 2005. MakeMyTrip is headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana, and earned a revenue of 141.7 million dollars in the quarter that ended in June 2019.

The company provides online travel services including flight tickets, domestic and international holiday packages, hotel reservations, and rail and bus tickets. It has recently also opened a new section of services where users can rent villas and apartments too.

With 50 million+ downloads on the Android PlayStore and an average rating of 4.4/5 stars, the service is widely used as an application, but the website is easy to navigate too and contains every relevant feature that the user would require in the travel niche.

• Make My Trip Competitors

The main competition faced by MakeMyTrip is through Yatra.com (National/Local Competition) and Booking.com (International Competition).

The students chose to analyze these brands as competitors because other well-known names in the travel industry like Trivago.in and Airbnb provide only accommodation services whereas MakeMyTrip, Yatra and Booking.com provide not only accommodation but also transport, trip-planning, VISA clearing, etc.

Though MakeMyTrip business pages have a fairly good number of followers on Facebook and Instagram, the engagement rate is low and the digital marketing campaign that our students have come up with does tackle that issue along with the main pain point- group offers and discounts.

After taking an insightful consumer survey, the findings deduced that though MakeMyTrip has several discount schemes and daily coupons, it does not openly focus on group discounts and offers. The Make My Trip marketing campaign aims at introducing these schemes to spark desire and ultimately action among the audience.

The consumer survey was done to identify the pain point

• Campaign

The campaign curated by our student is called MakeMyTrip Land or simply MMT Land. The basic ideology behind this Make My Trip marketing strategy is to target all those half-made and never-successful plans that college-going kids and working freshers make.

This campaign is here with a group that offers that even the introverts of the group cannot refuse and make memories out of the “Goa Trip that never happened”.

Though MakeMyTrip already offers a lot of daily coupons, the communication of the same is very family-oriented and this campaign makes it more youthful and dynamic. The digital marketing campaign focuses on setting up VR Booths where three people can enter at once and experience a “friend-cation” at one of the 5 spots that come at the top of a college student’s travel list- Goa, Thailand, Manali, Rishikesh and Leh. The student will experience the temperatures, sonic range, and activities virtually after which he/she will exit the booth from a walkway tunnel from the other side which is divided into 5 sections catering to the 5 destinations.

They can click pictures, make boomerangs or videos within the tunnel and post them up with a cool hashtag for a feature on our page.

This will ensure that MakeMyTrip deviates from the business-trips or family vacations and inculcate a trendy friend-cation vibe in its communication.

Logo and tagline for the campaign

• Target Audience and Buyer Persona

This MakeMyTrip project focuses on acute market segmentation. The target audience chosen is a very specific age group. The consumer survey circulated to collect insights and determine the pain point was sent to young adults, college students, and everyone between the age group of 18-24. After receiving around 65 responses a buyer persona was based upon the collected results.

The primary and secondary buyer personas are both college-going students, fest enthusiasts, young-adults, interns, freshers, and full-fledged employees between the age group of 18-24.

The main point of difference between the two personas is gender. The students have gone with this make my trip marketing strategy mainly because since this campaign is going live in India’s college fests, females make sense as the secondary audience as unfortunately, they do have permission issues and a lot of other personal factors to consider before planning a trip with friends and colleagues- which may, in turn, be a hindrance to a direct sale. Males, on the other hand, do not have as many factors to consider and are easier to sell the idea to.

Make My Trip Marketing Strategy:

• Make My Trip SEO

The online activities focus on boosting MakeMyTrip’s digital marketing as a complement to the offline campaign by using all the content collected on-site to create some noise among the younger generation online.

The SEO strategy that the students have used for this campaign mainly focuses on targeting keywords extensively so they can penetrate almost every niche that a millennial lookup on Google.

As an example, 85 keywords are listed in the presentation and the same has been broken down into Generic, Competitive, and Branded keywords.

The resultant meta-tags will have a quirky tone which will ultimately take them to the landing page showcasing what their ‘friend-cation’ could look like if they book with MakeMyTrip.

Along with search engine activities, they will step up their Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter communication through organic posts that follow recent social trends and communicate with the lingo of the younger generation. The focus will mainly be on Instagram and Facebook since the target audience flocks there.

 

• Email Marketing

The e-mail marketing strategy undertaken by the students includes reminder e-mails with catchy subject lines and descriptions. Out of all the e-mails sent out, some will have a link to the landing page, some to the blogs, and others to video montages made of the offline activity done at various college fests.

Digital Marketing through catchy E-mails

• Endorsers & Influencer Marketing

Social media strategy and marketing come into play here. MakeMyTrip signed up with the energetic duo of Alia Bhatt and Ranveer Singh in February 2016 and have filmed several humorous and witty television advertisements with them which speak to the young and old audience alike. This is the reason why our students did not change the endorsers of the brand and planned to make a series of video ads to coincide with their campaign and promote them across YouTube, Facebook, and IGTV.

The ads will be in a “to-be-continued” format where Alia and Ranveer will narrate their “MMT Ke Kisse” or Stories with MMT to their grandchildren and show flashback memories.

These stories will feature each of the 5 destinations targeted by our students.

For example, how Alia and Ranveer met in Manali and fell in love, Alia had a “girls-trip” to Thailand, Ranveer took his bachelor’s trip at Leh etc.

For influencer marketing, our students have gone with two main methods of operation. Firstly, whichever college fests will be targeted, they will have a set of “popular kids” or “cool gang” like every college does. They will be taken as micro-influencers and given referral codes to go on a trip to any of the 5 destinations targeted, post pictures and use our hashtags (#Friencation #BeTrippin) and ultimately stoke their friends to take a trip and follow the cool-kid trend. These college-students normally have a large follower base and network of other college-going children which will help in pinpoint targeting at minimal costs.

As for the big names in the influencer community, our students wanted to rope in some faces from FilterCopy, AIB and other content creators on social media sites to give a surprise visit at the VR Booths while the students are enjoying the experience and clicking pictures to post!

 
 

• Make My Trip SEM and use of Content Congregators

Along with Google display ads and banner ads which will lead to the landing page upon receiving a click, our students have targeted innovative keywords like “what should I do after 12th” “I need a break” “what to do when I’m bored” “courses after 12th commerce/science/arts” etc so that when the target audience Googles these keywords, the MMT Land meta tags and display ads appear.

The content creators that our students plan to rope in include BuzzFeed, FilterCopy, Mad over Marketing, Social Samosa, JordIndian, ScoopWhoop etc. These names are big among the target audience chosen and will create blogs, quiz, memes, video content and native communication revolving around the MMT Land campaign to create buzz and spread awareness to spark the required consideration and ultimate action.

Paid banner ads and display ads included in campaign strategy

• Innovative Campaign

Along with the main campaign, our students have thought of an innovative campaign to leave no stone unturned. Since the main campaign focuses on tier 1 and tier 2 college flagship events and university fests, in the innovative campaign all the tier 3 colleges and schools are to be targeted.

In this campaign, a school bus which is totally revamped according to the MakeMyTrip theme will be sent out and after a day full of engaging activities and prize-winning, MakeMyTrip will ask all the students to write down their dream destination and one activity that they always wanted to do there, for example- deep-sea diving at the Maldives or cycling across the plains of Kerala.

After collecting all the wishes, MakeMyTrip will announce 5 lucky winners and fulfill their wishes!

Our students plan on sending one travel blogger with each of the winners at the dream destination and document the entire trip so that MakeMyTrip can use it as content to promote this initiative on every digital platform.
The consumer survey was done to identify the pain point

Conclusion

MakeMyTrip is a well-established online travel company in India that can grow tremendously with the right digital marketing practices and use of resources. The Make My Trip project and marketing strategies put up by our students are an attempt to help the brand overcome the pain point faced by it through the eyes of the younger generation and reveal a new facet of the brand. These are also good marketing case studies for Mba students.

IIDE helps its students shape their ideas into creative campaigns that could take the respected brand to another level. If you also want to learn how to create such amazing strategies, start learning Digital Marketing today.