In a previous article, we learned about the SWOT analysis of IRCTC. In this article, we are going to elaborate on the marketing strategy of IRCTC (the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) with a full detailed analysis.
The objective is to help you gain insights on IRCTC which is the only public sector undertaking in facilitating catering, ticketing, and tourism services to the Indian Railways.
Marketing is a part of a company that can either make it or break it. Across the world, users become more digital, though it’s become the need for marketing to follow them as well. If you are curious to know about digital marketing, then you should definitely check out IIDE’s Free MasterClass on Digital Marketing 101 by our CEO and Founder, Karan Shah.
We will fully cover the marketing strategy of IRCTC in this blog. Before we begin our depth analysis of IRCTC, let’s take a look at the company’s introduction, target audiences and its presence in the digital world.
About IRCTC
The Indian Railways Tourism and Catering Corporation Ltd. (IRCTC) is a public sector company under the Ministry of Railways. It was established on 27th September 1999 as an enlarged branch of Indian Railways to improve, professionalise and manage restaurant and hotel services at stations, trains and other places.
Establishing domestic and international tourism by developing special budget hotels to promote travel packages, information and commercial advertising and a global reservation system.
IRCTC’s vision is to be the leading provider of quality travel, tourism and hospitality services to a variety of customer segments with consistently high levels of customer satisfaction. The total number of IRCTC records is approximately 9 million. The head office and registered office are located in New Delhi.
| CEO | Rajni Hasija |
|---|---|
| CMO | N/A |
| Area Served | India |
| Industry | Catering and tourism Industry, Railway |
| Market Share/ Revenue | Rs 14.30cr |
| Vision | “To live as the routing provider of the high-class trip, tourism and hospitality services, for a range of client corridors, with the constantly high position of client delight.” |
| Tagline | Lifeline of the nation |
Marketing Strategy of IRCTC
Let’s have a look at various marketing strategies taken by IRCTC:
Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning
As it has around 21 million people who mainly use it continuously for online ticket booking and apart from it, at present, the company operates through Fourteen RailNeer Plants, Eleven Base kitchens, Five zonal offices, ten regional offices, one internet ticket office, and one tourism office.
To provide services it mainly focuses on Catering & hospitality, Internet Ticketing, Travel and tourism and Packaged Drinking Water (Rail Neer).
Initially, IRCTC started with the train online ticket bookings and now it facilitates so many services to the Indian Railways and for the passengers. The simply thing is that they mainly provide services at the cheapest rate so every type of passenger is able to afford them. Now, it deals with approximately all kinds of services and works on various schemes to launch.
If talks come around about the Indian Railways the first thing that would always come to mind after railway is IRCTC to book any kind of service whether it’s ticket booking or tourism facilities in railways. Hence, is the only cooperation which is owned by the Indian Railways itself and its speciality which makes the passengers or users keep faith in their services.
Marketing Campaigns
(picture of story rail campaign)
“IRCTC Storyrail – One destination, countless journeys.”
This campaign started in September 2019, it was organized by IRCTC by ad School: Miami Ad School. The campaign was conducted to convert trains into time machines, its vision is to make passengers’ journeys easier and they could scan different parts of the train to unearth stories
It is the successive initiative brought by the students to take untold train stories forward, it is related to the transport industry and contains 4 media assets.
(picture of Maharaj’s campaign)
Maharajas’ Express campaign.
The campaign initiated by the IRCTC is another digital campaign that was heading to the height of success.
It started in 2014, its vision is to let global travellers see the Beauty and heritage of India. This is one of the luxurious trains that ride for global passengers.
This campaign was on every social platform and the team gave their best to make this campaign succeed.
(Picture for the reference of the “shubh yatra campaign”)
Shubh yatra facilitates travellers to earn ‘Railway Points’ whenever they book tickets through the official website of IRCTC. Along with this travellers can get special discounts on their bookings for the whole year. It started in 2019 and according to IRCTC, passengers can avail of discounts on SBI co-branded credit cards or 10% cashback of the ticket booking amount of AC.
According to IRCTC, passengers can get up to 10 per cent cashback of the ticket booking amount of AC class with an SBI co-branded credit card.
Social Media Marketing
IRCTC is active on every social media like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. It recently completed 466k followers on Instagram,671.9k on Twitter and 289k on Facebook. So, it has the maximum number of followers on Twitter than Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram.
Genuinely, LinkedIn is a professional platform where it avoids the memes and fun things that Instagram and Facebook don’t. Linkedin contains promotional and knowledgeable posts those mainly used for advertisement and will prove beneficial for the corporation.
SEO Strategies
(report of traffic)
As per SEO ranking, it is said that the number of keywords- below 500 is bad, above 1000 is good, and 10,000+ would be excellent. As we can see here, www.irctc.co.in has 57,092 organic keywords and then it should be considered excellent. This concludes that the digital marketing of IRCTC is gaining an excellent number of insights.
The same traffic per month is around 4 million+ which is obviously amazing. Hence, IRCTC is going in a great way and this result comes after putting great hard work into SERP results and it will maintain this growth further.
Influencer Marketing
Till today, IRCTC collaborated with so many celebrities, actors, chefs etc. Where they promote or advertise the IRCTC on various platforms like tv, newspapers and various social sites.
Some of them were:
(Sanjiv Kapoor )
Sanjiv Kapoor has been in the hospitality industry since 1984 and was one of the celebrities to promote IRCTC.
As a promoter of IRCTC, he said: “I won’t be able to reveal much, but yes as an Indian I’m glad to be able to help Indian Railways.”
E-commerce Strategies
(e-commerce of IRCTC)
If we talk about the e-commerce strategies of IRCTC, it has its own website to deal with bookings of different services and It is the biggest e-commerce platform in India. Besides train bookings, it also provides hotel bookings, vacation packages and much more. It uses i-pay as a payment gateway and processes 125,000 transactions daily for air tickets, tour packages etc.
Mobile Apps
Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited (IRCTC) has its own Mobile app to take care of the bookings of the various services of Indian Railways. It makes it easier for the users to track their records, bookings and payments. Anyone can download it from the google play store easily.
Content Marketing Strategies
As IRCTC always remains active on social media, the post content is related to its new schemes, new updates and awareness schemes etc. The sources of posting content are social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. Also, they have another option to give knowledge to their customers by releasing the important details or the information on the website itself.
This ends the elaborative marketing strategy of IRCTC. Let us conclude our learning below from the marketing strategy of IRCTC.
Conclusion – What’s Unique in IRCTC Marketing?
In the marketing strategy of IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation), we have seen the love and support that IRCTC is gaining day by day and its growth is increasing persistently. Users are increasing and likewise, their expectations or demands are increasing as well.
As we all know, nowadays Digital Marketing started affecting our businesses a lot, and at the same, it is affecting the IRCTC as well. If we analyse the internet users and take out the exact data we will see that 90% of the users are using the internet to acquire services. Though, the pandemic is also the reason behind this much success of digital marketing in raising the image of companies.
Digital marketing is crucial since it links a company with its clients when they are online and is effective across all sectors. It links businesses with ideal consumers through SEO and PPC on Google, social media marketing, and email marketing. If you would like to learn more and develop skills, check out IIDE’s 4-Month Digital Marketing Course to learn more.
Alternatively, you can enrol in one of our free online masterclasses led by IIDE’s CEO, Karan Shah, to gain insight into the field of digital marketing.
We hope this blog on the marketing strategy of IRCTC has given you a good insight into the company’s marketing strategies.
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