Flightmapping’s MD to speak at Eye For Travel
I will be speaking at the Eye For Travel summit in London tomorrow. Below is my reply to some questions sent by the conference organisers.
1. What in your opinion have been the latest trends when it comes to affiliate marketers using search in an optimal manner?
I suppose the one basic trend is that affiliate marketers are often much better at SEO than merchants! This might sound arrogant, but it is simply a question of resource allocation. Most travel companies are in business to put bums on seats - but actually providing these services, or even providing booking technology, is not the same thing as creating relevant content and playing the never ending Google game.
With the constant cat and mouse race between white hat and black hat (ethical and allegedly unethical) SEO techniques, it is always going to be far easier for affiliates to take risks, than it is for large-scale corporate merchants. Ultimately, there will always be some merchants out there who view affiliate marketing as an unnecessary cost, but I certainly think that affiliates are a very good value proposition, and an excellent return on investment, compared to outsourcing search engine marketing activities, which can often be extremely risky.
2. As an information source about flights from the UK, how is Flightmapping.com capitalising on affiliate marketing?
We want to capitalise on what we do best, which is provide routing information about all flights from all UK airports, whether they are operated by scheduled, budget or charter carriers. In the same way that some merchants might view affiliates as a way of outsourcing their marketing activities, we think that affiliate networks can play a very useful role in outsourcing our own sales activities.
There are simply far too many airlines, consolidators, and price comparison tools out there for us to have the time to speak to all of them. Although we consider ourselves to be a fairly substantial player amongst UK travel affiliates (we will sell £18 million worth of flights this year), we started at a time when travel agents’ margins were being squeezed across the board, and have always understood that selling flights is all about volume.
Margins can often be wafer thin, so working with affiliate networks, allows us to spend more time on growing our business, and let us concentrate on a few key relationships with a select number of prominent merchants.
3. How has your dealing with clients changed in the recent past when it comes to affiliate marketing?
Generally, I think that affiliate marketing is going from strength to strength, and we are finding that as the industry matures, we are developing better and better relationships with our key partners. Events like this are a really good way of highlighting the developments which are taking place, and I’m glad that Matthew Wood from the UK Affiliate Marketing Forum (http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/) has recognised this by providing dedicated sections of his community for the travel industry. Affiliate networks are also starting to appreciate the importance of vertical channels, with Affiliate Future in particular leading the way here.
Unfortunately, there will always be some merchants who feel they can take affiliates for granted. It is a shame that we have still not had any direct contact with our largest client, despite sending them over 1000 bookings each month.
Meanwhile, another airline tried to suspend their affiliate programme in order to make their end of year budget look pretty. We had no choice but to stop working with this company - we think that affiliate marketing is a very low-cost route to market for any merchant, but we will not give away traffic for free!
4. A study recently stated: Consumers lack trust in paid search and are turning overwhelmingly to natural search results. Considering this statement, how do you assess the situation from affiliate marketing perspective?
Any study like this is music to our ears. Pay per click has always been an expensive business for us, whereas organic traffic is our bread and butter. There will always be spam in any search index, whether it is paid or unpaid, but the more search engines move towards quality ratings, the more we think we have to gain.
Thankfully, the days of spammy aggregator listings seem to be coming to an end. If you don’t mind me taking off my SEO hat, and putting on my trainspotter anorak, we used to call these sites “Cornbrooks”, after a Metro station in Manchester, where passengers could only change from one line to another, without any entrance or exit. Ironically, I passed through Cornbrook the other day, and it no longer had this quirky distinction!
5. It is being felt that as affiliate marketing matures, merchants will rely on a small group of quality affiliates who will get privileges that the other amateur affiliates don’t. What kind of maturity level is there right now and how do you expect it to shape up?
I don’t think it really matters what industry you look at, there will always be some people who tell you that there is an “Us and Them” attitude. It is always worth remembering that the barriers for entry to affiliate marketing are extremely low - you could buy a domain with a year’s hosting, and still get change from £100. Anyone who has concerns can usually get an answer from an affiliate marketing forum, or by posting on a blog, and there are usually plenty of opportunities to meet merchants face-to-face at various industry events.
6. To what extent do your clients agree to this statement: committed affiliates are potentially a powerful tool for a merchant’s “online reputation management”?
I think there is some truth in this, but we are always careful to draw a line between providing unbiased content and generating advertising revenue. Mark (my brother and content editor), used to work for a newspaper where advertisers often mistakenly believed that they could dictate the editorial. If an airline has an affiliate programme, then we might well take more interest in their route developments, and try and fly with them ourselves, but if the service is terrible, we aren’t going to pretend it was brilliant - that would be a surefire way of trashing our own reputation! Having said this, this line is never as clear-cut as it should be - if a merchant treats its affiliates badly, then there is a very high chance it will treat customers in the same way.
7. How can affiliates use “user-generated” content to their advantage?
I think affiliates have a big advantage here, because they can be much more liberal in the kind of user generated content they will accept. Whatever any merchant might say, they really don’t want to have bad reviews on their own website - this will simply put people off from booking with them.
On the other hand, we don’t gain much credibility by being either overtly negative, or brazenly positive, about any particular flight experience. The vast majority of content on our site is written by our own team, although sometimes I wish I could make some of my comments a bit more anonymously! There are always going to be credibility issues with allowing unvetted user comments, so I think we are more likely to work with a closely selected group of contributors, and get them to focus on providing highly detailed, well rounded, reviews.
8. What’s on your agenda?
Despite just starting a blog, I am trying to stay off my soapbox as much as possible, and focus on improving the site. We’re approaching our fifth birthday, and we’ve got a really sharp team, and a number of new developments in the pipeline to keep us busy.
We are about to bring out the big guns on the PR circuit, because I really do think we now have a website which every UK traveller should come to first, whenever they think about flights.