Norse Atlantic Awards | Full-service digital strategy case study

The challenge

Norse Atlantic Airways set out to launch its brand new airline and sought the help of a digital agency to devise and deliver its international multi-channel digital marketing strategy. As a brand new player in its space, Norse needed to position itself as an airline of choice vs established alternatives.

Looking to utilise digital channels only, it appointed Impression as its strategic agency partner, tasking us with the challenge of launching an airline.

Leaning on the expertise of Impression’s strategy, solutions, paid media and conversion-rate-optimisation teams, we worked collaboratively to launch Norse Atlantic as a new low-cost airline, as the travel industry was still recovering post-pandemic.

We set out to communicate Norse’s unique value proposition of affordable fees to exciting long-haul destinations to a broad audience to drive maximum impact.

The strategy

Our initial approach was focused on reaching the highest intent audiences who were ready to purchase, identifying key purchase environments to push Norse’s low price point.

This focused on two marketing objectives:

– Driving flight bookings efficiently

– Increasing consideration of Norse

Norse Atlantic had punchy targets and not much time to get there. We activated our strategy across paid search, social, display advertising and conversion-rate-optimisation. We mapped out the customer journey which enabled us to align our activity to the mindset of the consumer; ensuring our creative approach was consistent from first touch point to conversion, aligning audience targeting across our Paid channels and establishing a holistic measurement framework for each channel to contribute towards.

A little while into working together, we came up against a challenge: the customer journey takes time. Consumers book a flight as part of a holiday and they take time to plan their holidays.

Our current strategy wasn’t targeting the whole customer journey, meaning that when our audience was ready to purchase, alternative options were also front of mind. This, combined with Norse being a new player with low credibility, meant we had to evolve.

We introduced a new objective: increasing brand awareness of Norse.

We had to be present across the whole customer journey, which we know takes time, to be front of mind at the purchase moment. In particular, during key sales periods, we had to prime the audience well ahead of time to build demand and then use sales discounts to harvest it. We did this through a combination of new social media channels, such as TikTok, high-impact display and video activity on YouTube and Connected TV.

Ways of working

As a new company, Norse had a small internal marketing team and it was up to us to establish ourselves as a true extension of that team. Our strategy and client success departments were an integral part of ensuring this happened through the facilitation of cross-channel collaboration, regular calls as well as plenty of face-to-face interaction.

To maximise the value of all meetings, an extensive RACI matrix was created to ensure the right stakeholders were present, resulting in decisions being signed off and actions being put into place. Two weekly one-to-one meetings separate running BAU activity from focusing on strategic direction.

The results

Our strategy has continued to see success, with Norse’s latest 10-day sales period in April exceeding expectations, increasing transactions vs the last one (September) by 70% (GA). This equated to a 47% uplift in transactions versus the previous period.

We have been able to hit our objective framework with our approach over the last 12 months

75%

Increase in brand searches, according to Google Trends data.

182%

We have increased consideration through driving new user traffic to the website, increasing traffic by 182% since the first month of the launch.

600%

Increase in sales

I would recommend Impression as a digital marketing agency. The team are friendly, helpful and competent. It has been great working with them over the past year and I look forward to working with them in future.

Gemma Launchbury VP of Marketing, Norse Atlantic Airways