I speak with Douglas Cook who is Director of Growth at Skyscanner. Skyscanner operates in the extremely competitive travel search space. They have seen phenomenal growth in their website visits and user numbers and they’re still growing aggressively in EMEA. In this episode Douglas and I speak about the marketing strategies they’ve used to get there. We spend a lot of time talking about product, SEO, direct response, digital marketing, personalisation and display. We also discuss how Skyscanner use a lean and agile approach to marketing to make sure they see success on a small scale before they grow any new marketing campaign.
Listen to the show:
Subscribe:
Last 5 questions:
What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
I can say this from the angle of what a lot of people have come to me to ask about is they’ve seen a lot of stuff on how Skyscanner’s done lean and agile and growth, and how do I do this for my business. I think regardless of whether you’re a tech business or a traditional business and you want to make a change to be more agile, to be more lean, to introduce principles of growth, whatever it is you want to do, the first part has to be to get the culture and the people piece right. If you only do one piece, sort that bit, and if you’re doing it all, then start with that bit. So, get the structure right, make sure the people are supported in whatever change it is you’re going to make would be the first thing I would recommend to anybody coming and asking, “How do I apply some of these principles in our business?”
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
I’ll give you a couple. The first one actually I’ll give you is based on everything I just said, which is Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck, ’cause I think a lot of what people need to go through when you’re making changes is that they are willing to learn new things, and Growth Mindset is a great book in that regard.
The second one that really helped me when we at Skyscanner went through the change was Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday. Now, some people look down their nose a little bit at this one I’ve found, especially when you say it as conferences. It isn’t the most complex and it isn’t the most revolutionary when you look at it now, but where it really helped me is Ryan was coming from a place that was very similar to where I was in terms of consumer goods. Going through his journey as to what he knew and where he’d been and then how growth differed from that was, it was super helpful to me in terms of my mindset shift and my transition. So, I really like it in terms of a … like as a first book. If you’ve not done growth, especially if you’ve come from a more traditional marketing org, then it’s a great place to start to understand what growth is all about and how that differs to marketing.
What software tool couldn’t you live without?
Well, obviously I’ve got to say Skyscanner here. I can’t say anything else. I’m not being sycophantic, or not being completely sycophantic about this. I guess the other thing as well, let’s face it, we could do our jobs with pencil, paper and a telephone, right? So, if all I had was one piece of software, then I need to experience what our travelers are experiencing. I can’t market something that I don’t know how that is, so I need to be able to experience Skyscanner and go through the pain points there. Then everything else, if I had to, I could do it without any tool. I could just do it with a … It would be longer, but I could do it with a piece of paper and a telephone. Slack is probably the one that is absolutely always open at any one time. There’s loads of stuff which is open most of the time, but Slack is the one that is definitely open all the time.
What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
This was an interesting one as I was thinking about this, and I don’t know. It got me thinking a little bit deeper about it. A lot of where I tended to go to was some of the, I don’t know whether to call them ‘golden oldies’, that makes me feel old as well. Some of the big … Back in the day of Guinness, things like Guinness and Prancing … Was it Prancing Horses or whatever that one was called. It was more than an advert. It dictated music choice and Leftfield … It was kind of a big thing, I think, in Leftfield, the band, becoming popular at that point in time. But, it was a cultural piece, not just an advert. Probably as much a factor as the fragmentation of media landscapes and that sort of thing that adverts often tend not to get that level of impact these days, but, to me, stuff like that still feels really inspiring, stuff that has an impact more than just selling more Guinness. I believe it did sell more Guinness, but it has an impact on culture as well.
I think there is some stuff still does that. The John Lewis ads. It’s probably a bit of a cliché to say, John Lewis ads, which for those of you in the States, that will mean nothing, but Christmas ads, that is probably the one, it’s still something that people look forward to, it’s still something people talk about. While I personally maybe don’t get as that as I did by the likes of Guinness back in the day, it’s still something that doesn’t just drive sales, but it makes a bigger cultural impact than just a marketing piece.
Which other podcasts do you listen to?
Sorry, you’ve got two weeks in a row where people have said, “I don’t listen to podcasts.” I don’t listen to podcasts. I kind of find … It’s just the time. I consume most of my stuff on blogs on my phone, in stolen moments between screaming kids or sitting in meetings, so to get the time to sit and listen to podcasts I find quite hard. So, I will consume five minutes worth of information on a phone while I’m putting my son to bed or when I’m sitting for somebody who’s late for a meeting. That’s how I consume all that information, whereas finding that time to sit down and listen is quite hard.
So, yeah, sorry. Obviously I will listen to this one, then I’ll listen to future ones, but, yeah, I’m an avid blog reader and I use Twitter a lot to just sort of … It’s almost like a rabbit warren of you click on one thing and another thing and another thing and you find new people and find new stuff to read. So, that’s how I consume a lot of my information on growth and marketing.
Transcription:
Matt Byrom:
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Marketing Strategies Podcast. Today, I’m joined by Douglas Cook, who is director of growth at Skyscanner.
Douglas has been with Skyscanner since 2013. He started out as marketing manager for UK and Ireland, and has grown through multiple roles to his current director of growth position where he’s responsible for [EMEA 00:01:25], with specific responsibility for growth in their seven largest markets: UK, Russia, Germany, Spain, France, Italy and the Netherlands.
I’m extremely excited to understand the strategies, tactics and channels Douglas and his team focus on to generate their phenomenal growth. So, let’s dive right in. How you doing today, Douglas?
Douglas Cook:
Good, thank you. Thanks for having me.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, you’re very welcome. It’s a pleasure to have you on today. It’s an app and a piece of software that I’ve used a number of times, so it’s really exciting to have somebody on from a product that you’ve used in the past.
Douglas Cook:
Great. Glad to hear it.
Matt Byrom:
So, for the listeners and anybody who hasn’t heard about Skyscanner, tell us a bit more about what you do and the problem you solve for your customers.
Douglas Cook:
Yeah. So, Skyscanner’s a travel search site. We currently cover flights, hotels, car hire, and more recently rail trains in the UK. We’re a travel search site, free, unbiased, 70 million travelers around the world currently using us to find the best deals on their travel.
We were started in 2003 here in Edinburgh, and now have offices in a number of locations and teams in a number of locations around the world. I think we’re up to about 10 offices globally now.
Matt Byrom:
The travel industry is obviously hugely competitive, but flight, hotel and car search is also an extremely competitive part of that industry. How do you actually find that competition?
Douglas Cook:
It is a very competitive industry. I mean, I think, for us, it’s about how we stay ahead technologically, and we do think of ourselves as we’re a tech company that just so happens to operate in travel when it comes to the principles of the business and how we operate. That’s keeping us very much ahead of the curve in terms of the technologies that we develop and that we work with to keep ahead of the curve and keep solving travelers’ problems, making travel as easy for them as possible.
I guess, if you think back, 2003 is a long time ago. In a lot of our markets, we had real first mover advantage and have managed to keep ahead of that curve with that tech focus that we’ve got.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. That’s what I hear a lot from people, guests that come on this podcast, is that focus around product, make the product as phenomenal and as outstanding and as useful for the customer as it possibly can be, and that’s what’ll keep that advantage. That’s effectively what you’re saying there, about the technological advancements and staying ahead of the curve, really, I guess.
Douglas Cook:
Absolutely, yep.
Matt Byrom:
A little stat that I saw is that, at Skyscanner, even in your first year with the business, which is a little while ago now, but you saw 50% plus increase in visitors in the UK and 100% plus in Ireland during your first year. Is that something that now you’re working in EMEA and the seven largest markets, is that something that you’ve been able to replicate and continue at Skyscanner?
Douglas Cook:
Yeah. We’re still a fast growing business and still going through huge growth across all our markets. Obviously the growth will vary according to market, and there’s some new ones we’re just starting to break in now that are seeing significant levels of growth, albeit from a smaller base. But, yeah, the business is still growing.
Matt Byrom:
Excellent. Good to hear. I guess, before we move into the marketing strategy in more detail, I’d love to just understand … So, it’s helpful, as a free online tool, it’s helpful to understand where is the point of conversion for you? What’s the point that a customer generates you revenue or somebody goes from being a user to a customer for you guys?
Douglas Cook:
There’s, I guess, broadly, there’s a couple of ways customers can book via us. We’re making a big push, as you may have seen and read, into direct booking on our own site. That is with us as the facilitator of the travel, the end booking is still with a provider. We’re not the end travel agent or the end airline if you like, but we can facilitate that booking on our site, or users also choose sometimes to click out to a partner site and book via the partner. So, we don’t take the booking, we don’t take the customer information our side, but they click out to a partner to do that.
Matt Byrom:
It’s at the point of booking then that you’ll see revenue as well.
Douglas Cook:
Yeah. We have a number of different monetization models to how exactly we monetize. But, yeah, that customer converting through to the airlines is what our aim is.
Matt Byrom:
Excellent. It’s good to just understand that before we go into the marketing challenge, just so myself and the listeners can fully understand, for a free tour, where somebody for you becomes a customer, I guess. Tell us a bit more about the marketing strategy, what areas your team focus on, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
Douglas Cook:
Yeah. I guess it’s worth giving a bit of a history to marketing at Skyscanner, if you like. I guess, in our very early days, it was all about SEO, and I guess the foundations of the business are still, or the marketing side of the business anyway, are very much in SEO. It’s a real core strength of us, and it’s how we grew in those early days and driving a lot of our growth now.
Over time, as we start to generate revenue that we could afford, marketing activity, we kind of moved into more direct response, digital type activity. At the point I came into the business, which was 2013, we were going through that point of looking for where’s the next area we’re going to move into to continue to drive growth, and tried a number of different tactics at that point in time, tested a number of things.
It was round about 2014 and then into 2015 that we started to make this transition to growth as a principle as opposed to thinking of ourselves just as top of funnel marketing. That was a pretty fundamental shift in our thinking as marketers as we were then, and a very big impact in terms of the ways we worked, how we worked across the business, how we thought about our customers and travelers as well. So, that’s the journey we’ve been on, from SEO to the introduction of paid and then onto growth.
In terms of our strategies, I guess it’s worth just giving a bit of background to where I sit within the business to help with some context here. As you’ve already pointed out, I’ve got remit over specific markets. We sit within the regional growth teams, and we are very much the voice of the market. For France, for example, the team we have in France are the ones that are most focused on the French user and the French traveler and understanding what they need.
Globally, we will develop the product, we will develop the technology, we will offer solutions that will cater for the majority of traveler needs, but really that last mile is very much for the local market to deeply understand what that traveler needs that’s different from elsewhere and then help shape that, not just the marketing strategies but the product itself and the whole funnel thinking, full funnel, as to how they best serve the needs of the French traveler and how they best bring French travelers into the funnel in the first place.
It’s a real kind of … Growth is a full funnel thing. It’s not just about acquiring users at the top, it’s thinking right from that acquisition point through to conversion and then how we bring those users back in the future.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. So, things will be done at a broad level from the global point of view, but then the nuances and specifics might be done by the local teams to make sure that it’s actually talking to those countries and audiences specifically.
Douglas Cook:
Yeah, absolutely. It can vary a lot by market, and that’s the approach we take, is market first. It’s hard for me to point to a … You say, “Summarize your strategy”, there’s not one strategy fits all the needs of different markets depending on the needs of their travelers, the media landscape, regulatory landscapes. All these things shapes very different strategies and very different approaches in our different regions, and they have the autonomy and the remit to do what is right for their market as opposed to [inaudible 00:09:33] follow a global marketing strategy that we then just roll out to each market.
Matt Byrom:
Is SEO still a big thing for you guys? I did a little bit of research on, say, similar websites. You get just over 40% of your traffic from search. I did a little bit further research using our [Ahrefs 00:09:52] account, and I see that a lot of that might be for people actually searching Skyscanner specific keywords. There’s also still a lot of traffic that you guys are getting from local guides or as pieces of content that you’re creating that are search friendly and useful to your audience. Is that still a big area for you? Are you still putting a lot of time and effort into SEO, or has focus shifted further and further away from that?
Douglas Cook:
No. Like I sort of eluded to already, search is still a massive thing for us. It’s still very much the foundations of the business. It drives a significant amount of our volume. I guess, as most of the listeners will know, that half the battle is getting to the positions you’re in, but you can’t just then deprioritize and step away and expect to stay there. There’s a huge amount of work from the teams just to maintain the strength that we’ve got. So, yeah, search is still really big for us.
I guess another area that we know is quite big is that direct traffic as well, which, if you’ve dug into SimilarWeb, you’ll probably be seeing some of that. That comes from word of mouth and friend recommendation, but almost the … Not your incentivized referral program type stuff, but like old school, hard to track, hard to see where it’s coming from word of mouth, from having a great product and people telling their friends and coming direct back to you that way. Those are two really big areas for us.
Matt Byrom:
I mean, as SEO is a particularly big part for you, as you mentioned, it’d be interesting to dig into that and then we can dig into the direct and partnerships in a moment a bit further. So, in terms of SEO, what type of content are you creating, and what are you seeing work best for you?
Douglas Cook:
I guess there’s broadly two areas that the teams are currently heavily focused on. The first is much more transactional stuff. That can be anything from flights from Edinburgh pages to routes level pages for Edinburgh to London or London to New York, airline pages as well. So, things that are targeting users. They might not know exactly where they want to go, but they know where they’re traveling from or they know the airline they might want to travel to, which can be particularly useful from a US perspective potentially, where they’re highly loyal to particular airlines.
There’s those kind of more transactional pages there, which are much further down the funnel, but we do a lot of more destination and inspiration type content as well, which can vary from best places to go in October or November … I know our UK team have had some great success with pages like that, that’s really early stage, I know roughly when I want to go away, but I don’t really know where I want to, and they’ll serve up, I don’t know, 10 destinations you can potentially go to with a bit of information about each. Just stuff that-
Matt Byrom:
Those posts are always popular.
Douglas Cook:
Yeah, exactly. Then other destination and inspiration stuff can be much further down the funnel. Maybe you’ve booked your flights to Barcelona and then there’s things we can do to help provide you guides or information to help you when you get there. So, they’re post-booking, but they’re still giving value to the travel and still giving them a reason to come back to Skyscanner as well. So, there’s a lot of stuff we do in that destination and inspiration area.
Matt Byrom:
It’s trying to add value, I guess, there. Like you say, it’s useful after you’ve booked, but, actually, to know the area and to actually understand what you could do and what it’s like there is also a good value add for pre-booked as well.
Douglas Cook:
Absolutely. For us as well, it’s about shortening the cycle time to value. For an infrequent traveler, they might only travel twice a year, if that. Some people just take one holiday, one flight a year, which means you’re 12 months from the next time you want to use Skyscanner, which, for some people, that can mean they’ve forgotten about us, and then you need to invest money, either directly with paid or indirectly with SEO, to bring them back again.
Whereas, if we can shorten that cycle time from when they last got value to when they next get value by appealing to them further down the funnel, then it might only be six months until they start their planning for the next trip. So, they’re more likely to remember us and more likely to potentially come back direct.
Matt Byrom:
Will you do that through an email nurture campaign, for example. So, someone uses Skyscanner, becomes a customer, you may send them some destination information, would you then send them further information following that, weeks, months down the line, to keep you brand in front of that person?
Douglas Cook:
Yeah. I mean, there’s lots of different ways we do that. Email is a big one for that. We run push activity as well, both on mobile and we’ve tried it on web too. We’ve tested various different content promotion type activities in the past as well, which is another way of getting information to them. But, email’s probably the … I say probably, it is the biggest way that we currently serve that information to people outside of organic search results.
Matt Byrom:
Very interesting. What I particularly liked about your articles is that they include a Skyscanner search widget, I guess, or panel in there so that people, when they’re actually reading the article, can actually use the product straight from within the article. I mean, I can’t think of many other businesses that would be able to actually embed their product into an article and how valuable that possibly is.
Douglas Cook:
Yeah. It’s just about us making it as easy as possible. If you have read something that inspires you or interests you, then what’s the point in sending them back to the home page to starting them going through the funnel when you can just get them searching, and in some instances get them directly into the funnel right now so you don’t even need to input details in the search bar? But, is there a button that we can put there that links you directly into the funnel with the best price to Barcelona if you’ve been reading about Barcelona, for example?
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Just making it relevant and as easy as possible, I guess.
Douglas Cook:
Yeah.
Matt Byrom:
How are you deciding what content to create from the funnel, different positions in the funnel, and different gaps that you may have, and also on a keyword level in terms of actually focusing on or deciding which keywords to focus on and target?
Douglas Cook:
The approach will vary depending on what it is that the teams are trying to do, but let’s take the example of what we can provide value for maybe further down the funnel. The teams will be looking at the internal data we have to understand the current trends for searches and bookings and where are people currently looking for, where are they booking for, and therefore that can help inform their strategy for what sort of content we might need to produce or promote there.
Equally, if, I don’t know, if you were seeing … We do quite a lot of stuff round about travel trends type of information. If you’re seeing changes in searches to particular areas, then it might inform you to produce some more early funnel stuff and destination type content to encourage people into a new trending destination as well. So, there’s lots of stuff. There’s no one answer to that question. It just depends what they’re trying to do, whether they’re trying to tempt people in the first instance or provide them value later, and then there’s lots of internal and external data that we can pull on to help inform that.
Matt Byrom:
Are you focusing around specific keywords, so writing for potential opportunities in the search engines and then building value around that, or is it really value first, search second?
Douglas Cook:
I think value first, search second. I think Google would say that in any guide they would ever give you, is first and foremost, they want to know that you’re giving value to their users, and, for us, that we’re giving value to our travelers. So, eventually, if you give that value and the user likes what you’re getting, then that will positively impact you from an SEO perspective.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. I just wanted to take a slight departure from the specific ways that you market your business and just take a slight detour onto something that I read recently on your LinkedIn page, which is an article that you’ve written around lean and agile marketing and the specific process that you’ve developed around lean and agile marketing, around testing, experimentation and learning before going all out on a campaign in a big way.
I mean, could you tell us a bit more about that? Could you educate the listeners about your process, how that works and what it does for Skyscanner?
Douglas Cook:
Yeah, no, absolutely. This is an area that I’ve got a lot of interest in and I’ve been pretty heavily involved in over the last few years. This goes back to the 2014/15 point which I alluded to earlier on, where we were looking at where do we go for our next step of growth as a business.
We saw this idea of growth hacking starting to gain traction in Silicon Valley at that point in time, and people were talking about lean and agile principles and how can we bring these to areas outside of software engineering and project management and how can we apply them to marketing, if you like. There was no silver bullet is what I always say there. We didn’t subscribe to one particular model. We didn’t just go all in on growth hacking or all in on principles of lean, but we took various bits of each of those principles and mashed them together in a way that worked for Skyscanner.
There’s four key areas that, for me, were really critical to that change we made. The first was we had to get the people and culture right, ’cause we were a transitioning team from very different backgrounds and teaching them lots of new skills and lots of new capabilities. For me, it was a massive departure from where I’d come from, in a very traditional consumer goods organization with a fairly typical brand team type setup. So, we needed to build the right teams, and we followed what many will call ‘the Spotify model’ of squads and tribes, although I’m conscious that lots of businesses have [squadified 00:20:04] before and after. So, set up those cross-functional squad teams was one of the first steps, and then supporting our teams in their development as individuals as we started to change the things we were asking of them and further down the funnel, etc, that I spoke about before.
Then the second area was how we started to introduce lean startup principles into growth and into marketing. As a business, things like ‘The Lean Startup’ are very heavily read and very much evangelized in the product side of the org, and we were looking at how can we take those principles of build, measure, learn into the growth side. Prior to that, although we weren’t producing necessarily big above line campaigns like some brands do, we were still following a fairly standard marketing development process of creating things big batch and sticking them out there and just hoping for the best. Of course, you would have done the research beforehand and you might have done … But, most of that would have been desktop research or in a focus group, whereas the principles of lean and agile really focused us on how do we make the smallest possible version of this activity and get it out in front of real users right now and see what it actually does to our metric as opposed to just taking to a focus group or a small number of users and just saying, “Hey, what do you think about that?” So, we very much took those principles from ‘The Lean Startup’, about building MVPs, or minimum viable campaigns as we would call them in growth, and creating activity that way.
The principles of agile, basically we just … Well, we saw that the software engineering side of the business was taking on a lot of the agile software development from the agile manifesto. But, it was interesting when you looked in marketing at the time, my perception anyway was when people said they were doing agile marketing, they really meant realtime, and that was something we were doing already. I think, for some businesses, it was quite a change.
One of the most prolific examples, I think, when you Google it for great examples of agile marketing, was if you remember when Craft did the Oreo Tweet during the Superbowl and the lights went out, they were just responsive to the situation. They weren’t going from a preplanned content sheet as to what they put out in social at that point in time. In reality, we were doing a lot of that anyway. Our social teams were already empowered to make decisions then and there about what was right for their content as opposed to having to plan it four weeks in advance.
But, what we then found in our research is somebody had already created the Agile Marketing Manifesto and it’s still there on agilemarketingmanifesto.org, and there’s lots of really good principles there about how you take the core principles of agile as it pertains to software development and apply those in a marketing environment as well. So, a lot of that stuff we took from there and then mashed that up with a bit of lean and then a bit of squads and tribes, and came to we’ll call it ‘the Skyscanner model’ for growth as opposed to being, as I say, subscribing to any one of those three different approaches.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. You’ve always got to do it in your own way, haven’t you? You can’t just mold yourself to fit what works for somebody else, so that makes total sense. But, how long did that take to implement in that case, ’cause it sounds … Whenever you make culture changes within a business or start to move in a different way like that, it can take time to implement. Was that something that was difficult to get people onboard with or was it a straightforward process?
Douglas Cook:
Yeah, it was difficult. I don’t know. How long did it take? I guess it’s … Are these things ever finished, ’cause there’s always evolutions, there are things that don’t work. There’s things we’ve learned along the way. I would say we’re in a great place, but I wouldn’t say we’re finished ’cause we’re still making adaptations to the model. But, yeah, it took time. I think it took a lot … It’s not just about growth in terms of growth marketing or growth hacking, but it was growth in terms of growth mindset as well, that we needed to be open to try new stuff. ‘Cause, like I said, for somebody like me, this was a massive shift versus how I was previously doing stuff and had spent seven years doing stuff in a consumer goods type role. So, yeah, it was a big shift and it took time.
Matt Byrom:
It’s interesting, on the article … If anybody who hasn’t seen this article, go to Douglas Cook’s LinkedIn profile and on there you’ll see this article, ‘Developing a Lean and Agile Marketing Process’. But, one of the things that you’ve got in there is a great example of a banner, simple, straightforward banner of a Tenerife beach with a temperature and a benefit statement, and it says ‘Tenerife’. Then the next one down has the temperature and Tenerife, but doesn’t have the benefit statement. The third one down is just Tenerife with a picture of the beach. It’s almost like this is how you learn along the way. How many of these experiments would you be running at any one particular time, and how does that work for you?
Douglas Cook:
How many? I don’t know. I lose track. It depends. Different teams will have different levels of throughput. At the point in time where we ran that particular one, my team in any given sprint might be pulling in four, five, six particular ideas in a four … I think we were running in four week sprints at that point in time. We were taking four, five or six things. Typically, like only one, maybe two at a push of those things would succeed, and the rest you were weeding out with your small scale test pretty quickly. So, you were only launching at scale perhaps one, if even one thing, per month or per sprint, but you were trying lots of different stuff, lots of different stuff along the way.
That particular example, I think, is … It’s interesting you pick up on that one ’cause that’s still the one I give as a really nice textbook example of how the principles of lean work for marketing and work for growth. So, that particular one, the idea was if we had a dynamic temperature feed in our ads, then it would really appeal to last minute bookers, who … As it often is in Edinburgh, it’s cold and raining, but if you knew it was-
Matt Byrom:
Follow the sun.
Douglas Cook:
… yeah, 20 degrees in Tenerife that weekend and you can get there for £100, then you might get that last minute booking. Now, there’s loads of different tools out there. You can get weather feeds from probably a million and one different places, and there’s loads of dynamic ad solutions that you can build those into, but all those would have taken time. Not very much time, but they would have taken time. Whereas we sit at a pod with our design team and with our growth team, so we simply said to them … We went to the weather channel one morning and said, “Okay, it’s 18 degrees in Tenerife this weekend and the current cheapest flights from Edinburgh are X pounds,” and they’d update the ads.
Then we’d run that for 24 hours, and the next morning somebody would go back to the weather channel and they’d go back to Skyscanner and they’d just update the temperature and the price. That was our MVP, was just manually checking it on the weather channel as opposed to building that dynamic feed, which would have taken time or money if we were having to build something. So, super lean, super agile, just to get an idea out there and test it quickly.
Matt Byrom:
That helps you validate whether that’s even a way to go, whether that temperature is something that’s actually going to sway more people than less people, and actually test that quickly. So, yeah, that totally makes sense.
What channels are you focusing on with these campaigns? I mean, this that we’re talking about here is, it looks like a banner ad that would be used for, I guess, retargeting perhaps or actually audience engagement online. Is that correct, and do you also use social for some of these tests as well?
Douglas Cook:
Yeah. That one was so long ago, I can’t even remember what channels we used for it. I remember it in terms of it’s a nice principles of lean and agile, but as for the detail of the channels, I can’t remember. We’re pretty open, right? For something like that, the teams need to pick the channel that they think is best for that particular idea. If they want to use paid search, if they want to use social, if they want to use any of our in-house channels, it’s up to them to work out what is right for them in their market, for their travelers and for that particular activity.
We have access to a huge number of channels and most of our teams are empowered to use those channels themselves, so it’s not like we’re having to wait for an agency to do that or to pitch that to somebody. It’s you’ve got the password, you’ve got the login for that, if you want to go and try it in that particular channel, then go and try it yourself and see what happens.
Matt Byrom:
Then what would you hold the campaign success to? Are you looking at cost of user acquisition or other metrics? What are your metrics?
Douglas Cook:
It will vary slightly by activity. Ultimately, our North Star metric is looking at what value we create for travelers and for partners, and we do that through looking at the total transaction value that is facilitated through Skyscanner. That’s our North Star, but there’s load of different ways of getting to that. Sometimes we will be looking at acquisition activity, sometimes we’ll be looking at the most efficient way of retaining people and bringing them back to site, sometimes it’ll be about funnel session.
So, again, it’ll vary, and it’ll vary according to the stage each market is at as well. An early stage market may be wanting to acquire more users to really start to get that flywheel turning, whereas there may be markets that have a particular challenge with the retention and it’s about retaining users they’re acquiring quite successfully. But, where we all converge is on that total transaction value as our North Star metric, right at the end of the funnel.
Matt Byrom:
Previously we were talking about SEO and now we’re talking a bit more about direct response. What would be the lead time from somebody seeing one of these campaigns, like your tested campaigns, like an advert on social or retargeting around the web, for example? What would be the lead time, or typical lead time, between somebody clicking on one of these ads and actually booking? Do you typically see that that happens almost straightaway, within the same day, for example, or is there a longer time where people would actually think about plan their holiday and then book later date?
Douglas Cook:
Yeah, it can do. It can be in that same session, and I think this goes back to when we were discussing SEO and how the fact that we’ve got transactional stuff that’s trying to fulfill travelers who know where they want to go, when they want to go. With stuff like that, it can be same session.
Matt Byrom:
Like an impulse really, I guess.
Douglas Cook:
Well, not even impulse ’cause they may have spent ages researching it, but for whatever reason they haven’t come across Skyscanner or we need to remind them about Skyscanner when they get to that point of purchase, whereas some of the other content that we talked about can be about more destination and inspiration. That’s early funnel. They may be weeks or months away from making that purchase, so it’s about serving their needs right then and there, which is I just want a bit of information about where I could go in October, and then keeping feeding them information as they go through their thought process and their consideration process so when they get to purchase time they remember Skyscanner.
Matt Byrom:
Very interesting. What tools are you using to track, I guess, your experiments and to understand which are being successful at what rate, and then how to actually progress the ones that are looking positive to a bigger stage?
Douglas Cook:
Lots. It’s a combination of external and internal tools. We’ve built a lot of our attribution models and that sort of thing in-house. In terms of specifically on how do you track what’s working and what’s not and what do you want to scale, that’s a challenge with the size of team we’ve got because there’s a lot of people doing a lot of stuff. At any time, there can be hundreds of experiments going on.
Matt Byrom:
It’d be really interesting to know if there’s any juicy takeaways, I guess, or some things that you’ve gone, “Wow, that’s worked better than expected.” Are there campaigns that you’ve run and that you’ve seen, or tactics that you’ve seen other people use that you’ve tested yourself and you’ve thought, wow, that’s really worked well? I guess what I’m after is what campaigns have worked particularly well for you over the last few years, and is there any takeaways from that that you could give to the listeners?
Douglas Cook:
One that I think is … I guess this goes back to a general operating principle, but then I’ve got a specific example that I think illustrates it. When we squadified and made the teams autonomous, to take the decisions that were right for their market, one of the things that they needed to make decisions on was when’s the right time to run an activity, what is the right way to do it in your market. Previously, we would have created an activity centrally, everybody would have ticked a box on a spreadsheet to say yes, no, we don’t want it. They would have done some translations on the spreadsheet as well to adapt the core collateral, and often you would have just rolled it out at the same time because there was efficiencies of doing it that way or you’re reliant on data that needed to be run to and from the campaign.
So, specifically, on something like our best time to book campaign, which is a very successful way of informing users on the best time to book to get the best flight prices from their country to popular destinations, something like that we used to run in January of every year. Now, when we said to teams, “It’s up to you to run this campaign how you want it and when you want it,” some markets like the UK will still go, “We’ll still do this in January because this is the point in time where we believe travelers most want to know this information,” whereas markets like Turkey go, “Actually, we’re going to run it in July. January was never good for us. We just did it in January because we didn’t have an option because that’s when the majority wanted it, but now we can do it exactly how we need it for us. We’re going to change the time completely of when we do it, we’re going to change the assets more, we’re going to adapt it more for local needs.”
So, if you look at a campaign like that, we don’t get the big bang we used to. January, we used to see a massive spike in users from this activity, so we don’t get that anymore, but if you look over the course of a year, we get a much more sustained impact from that activity than we used to by empowering the markets to take the decisions that are right for those markets as opposed to just saying everybody has to do it at once and making it an opt in or out kind of thing.
Matt Byrom:
I guess that talks to what we were discussing earlier about actually having the local markets be agile and be able to adapt to their local customer, because there’s differences of culture all around the world, and being able to actually adapt to the specific interests of your local markets must be, and clearly is, really, really important for Skyscanner.
Douglas Cook:
Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s a big part of how we operate. It’s in company goals, it’s in team goals as to how we win in each market individually as opposed to just thinking how do we win in aggregate, which could mean one market smashes it out the park and another market is propped up by that market that is smashing it out the park, if you like.
Matt Byrom:
So, what are the marketing strategies that you’re going to be focusing on in 2018? What’s on your radar, what’s big, what’s going to be important for Skyscanner moving into the rest of this year and then 2019?
Douglas Cook:
I guess the main thing is how we … And I keep going back to this point. It’s not necessarily about having a strategy that I can say that Skyscanner overall is going to follow, but it’s how we continue to make sure we learn as much as we can about travelers in our market and continue to make sure that the entire traveler experience, right from the point of acquisition right to the point of purchase, through the full funnel, is adapted to meet the needs of travelers, whether they’re in France or Singapore or Brazil, and that our local teams, which is very much, as I said at the start, where my remit is, are the voice of the traveler in those markets and doing everything they can to make sure that Skyscanner fulfills traveler needs.
There’ll be a combination of stuff we’ve done before. We’ve talked a lot about SEO, and that is still a big area for us, but we’ll also keep trying new stuff, new ideas, new creative ideas, new channels as well. A lot of those over the second half of the year, I won’t even know what they are yet, as is the way quite often when you’re as agile as we are. We may not know one month to the next exactly what’s coming, but we’ll always been looking for new ways to help solve travelers’ problems and help bring more users into Skyscanner.
Matt Byrom:
That makes total sense as well. It rounds up what we’ve been talking about nicely. I’m going to bring this to our last five questions, which is five quickfire questions that I ask every guest that comes on this podcast. So, first up, what’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Douglas Cook:
So, I struggled a bit with this one. Obviously, I did know you were going to ask me this one, but I still struggled on it. I guess it depends what you want advice on. I can say this from the angle of what a lot of people have come to me to ask about is they’ve seen a lot of stuff on how Skyscanner’s done lean and agile and growth, and how do I do this for my business. I think regardless of whether you’re a tech business or a traditional business and you want to make a change to be more agile, to be more lean, to introduce principles of growth, whatever it is you want to do, the first part has to be to get the culture and the people piece right.
If you only do one piece, sort that bit, and if you’re doing it all, then start with that bit. So, get the structure right, make sure the people are supported in whatever change it is you’re going to make would be the first thing I would recommend to anybody coming and asking, “How do I apply some of these principles in our business?”
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, that makes sense, ’cause then everyone’s pushing in the same direction. Everyone’s bought in, everyone’s got that culture of lean and agile and growth really, so I can totally see how that’s important to do at the start of the process.
Douglas Cook:
Absolutely, yep.
Matt Byrom:
So, number two, can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Douglas Cook:
Yeah. I’ll give you a couple. The first one actually I’ll give you is based on everything I just said, which is ‘Growth Mindset’ by [Ann Dweck 00:38:01], ’cause I think a lot of what people need to go through when you’re making changes is that they are willing to learn new things, and Growth Mindset is a great book in that regard.
The second one that really helped me when we at Skyscanner went through the change was ‘Growth Hacker Marketing’ by Ryan Holiday. Now, some people look down their nose a little bit at this one I’ve found, especially when you say it as conferences. It isn’t the most complex and it isn’t the most revolutionary when you look at it now, but where it really helped me is Ryan was coming from a place that was very similar to where I was in terms of consumer goods. Going through his journey as to what he knew and where he’d been and then how growth differed from that was, it was super helpful to me in terms of my mindset shift and my transition. So, I really like it in terms of a … like as a first book. If you’ve not done growth, especially if you’ve come from a more traditional marketing org, then it’s a great place to start to understand what growth is all about and how that differs to marketing.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. I’ve read Ryan Holiday’s book. It’s a short book, it’s an easy read, and it’s, like you say, it really gives you the introduction to thinking about growth hacking, really, in that way. I agree. I think it’s a great book. I think it’s a straightforward book that gives you a good guide in terms of … Almost an inspirational book in terms of where you could actually focus your time and a direction to move in. So, a great choice from my point of view.
Douglas Cook:
Absolutely.
Matt Byrom:
So, number three is what software tool could you not live without?
Douglas Cook:
Well, obviously I’ve got to say Skyscanner here. I can’t say anything else. I’m not being sycophantic, or not being completely sycophantic about this. I guess the other thing as well, let’s face it, we could do our jobs with pencil, paper and a telephone, right? So, if all I had was one piece of software, then I need to experience what our travelers are experiencing. I can’t market something that I don’t know how that is, so I need to be able to experience Skyscanner and go through the pain points there. Then everything else, if I had to, I could do it without any tool. I could just do it with a … It would be longer, but I could do it with a piece of paper and a telephone.
Matt Byrom:
Well, is there a software tool that you use on a daily basis that is always open on your computer?
Douglas Cook:
Slack is probably the one that is absolutely always open at any one time. There’s loads of stuff which is open most of the time, but Slack is the one that is definitely open all the time.
Matt Byrom:
Cool. What’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?
Douglas Cook:
This was an interesting one as I was thinking about this, and I don’t know. It got me thinking a little bit deeper about it. A lot of where I tended to go to was some of the, I don’t know whether to call them ‘golden oldies’, that makes me feel old as well. Some of the big … Back in the day of Guinness, things like Guinness and Prancing … Was it Prancing Horses or whatever that one was called. It was more than an advert. It dictated music choice and Leftfield … It was kind of a big thing, I think, in Leftfield, the band, becoming popular at that point in time. But, it was a cultural piece, not just an advert. Probably as much a factor as the fragmentation of media landscapes and that sort of thing that adverts often tend not to get that level of impact these days, but, to me, stuff like that still feels really inspiring, stuff that has an impact more than just selling more Guinness. I believe it did sell more Guinness, but it has an impact on culture as well.
I think there is some stuff still does that. The John Lewis ads. It’s probably a bit of a cliché to say, John Lewis ads, which for those of you in the States, that will mean nothing, but Christmas ads, that is probably the one, it’s still something that people look forward to, it’s still something people talk about. While I personally maybe don’t get [inaudible 00:41:52] as that as I did by the likes of Guinness back in the day, it’s still something that doesn’t just drive sales, but it makes a bigger cultural impact than just a marketing piece.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. I mean, true ads are more than just ads really, aren’t they? They’re actually, as you say, they influence music and culture and make you feel good well. So, I agree. I actually went to the Guinness factory in Dublin not do long ago and they’ve got a whole section devoted to the advertising that they’ve done over time, and there was some fantastic pieces that they’ve done.
Douglas Cook:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I agree.
Matt Byrom:
Finally, which other podcast do you listen to?
Douglas Cook:
Sorry, you’ve got two weeks in a row where people have said, “I don’t listen to podcasts.” I don’t listen to podcasts. I kind of find … It’s just the time. I consume most of my stuff on blogs on my phone, in stolen moments between screaming kids or sitting in meetings, so to get the time to sit and listen to podcasts I find quite hard. So, I will consume five minutes worth of information on a phone while I’m putting my son to bed or when I’m sitting for somebody who’s late for a meeting. That’s how I consume all that information, whereas finding that time to sit down and listen is quite hard.
So, yeah, sorry. Obviously I will listen to this one, then I’ll listen to future ones, but, yeah, I’m an avid blog reader and I use Twitter a lot to just sort of … It’s almost like a rabbit warren of you click on one thing and another thing and another thing and you find new people and find new stuff to read. So, that’s how I consume a lot of my information on growth and marketing.
Matt Byrom:
Cool, yeah. I mean, everyone consumes media differently as well. I think that’s the beauty that we’ve got these days with the digital landscape, is being able to have audio for people that love audio and lots of different blogs and ways of consuming that for the people that love to do that as well.
Douglas Cook:
Absolutely.
Matt Byrom:
It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today, Douglas. Thank you very much for your time. It’s been really nice to hear about Skyscanner, your experience and what you’re doing with lean and agile marketing. I know there’s a lot of takeaways for the listeners.
If anybody’s got any questions, please feel free to get in contact with us through any of the channels: LinkedIn, YouTube or directly by email. If anybody wants to see the show notes, we’ve got links to all the books, everything that we’ve mentioned in here, at mattbyrom.com.
So, thanks again, Douglas. Really appreciate your time.
Douglas Cook:
Thanks very much, Matt. It’s been great to speak to you.