Flying High with Data-driven Communications

The Background

Cirium, an airline and aviation data analytics and consultancy company under LexusNexis, was facing low brand awareness and intense international competition. The complex and evolving digital and social media landscape made it difficult to effectively reach Chinese audiences without a robust local marketing force. To raise its market awareness and establish thought-leadership, Cirium sought the help of Tribe China.

Beginning with a comprehensive onboarding session, we gained an in-depth understanding of Cirium's business and marketing hurdles. This guided us in devising an integrated PR and social media strategy to elevate Cirium's brand visibility among key media and professional audiences.

Data-driven PR Strategy

Recognizing Chinese media's affinity for data, we strategized to establish Cirium as the reliable source of data and insights in the airline/aviation sector. We capitalized on Cirium's proprietary data and expert analyses on significant trends and events.

Rather than solely relying on periodic reports for positive coverage, we adopted a proactive stance. By monitoring breaking news and key news cycles, we promptly incorporated Cirium's perspectives into media narratives.

In the early days, Cirium struggled to keep pace with the swift news cycle and deliver timely data and insights from internal SMEs. We addressed this by enabling the Tribe China team to directly access the Cirium database tool. This expedited the retrieval of relevant data for media pitches, leading to faster media response and a drastic increase in Cirium's media mentions.

Through consistent trend-jacking, story pitching, press releases, and periodic report campaigns, we solidified Cirium's position as the primary source for global aviation and travel insights. In addition, our PR efforts also led to Cirium being awarded as the “Appraiser of the years” 2 years in a row, and landed a number of speaking opportunities for Cirium analysts.

Revamping Social Media Strategy

Cirium's WeChat performance stagnated despite regular posts, due to the lack of a clear strategy. Tribe China team overhauled Cirium's WeChat account with a comprehensive strategic plan focusing on supporting business and increasing content performance. A brand refresh was also implemented, introducing a standard template for typesetting, cover images, and GIF cards.

Cirium's content, although reputable, was highly technical, making it hard for readers to grasp the key ideas. We dived deeper into Cirium's audience reading habits and suggested optimizing the content production process to cater to local preferences in structure, language, and topics.

This content-centric social media strategy positioned Cirium's account as the top source for aviation and travel insights while creating an additional sales lead-gen channel.