Yatra.com partners with OMLogic for social media marketing initiatives

The online travel site aims to target a larger section of the netizens through strategic social media activities

Online travel company Yatra.com has partnered with OMLogic, an online and social media marketing company, to roll out strategic social media activities in order to reach out to a larger audience.

With this new initiative, Yatra.com aims to engage its target group through social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and YouTube. It aims to optimally use the social media platform to listen to, engage, encourage and support customers through new innovative initiatives.

Yatra.com partners with OMLogic for social media marketing initiatives

This is not the first time that Yatra.com will engage audiences online. Over the years, the travel website has carried out social media activities such as launching a Facebook page and integrating Facebook Connect with its Holidays section. It also launched 'Twitter-only' discount codes, a blog that's been running for more than two years, a YouTube video channel and a weekly specialist question on Yahoo! Answers. Yatra also went live with its own forum a few months ago.

Bharat Malik, head, online marketing, Yatra.com, tells afaqs!, "While we have undertaken some social media activities, it has all been in-house. Even the limited activities we have tried have shown results. Thus, we feel the need to scale up our activities and follow a more integrated strategy. We'd like to do this with specialist inputs."

Social media provides a great opportunity to engage in a dialogue and two-way communication with a brand's customers. The number of people interacting with social media in one form or another has grown immensely, be it Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Scribd, Slideshare or blogs. These channels allow customers to share their opinions and feedbacks about a brand's products and services in real time.

Regarding research related to traffic coming in from these sites, Malik says, "Internally, our team has carried out the research to establish the targets that we hope to achieve. Like all online marketing activities, we will use our analytic tools to measure the impact."

Discussing the alliance, Kapil Gupta, chief executive officer, OMLogic, says, "Yatra's emphasis on social media underlines its customer focus and service oriented vision. It wants to truly ensure that its customers are heard and have the best service experience."

Malik of Yatra.com adds, "Through our partnership, we aim to listen to what customers are saying about Yatra.com - not just to us but also to each other. This will enable us to improvise our services as per customers' feedback. We look forward to a great response from our customers for this initiative."

Launched in August 2006, Yatra is one of the top providers of direct travel services in India. Within a short span of time, it has shown an impressive growth by posting average revenue of $30 million a month, with a volume of 10,000 tickets and 350 rooms a day. The company achieved a gross turnover of $250 million for FY 2010.

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