Peek Inside MSC Cruises Multi-Million Dollar Growth Strategy

The pandemic has caused an interesting rift between travel companies — you’re either on track to win or lose the post-pandemic recovery race.

So what’s the difference between the winners and losers? What marketing strategies are the winners using to book more travellers than ever and position themselves to stay on top when the post-pandemic travel fever is over?

In this article, I’m going to do a deep dive into the digital marketing strategies that MSC Cruises is using.

Why them?

They’re the third-largest cruise brand and currently the fastest growing cruise company.

And even if you’re not in the cruise sector, there’s a lot to be learned from their post-pandemic recovery strategy that applies to any travel company.

A NOTE ON THE INFORMATION BELOW

The data below is real and collected with the ad spy tools we use to make better decisions and find opportunities for our clients.

About MSC Cruises

MSC Cruises was originally started as a shipping container operator. In 1988, they purchased their first cruise ship and after a €5.5 billion investment in 2003, have been growing rapidly ever since.

They now own one of the most modern and dynamic cruise fleets in the world with 18 vessels, with plans to expand that to 23 by 2025.

Summary Of Their Strategy

While MSC Cruises uses a variety of different online strategies to get new customers, which I’ll list below, it appears the bulk of their digital advertising spend is on paid search ads and display ads using programmatic buying (more details on this below).

Traffic Profile For MSC Cruises

Below you can see the online traffic profile for Carnival (blue), Royal Caribbean(orange), Norwegian(green) and MSC Cruises USA (yellow):

We’re going to focus on the difference in where the traffic is coming from based on the data above. Here are the 4 things you should take note of:

1. MSC Cruises proportion of direct traffic (31.2%) is a lot lower than all 3 of these sites (average of 41.8%).
2. MSC Cruises proportion of referral traffic is a lot higher (7.34%) than their competitors (average of 3.04%).
3. Their proportion of paid search is about average (11.85%), but way below ncl.com — Norwegian (19.5%).
4. MSC Cruises uses display ads to drive a much larger proportion of their traffic (4.52%) than their competitors (average of 1.18%).

Below you can find more details on each of these traffic sources.

Direct Traffic

MSC Cruises proportion of direct traffic is a lot lower than all 3 of their competitors. This could mean 2 things:

1. That the other brands are more well known and their sites drive more direct traffic because users are typing the urls to go directly to the company website. This Google trends report confirms this is mostly true:

MSC (the green line) does have the lowest brand related searches over the past 5 years, but over the past 6–7 months, it has overtaken ncl.com. This leads to the second point, which is:

2. MSC Cruises is more aggressive than the other three companies on some of the other channels, which is why the proportion of brand traffic that MSC gets is lower than the others. You can see that their proportion of referral and display ad traffic is much higher than their competition. This is likely where they are beating their competitors.

Over time, they should continue to build their direct traffic, as their brand becomes more well known to consumers.

Paid Search Traffic Profile

Paid search is driving a similar proportion of the traffic as royalcarribean.com but they are far behind ncl.com. This means that they are likely having some success here, but there is the opportunity to improve.

Paid search traffic is one of the best sources of traffic for travel companies because it is high intent traffic. Improving your paid search campaigns can result in quick and significant results.

Their search ads send traffic to simple landing pages that show cruises directly related to the search term. Each cruise page features photos, the list of ports on that cruise, and booking info.

For example, here is their Caribbean and Antilles landing page: https://www.msccruises.ca/plan-a-cruise/destinations/caribbean-antilles

The main offer on their landing pages is the immediate purchase of the trip. They don’t have an easy way for someone to sign up for their mailing list on these pages, other than in the bottom footer. This is a huge missed opportunity and is likely why their performance is worse than ncl.com.

When you click on an ad from ncl.com, you can see that one of their primary objectives is to get someone to sign up for an account:

Turning that offer box into a form asking visitors to sign up for special offers would perform better, however, the promise of ‘Special Offers’ does likely still get plenty of visitors to sign up and those are likely very valuable leads for ncl.com.

Also note that NCL features a limited time discount at the top. The urgency of this would help push users to actually book a trip. If MSC cruises implemented the email address collection and offered a limited time offer, they would likely see better results on their search campaigns.

Keywords

Their paid search strategy mainly targets branded based searches (i.e. msc cruise) and general cruise keywords (i.e. ‘cruise deals’, ‘cruise lines’, or ‘cheap cruises’). See the list below for their top paid keywords:

Based on a Google Ads keyword reporting tool, MSC Cruises is bidding on less cruise-related keywords than their competitors.

The reason they likely haven’t expanded their keyword targeting and Google Ads budget is either:

1. They don’t have proper tracking set up and don’t want to take on the risk of bidding on more keywords without being certain of positive ROI. Setting up proper tracking is essential for excellent reulst with your Google Ads.

When tracking is configured properly, the ads work better (more leads for less money). Google’s machine learning is one of the most sophisticated ad technologies in the world so when you give it the right data, it can make the best decisions.

2. Their ads have a low conversion rate. If this is the case, they should first be focusing on improving their ad copy and landing pages to increase the conversion rate, which would result in helping them to increase the amount of bookings and leads for a similar price.

Display Advertising

The next thing that stands out is their display network ads. The proportion of this traffic is a much larger for MSC cruises than their competitors. This means that they are likely winning the display ads game.

Here are the ad networks where they are running their display ads:

The majority of their display traffic comes from the Google Display Network (GDN), with Yahoo providing about 25% and Skimlinks about 15%.

The most interesting piece of information to note here is Skimlinks. Skimlinks is an affiliate tracking program that allows affiliates to get paid for sales when they link to your site. This is a relatively large amount of traffic that is coming from this affiliate program. I would suggest trying this to other large travel companies that are looking for more sales.

Keep reading below for a more in-depth analysis of their approach to GDN ads.

Top Performing Display Ads

Below are some of their top-performing display ads:

Since they are getting a higher proportion of their traffic from Display campaigns than their competitors, one would assume they are having success here.

I think it is valuable to pay attention to their strategy here of featuring sales that they are offering. They drive clicks through special offers like the labor day sale, balcony upgrades, or onboard credits. These are enticing offers that get users to click on their ads.

When you go to the landing pages for those ads, you would immediately see the offer restated. This is one keep component to running successful ads on Google’s display network.

Below is an example of their landing page, from an ad where they are promising a $200 onboard credit.

You can see that the top of the page promises that offer is promised on the ad. This is a strong offer and is something that they seem to run most of the year.

One other interesting note is that they have a pop-up on this page within a few seconds of reaching the page (on desktop, there is no pop up on mobile):

Adding a pop up with an opt in form is something that is worth testing, as you will usually not see a drop in the conversion rate of booking trips, but you will increase the number of leads from the campaign. Long term, this can make a large improvement in the results that you’re getting in the campaign.

Test This In Your GDN Campaigns

Offering a discount or special offer in your display ads, restating the offer on the landing page, and then displaying a clear opt-in box for your newsletter is usually a winning combo for GDN. This is definitely worth testing, if you’re not doing this already.

Having correct tracking set up is a very important part of running effective display campaigns because if you are getting newsletter or other sign-up leads that don’t buy right away, you need to eventually be able to track their actions.

You could have campaigns that initially seem like they’re not working but actually are bringing in leads that buy at a later date.

OPPORTUNITY ALERTLanding Page Experience

Although, the main offer at the top of the page matches the ads, there isn’t any reenforcement about the sale further down the page. Also, there is a limited time offer tag at the top, but there isn’t actually any time for the deadline. Usually having a specific date is going to drive a lot more sales than if you just have a general statement of a ‘limited time’. This is something that ncl does really well:

You could always offer a similar sale with a different name once that time has passed or renew the timer.

Lead Generation

There’s an opportunity for MSC Cruises to increase the amount of leads that they are receiving from this overlay. “BE THE FIRST” is an unclear headline that can be improved. They should test new headlines with a clear offer telling the user what they will get when they put in their email address. For example, “Sign Up Below To Receive Our Best Deals” or better yet “Sign up Below to Get A $100 Onboard Credit”.

Testing just the headline on forms like this can significantly increase conversion rate up. I’ve had client’s conversion rate improve by to 82% (just by improving the headline!).

Referral Traffic

Next you can see where their referral traffic is coming from. Here are the top referring sites:

When looking at this, we can see that the large majority of the referral traffic going to msccruisesusa.com is coming from their own site: msccruises.com. If we removed this traffic, then the we would likely see a similar amount of referral traffic to their competitors.

Additional Traffic Growth Strategies

Aside from these traffic sources, MSC Cruises also advertises on cruise specific review sites.

Their top referring websites, aside from their own MSC sites, are https://shermanstravel.com/ and https://www.cruisecritic.com/. They also run ads on https://www.dealnews.com/ and https://www.familyvacationcritic.com/.

It’s unclear if MSC is running these ads or if a partner/travel agency is running them on their behalf but the strategy seems to be working to drive traffic to their website.

MSC Cruises also uses a couple other strategies to sell tours:

1. Voyagers Club Membership — MSC Cruises offers discounts and a loyalty points program that incentivizes passengers to book in advance. The points program also encourages travellers to book exclusively with them — https://www.msccruises.ca/cruise-deals/voyagers-exclusives
2. Partnership with inCruises® — inCruises® is a membership travel club that requires members to pay a monthly fee in order to get access to group cruise deals — https://www.incruises.com/.
3. Video Ads — part of MSC Cruises social traffic (in the traffic profile above) comes from Youtube Ads.
4. Youtube ads are a great sales tool for travel companies because they allow you to share breathtaking visuals of trip highlights.
5. Corporate Partnerships — In 2022, MSC Cruises partnered with Formula 1 to become the Official Cruise Partner of Formula 1. This exposes MSC Cruises to a new audience that likely has many of the characteristics they look for in new customers. This partnership also allows them to “borrow” the credibility of Formula 1 so it becomes easier to sell to these new customers.
6. Upsells — like most cruise line companies, MSC Cruises generates a lot of their revenue from upgrades. While this is common in the cruise space, many other travel companies could benefit from creative, well-aligned upgrade offers.
7. LinkedIn — MSC Cruises also has a large audience on LinkedIn that they’ve grown with regular, engaging video and content posts. As of mid-2022, they have over 295K followers — https://www.linkedin.com/company/msc-cruises/. LinkedIn is their top social network referring site, which is likely because they’ve found their customer base spends more time there than any other social media platform.

Conclusion

If you are in the cruise industry, keep an eye on MSC Cruises. They’ve hit the ground running after the pandemic and they’re not slowing down anytime soon.

And while they are in the cruise sector, there is a lot of actionable info that can be applied to any travel company.

Don’t convince yourself that your travel business is different so none of this applies. Trust me, I work with travel businesses across all sectors — ultimately none are that different in the strategies that work.

Also, take notice as to what is not here. What strategies and tactics are not showing up here that some experts say you MUST be doing?

Remember, test everything, track your results, and then double-down on what works. Ignore everything else. It is just a distraction.

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Originally published at https://strongmoose.com.