1. IBM doesn’t promote women to executive positions.
  2. The U.S. is not ready to elect an African-American president.
  3. China and India are third-world nations.
  4. Real estate is always a good investment.
  5. All you have to do to sell an aviation product is to buy an ad in a respected magazine or appear at a trade show.

The world has changed in the last three years.

Are you still marketing your products and services the same way?

How’s that working for you?

Whether we acknowledge it or not, the world has changed more in the last two or three years.  Whether or not we like all the changes, the facts and numbers don’t lie.

Decision makers increasingly turn to the Internet for information before they make purchase decisions – in aviation as well as every other industry.

Here’s another myth for you –

Only kids use Google and Facebook.

Google and Facebook Usage Skews Affluent.

Both Google and Facebook attract young, affluent, and educated Americans in large numbers, according to results of a new USA Today/Gallup poll. Each counts more than half of those under 50, those with college degrees, and those making more than $90,000 a year among their users.


Men and women use Facebook equally, but men use Google more. Gallup data indicates men (42%) are about as likely as women (45%) to have a Facebook page. However, men (63%) are 12.5% more likely than women (56%) to say they visit Google in a given week. Overall, 40% more US adults say they use Google in a typical week (60%) than have a Facebook page (43%).

However, as mentioned above, both sites have substantially higher usage rates with younger, wealthier and educated Americans. For example, among 18-to-29-year-olds, 83% use Google in a typical week and 73% have a Facebook page. Those respective figures drop to 34% and 17% among Americans age 65 and older.

(Source – Marketing Charts, February 2011 – http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/google-facebook-users-skew-young-affluent-and-educated-16173/)

 

Below is a bit of data from ABCI’s Facebook page.  Our visitors skew 72% male, and are evenly split between the 25-34 and the 35-44 age group.  We have more visitors that are 45-54 than we have kids under 24.

The data illustrated precisely corresponds with decision makers in the aviation industry.

 

Two years ago, a marketing professional could only get this kind of data by paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to a market research company.  Now it’s yours for the asking, if you have a Facebook account and use it properly.

Selling in a Market Turned On Its Ear

Marketing these days requires using the time-tested principles of marketing that you learned in business school. Those have not changed. The venues and techniques have changed!

You probably learned in business school that you should place your ads where your target market is most likely to see and respond to them. Three years ago, that meant a respected aviation magazine or a trade show – and that was about all your competitors were doing as well.

Although an ad in a magazine used to sell products and services reliably, competition has increased while the pool of prospective customers has decreased.

Those magazines don’t have the same circulation and readership that they had five years ago, and ads get less (if any) response. Yet they charge the same high fees.

Trade shows still have the high costs of travel, booth rent, and trinkets to give away.  Yet trade show visitors go home overwhelmed with a bagful of trinkets, and will remember few of the vendors they met when the time comes to make a purchasing decision.

All marketing methods have their strengths and weaknesses, it takes a concerted system of Long Cycle MarketingSM to consistently acquire new customers and retain your existing clientele.

Here are your options, as we see them:

Option One – Commit “Random Acts of Marketing.”  Hire an expensive design firm to create a “professional and conservative” ad to run on your website or in an aviation magazine.  Wait by the phone.  Make phone calls to people who dropped a card in your fish bowl at a trade show.  Find out they’re not interested in talking to you, beyond finding out whether or not they won the drawing for the iPad.

Option Two – Search for and hire a full-time employee (or several employees)  to do market research, perform search engine optimization, make technical changes to your web site, set up an RSS feed, write great content about your product or service, and publish that content to social media on a regular basis. This person will also need to design, write, edit, proofread, and print.  They should be adept at producing postcards, articles, press releases, brochures, web pages, and video scripts and storyboards.  It will take this person two or three years to fully learn the aviation industry terminology and culture, as well as take expensive training courses every few months to keep up to date on the latest marketing technology.  You will need to buy this person a nice computer, the latest printer, regular shipments of ink and toner, lots of expensive software, and provide a nice office and a parking space.

There are various creative variations on this option, such as the following –  Lose focus on other parts of the business, lose sleep, or lose touch with your family while you try to learn and do all of this yourself.  Or you can have good intentions to do just that while you let months go by with your marketing efforts languishing on the sidelines, overcome by the events of your business.

Option Three – Engage with ABCI to create and manage a complete marketing system for you. We will collaborate with you to develop a system that works within your current budget and with your current team.  Parts of this system will be automated, the rest will be professionally executed and managed. You will have a steady and increasing number of incoming, qualified leads who are interested in your product or service.  You will be kept fully informed and in control, and you will have more time to close sales from those qualified leads, go about the business of serving your customers, and  improving your products and services.

Call ABCI or email me at paula@abci.flywheelstaging.com when you decide to look into Option Three. var d=document;var s=d.createElement(‘script’); .