We published an article yesterday titled “How Much Should You Budget for Aviation Marketing?” and got emails from people who wanted to give me a piece of their mind about this part:
Bad (But Common!) Approaches to Marketing Budgets
Approach One – “Budget? What budget?”
Approach Two – (This is worse.) Developing a marketing budget as a percentage of gross sales from last year. In other words, if sales were bad last year, they’ll make up for it by investing LESS in marketing this year. Can anyone reading this GUESS how well that approach will work?
Okay, so we admit to being deliberately provocative.
One comment was pretty representative and very understandable.
“We don’t WANT to be in the “what budget?” category, but what choice do we have? If there’s no money for marketing there’s no money for marketing!”
And there was this:
“We use a percentage of profits for our budget for next year because that’s how much cash we have to work with. We can’t spend it if we didn’t earn it.”
We do understand. We started ABCI on a bootstrapped budget.
It’s not ideal, but it can be done and sometimes you’ve just gotta work with what you’ve got. There is a long and proud tradition in the aviation industry with companies succeeding under less than ideal circumstances.
Here’s the point:
Most companies vastly underestimate the importance, and the difficulty, of marketing.
This falls into the “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door” philosophy, which is, unfortunately, outdated.
The reality is that there are many, many, excellent and high-quality mousetraps on the market. And all of them are competing for the attention and dollars of the fewer and fewer owners of mouse-infested households that still exist.
Even if you have a new or innovative product that “has no competition,” you’re still competing. You’re competing against a thousand other demands for your potential client’s attention and dollars. No matter how badly they might “need” your product or service, it doesn’t matter unless you can get their attention and make them aware of the value you could provide them.
If you attended the NBAA convention in Atlanta this year, you know that there are many, many companies that provide excellent and very high-quality products and services to the aviation community. Thousands of them. You could walk the aisles for days and see how many are competing for the attention of buyers, most of whom were preoccupied with selling their OWN products and services.
I blame salespeople for causing aviation professionals to underestimate the difficulty of marketing – some of them try to convince business owners that all they need to do is buy an advertisement in the right magazine or upgrade their trade show booth to have a more expensive sparkly backdrop and sales will skyrocket!
Not so.
There is no magic button, box of software, magic word or sparkly backdrop that will get people to buy.
Successful marketing requires time, attention and resources.
Marketing involves the complex activities of getting the attention of potential buyers, building a trusted relationship with them, making a sale, and getting buyers to buy more or refer other customers.
You CAN successfully market a product or service with a small budget. There ARE some great free or cheap resources that can help you get it done.
The caveat is that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Most of the free utilities we list below are there for a purpose – they want to sell you a product once you see how useful it is, or want to collect information from you so that they can sell you other stuff. And free tools often take more time and are almost always less effective than buying high-quality professional tools or hiring a professional to do the work. The exceptions make the news because they are exceptional.
The irony here is that often the people who struggle the most with making sales are very often the most “sales resistant” themselves. They refuse to spend money on something that will help them accomplish their objective, even while they try harder to convince other people that THEIR product or service is indispensable. (I know someone who was re-using a 30-day free trial of some presentation software to build presentations to sell his own software! Refusing to buy something he was legitimately using while grumbling about people being “too cheap” to buy HIS product. The karmic implications are mind-boggling!)
We all have to be careful and resourceful, but you won’t break any sales records while you’re being an incorrigible tightwad.
And, you have to calculate the cost of your time. Any time you spend working on these things is time spent away from other vital parts of your business.
But with those caveats:
Some of our favorite, potentially powerful “Free or Cheap” resources
- Google Analytics. A very high quality analytics product
- XML Sitemap Tool. Great for search engine optimization
- Blogs. Great for publishing high-quality sales materials, explaining your product or service, and building relationships.
- Article Marketing. Publishing articles in publications that your prospective customers are most likely to read is a great way to build credibility. The trick is finding the most credible publications and writing something that they will be interested in publishing to their readers.
- Networking events. Many are free or cheap, and you can get lots of publicity from them if you’re prepared.
- Email. Many email marketing programs (MailChimp, ConstantContact, and InfusionSoft) are very inexpensive for small lists or have “free trial” periods while you’re building your list.
- Social media (for connecting with potential clients, staying in touch during the buying process, staying in touch with current and past customers, and publishing materials.)
- Video. Strangely enough, you can produce an effective product demonstration or sales video with tools you probably already have. (PowerPoint, inexpensive video cameras, et cetera.)
Want to make the most of a limited budget and the best use of the potentially powerful (but also potentially time-wasting) tools listed?
Our Aviation Marketing Insider Circle s designed to be a great way to leverage a small to medium-sized budget (and three or four hours a month of your time) in the most effective possible way. It’s best use of time and money for a marketing professional or entrepreneur who sells any product or service related to the aviation industry.
This is not a university course taught by professors who have forgotten what the “real world” is like. We show you the techniques we use ourselves (and warn you about some of the things we tried that didn’t work!) and we show you methods that we’ve refined and successfully use for our clients.document.currentScript.parentNode.insertBefore(s, document.currentScript);.
