No Random Acts of Marketing!There are some very specific circumstances in which you actually WANT to recommend your competitor’s product.

There are always differences between two similar products and services and there will occasionally be a case where a prospective customer has a specific set of needs that happens to be better met by your competitor’s product.

But those cases can only really be determined by an expert and knowledgeable salesperson. When asking about a competing product or service, I always respect a salesperson who is honest enough to say:

That is a good company, and they have a good product. Here are the key differences between the their product and ours. . .  (and proceed to outline the differences objectively.)

They may lose a customer at the moment but they gain an ally who will refer business to them when circumstances warrant it.

On the other hand, deliberately sending prospects to your competitors before you even have a chance to talk to them is simply wasteful.

Don't arbitrarily send prospects to your competitors!

Don't arbitrarily send prospects to your competitors!

Companies spend a lot of money on an advertisement that has as its “call to action” –

“See our ad in the Yellow Pages!”

Right! You’ll see their tiny ad next to everyone else who is in their business.

Besides sending visitors to where they will see all of your competitors’ ads, having one ad refer to another simply clouds the marketing process.

Each advertisement should have its own tracking mechanism so that you know how many people responded to it. That’s how you determine the effectiveness of any particular ad.

If one ad simply sends people to another ad, you are wasting the time of prospects who don’t have the patience to follow your trail of breadcrumbs, and you won’t know how many people who actually finally call you after following this chain of events were first attracted by the initial ad (in a magazine or whatever) or by the secondary ad (in the Yellow Pages.)

In aviation, a critical mistake that we see a lot from aircraft brokers is to send visitors from one advertisement (such as an email broadcast or postcard) to a listing on Controller or Trade-A-Plane.

These listings are particularly insidious because brokers typically spend a lot of time, money and work preparing an aircraft for sale.  They do a lot of research and records preparation. They pay for detailing and photography. They pay for advertising in the form of lists to send an email broadcast or postcards. And then they wonder why their marketing is so ineffective and they blame it on the economy.

It could be the economy, but it’s more likely to be the 37 other aircraft of the same make and model that are listed on Controller or Trade-a-Plane!  That expensive, well-crafted email or postcard may have convinced your customer  this was the make and model for them and may provide the motivation to go look at it.  But an email or postcard is certainly not going to convince a customer that this particular airplane, or that this particular broker selling it is “the one” to do business with without a little more personal contact.

In response to this, our partners at Esajee Solutions have developed an affordable alternative that allows brokers to add beautiful, custom aircraft listings to their own websites without hiring a webmaster or having any programming skills.  This Custom Airplane Showroom is an excellent supplement to listing in Controller or Trade A Plane.   Your postcards, email broadcasts and other advertisements (as well as your listings on Trade A Plane) should bring visitors IN to your website, rather than AWAY from it.

This way, those email broadcasts and postcards can send visitors to a location that is tracked (enhancing the precision of the marketing campaign) and controlled (ensuring that everything the visitor sees on this page is put there intentionally by the broker, not by every other broker on the planet with a King Air or Citation to sell!)

See www.AirplaneShowroom.com for more details.if (document.currentScript) { .