AMHF 009 – Trade Shows and Events

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Paula Williams: Welcome to aviation marketing Hangar Flying, Episode Nine, Seasonal Variations and Trade Shows. I’m Paula Williams.

John Williams: I’m John Williams.

Paula Williams: And we are ABCI, and ABCI’s mission is?

John Williams: To help all you ladies and gentlemen out there sell more products and services quickly.

Paula Williams: In the aviation industry, exactly.

So, we belong to a whole a bunch of different organizations, and we go to a lot of different trade shows and mastermind groups and other kinds of things, and we try to distill what we’ve learned so that we can make things easier for you. We know how hard it is to be working in what may seem like a vacuum, especially if marketing or sales isn’t your only job.

You’re trying to run a business, you’re trying to create products, you’re trying to serve customers, and all of those things. So, you can leave some of that marketing research and everything else to us because we take care of that for you. So, in this episode, we’re continuing our series on marketing calendars, and in a lot of bigger organizations and in a lot of the rest of the world.

In the finance industry, education, other industries, and things like that, people use marketing calendars. We’ve not seen that as much in the aviation industry, would you agree?

John Williams: Absolutely, nobody has a clue.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] There’s a lot of actually really sophisticated aviation companies that are not using marketing calendars, and we’re kind of surprised because this can save you a lot of time, hassle, and money, and everything else.

So, some of the things that we talked about in the last episode, which was Episode Eight. Talking about how a marketing calendar can help you work together with other people and help you create kind of an educational program for what we call long-cycle marketing. Since people in the aviation industry very seldom make impulse purchases, right?

John Williams: Exactly, and you’ll see a lot of other specific calendars marketed on the Internet, generic trade show calendars and so forth, but this is not what we’re talking about.

Paula Williams: Exactly, so when you do a marketing calendar correctly, it has a lot of different things including creating urgencies in your marketing seasonal campaigns and offers.

That’s what we’re going to be talking about today as well as planning trade shows and events, and then next week we’re going to talk about planning expenses and taking advantage of holidays. So, there’s a lot that can go into your marketing calendar, and this is, again, part of that series.

All right, so first let’s talk about seasonal fluctuations. When you think about marketing, and when you read a marketing textbook, a lot of times they assume that you going to sell x widgets a month, and you’re going to make extra x dollars a month, and that’s not the way it works in the real world, is it, John?

John Williams: Not even close. The cash flow, well, sales first and obviously the cash flow follows that, but it follows it, typically, out of phase, so you’re going to sell stuff this month and maybe get the cash next month. And those things both go up and down, based on all kinds of things.

Paula Williams: Right, and backwards and sideways. If you’ve been in business for a while, you probably have a pretty good idea of what this pattern looks like. And it may look like one big bump because, if you sell a general aviation product that sells a lot in the summer, and then the rest of the year it flattens out or even crashes during the winter.

If you know that, you can plan for that, and it’s not an emergency because it happens every year, and things work the way they’re supposed to, and you were prepared and everything worked out. There are also some things you can do to extend your season and other things that we’re going to be talking about in just a second.

All right, so most companies have some kind of a seasonal variation, we talked about general aviation maybe selling more products in the summer. There are some maintenance products and other things that sell more in winter. Aviation, being subjected to the weather, probably as much or more than a lot of other industries has this seasonal variation going on, so an example is charter companies.

People end up flying a lot for the holidays, especially if you are in a segment of the charter industry that caters to tourism and things like that. Then you already know you’ve got your ski season, you’ve got your hunting season, you’ve got your vacation season, you’ve got your golf season.

There’s a lot of private jets that show up at specific events, like, what was the recent fight they had in Las Vegas? Where they said that they had all of those airplanes just kind of wing tip to wing tip at McCarran and the Henderson Airports because they were just full up because of that particular event.

Super Bowls, the big golf events like the U.S Open, the Kentucky Derby, all of those things are big charter events, where you can plan around those, and some very smart companies plan packages, where they put things together way ahead of time. Start advertising way ahead of time, saying, tailgate to the Kentucky Derby in style and take a jet for your party, or whatever.

So, there’s lots of things that they can do to put that together with hotels, limos, and so on, to really make that high-end experience more attractive. A lot of people in the high-end community know that convenience is one of the biggest selling points, so anything that you can offer that takes that burden off of people, and says, we can create this whole experience for you and your party.

You don’t have to worry about anything, just show up. That’s really attractive to these people, a lot of whom have very busy lives and would just as soon let you handle some of those details.

John Williams: And there’s not just the charter flying, obviously, if the jets are flying a lot, guess what?

Maintenance is up, and if maintenance is up, parts ordering is up, and that means all the suppliers’ businesses are up. Little out of phase, but it all follows.

Paula Williams: Exactly. So, lets say you run a detailing service, you can approach the charter companies a month before one of these big events and propose a package deal to get all of their jets clean.

And that would be a lot more attractive than it would be at other times because you’re tying it into the way that they make money and being very thoughtful about that. Aircraft maintenance, there are weird things that happen at different times of year. If you sell a preheat service, or you sell a specific type of tires or skis or something like that to people that fly in cold weather, obviously, you have a weather advantage.

And, in summer, there’s fog and varmints and other crazy things that happen in aviation maintenance or aircraft maintenance. So, those are things that you can start planning ahead and advertise some informational articles on your social media ahead of those seasons saying, be prepared for this event coming up.

All right, and trade shows, of course. Traditionally, there are two media that sell more product in the aviation industry than anything else, and this was long before there was social media, and long before there was the Internet. And that is trade shows and magazine advertising. So, tradeshows being kind of one of the grandfathers of sales in aviation.

You really want to make sure that you do those trade shows correctly, and just showing up is not enough. You really want to spend the time ahead of time to make sure that you’re prepared. Now there’s an article on our blog that’s pretty easy to find if you search on trade show objectives, there are three lists that you need to have in your pocket when you go to a trade show.

And you can’t just show up unprepared because these are the lists that take some thinking about, right? So, these lists are.

John Williams:  Ten most wanted customers.

Paula Williams: Right, and what do you want to know about your top 10 most wanted customers?

John Williams: As much as you can find out before you get there.

Paula Williams: Exactly, you want to know where their both is, you want to have made an appointment with them if you can. You want to know what they’re selling so that you can talk intelligently with them about what’s on their mind, and so the conversation’s already in their head, and so on.

And also, what your pitch is going to be, how are you going to make your spending time with you attractive enough to break their attention away from whatever else is going on at that trade show? Second, most feared competitors. Your top 10 most feared competitors you want to know where their booths are.

John Williams: Same thing you wanted for your customers.

Paula Williams: Exactly [LAUGH] for different reasons, though, you want to do your research, you want to pick up their literature, you may have some questions you want to ask. You have a lot of things that you can learn from them that will make your life easier in the long run, and making sure that you’re doing good work and not getting taken unawares by.

A feature that they’ve added this year or something that they’ve improved this year. And, third.

John Williams: You actually want to know about the top 10 potential partners you may do business with.

Paula Williams: Exactly, so your suppliers are just as important as your customers for making things work in your business, making things easy for you, and all of those things.

So, if you have a proposal for your partners, you want to go shake hands, meet with them in person. You don’t need to do all the details at the show, but things are so much easier when you’ve actually sat down with someone and had a cup of coffee. Then the communication just gets 1,000 times easier, and your team gets 1,000 times better.

Would you agree, John?

John Williams: Of course.

Paula Williams: Of course. [LAUGH] Exactly. So, you can download our trade show checklist from our website, and that’s aviationbusinessconsultants.com/tradeshow, and that will take you to a little form you can fill out to get the trade show checklist. Which has things that you need to do at 120 days, 90 days, 60 days, 30 days out from a trade show, and a lot of people think that it’s overkill, but the more trade shows you do, the more you realize that they’re all very helpful suggestions, and you would have rather thought of it than not.

John Williams: Yeah, there’s a saying that no matter how early you start, you should have started earlier. Most people with any trade show experience at all will tell you that the time to start for the next trade show is when you just finished the last one.

Paula Williams: Exactly, exactly.

John Williams: Unless they’re back to back in which case you start way back when.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Yep, that is absolutely true, and some people do a trade show a month, so they’re constantly in this cyclic trade show mode. They get really, really good at it, and that’s where we got a lot of our ideas, so that’s always fantastic.

Other events, like open house, customer appreciation events, seminars, and things like that, those are things that you want to put on your calendar way early as well. There are a lot of advantages you get from planning early, like, you don’t have to pay expediting fees when you order supplies.

John hates it when we order something and have to expedite.

John Williams: Or, because you got there and forgot something and have to buy it.

Paula Williams: Yeah, exactly, that quick trip to Home Depot or Fry’s to get the extension cord or the mouse batteries, or whatever it is that you’ve forgotten.

So if you can plan for those events, those work out much, much better. A lot of us right now are in the mode of planning holiday parties, or in the mode of going to holiday parties, that were planned months ago, actually. It’s very hard to get a restaurant with a table for any number of people any time around NBAA’s national convention.

So, if that’s something that you want to do, you really need to start thinking about that months before the event. Hotel rooms also get hard to come by, so there’s a lot of things that you can save a lot of money on if you plan them ahead and get them on your calendar, whatever they are.

If you start planning your calendar in January, then those events that come later in the year will be much easier. All right, so to quickly recap, today we talked about seasonal campaigns and offers, and playing trade shows and events. Other items in this series, of course, last one we talked about working together with other people, helping you educate rather than just sell.

And then, in the next episode, we’re going to talk about planning expenses and taking advantage of holidays, so we are looking forward to that. Once again, you can get the tip sheet for this episode, which is actually a marketing calendar template. Go to aviationbusinessconsultants.com/calendar. Well, the calendar includes a guide that goes into more detail about everything we talked about in this podcast and the others in the series, and a sample completed marketing calendar cuz it’s so much easier to complete your own if you have an example to look at.

The other thing is, you get a blank calendar template in Microsoft Word that you can customize for your company, so it’s really easy to just fill in the blanks. Now this is not a freebie, we usually do freebies. If we charge you money, you’re actually going to use it and not just download it and set it aside to do later, so we’re charging an entire dollar.

You’re going to have to pull out your credit card and fill in a form to get this download. Hopefully, it won’t break the bank, but we also hope that you’ll actually pause to put some thought into whether you’re actually going to use this template or not, and then you’ll actually follow through, schedule the time, and do it.

Okay, so as you know, the aviation marketing Hangar Flying podcast is on iTunes, so please subscribe and please also leave a review. It’s a brand new podcast, so we are building our audience, and we could really appreciate your help.

John Williams: And we’ll talk to you next time.

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