AMHF 0013 – 6 Prospecting Methods Using Aviation Digital Marketing

[smart_track_player url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/aviationmarketing/Aviation_Marketing_Hangar_Flying_13_Complete_1_-_1616_11.53_PM.mp3″ title=”Six Ways DIgital Marketing Works for Aviation” background=”default” social_linkedin=”true” ]

Transcript for Prospecting Methods Using Aviation Digital Marketing

Narrator: You’re listening to aviation marketing Hangar Flying. The community for the best sales and marketing professionals in the aviation industry. You can’t learn to fly just from a book.

You learn from other pilots who know the tools, the skills and the territory. Your hosts, John and Paula Williams are your sales and marketing test pilots. They take the risks for you and share strategies, relevant examples, hacks, and how tos. Be sure to subscribe to iTunes so you won’t miss a thing.

Paula Williams: Welcome to Aviation Marketing Hangar Flying Episode 13, online prospecting using aviation digital marketing tools. I’m Paula Williams.

John Williams: And I’m John Williams.

Paula Williams: And we are ABCI.

John Williams: ABCI’s mission is to help you folks sell more stuff and products and services and quickly in the aviation world.

Paula Williams: Exactly. So we get our information from a lot of different places.

And with online materials especially it is really really hard to stay up on the changes in technology and everything else. So we go to a whole bunch of different conferences and mastermind groups and everything else each year to talk with people in other marketing, who are in marketing but in other industries besides aviation, because a lot of folks are using different tools with different results, that haven’t really tried them in aviation before.

And so you know a lot of these are tried and true, a lot of these things were trying for the first time. And that’s why we’re doing this episode is to let you know, what the top six are as far as the online prospecting tools for 2016, so that you’re getting the most current information.

Okay. So the top six prospecting tools for 2016 as far as online tools go are these:

John Williams: SEO.

Paula Williams: Or.

John Williams: Search engine optimization. And you have content and videos, podcasts, webinars, and social media.

Paula Williams: Exactly.

John Williams: Not necessarily in that order.

Paula Williams: Right,  okay,  so those are the six and we’re going to talk some more about each of those six methods of digital marketing, and how you can use them for prospecting and how people get clients in the aviation industry by using these tools.

So starting with search engine optimization, which is probably the most cost effective. Wouldn’t you agree?

John Williams: Typically, depending upon if you get taken by somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing, but if you have your own staff does it or if you hire a reasonable, knowledgeable.

Paula Williams: Reputable.

John Williams: Firm, then yes.

Paula Williams: Right exactly. And there are a lot of shysters shall we say or snake oil salesman, in the field of search engine optimization. And the reason is because it is so technical that most people just kind of wash their hands of it. We used to have an SEO “Do It Yourself” kit that people could buy.

It was an information product that people could buy and basically do search engine optimization on their own. And this was in 2009 when search engine optimization was easy enough for a human to understand who actually had other jobs in the world, and that wasn’t the only thing that they did besides eat and sleep.

But things have changed since then.

John Williams: Technology is changing almost daily with respect to what it is that Google and the other heavies want with respect to how you place words, phrases, content, and meta data and so forth. And I mean changes daily several times but the major changes are the ones we try to keep up with and we hire people to do search engine optimization for aviation companies. 

Paula Williams: Right, absolutely, so we’re kind of getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back and talk a little bit more about advertising and prospecting in general and then we’ll get more into the details of each of these items. So, phase one, as we know in our long cycle marketing process, is advertising and prospecting, which is the way that people first come into contact with you, or with your company, or with your product.

So, they’re looking for something, you happen to be in the right place at the right time to catch their attention and engage with them in a way that really starts a relationship. And in the last episode we talked a lot about calls to action. So each of these items you’re going to have to have a really great call to action.

It doesn’t really matter if you have a really good ad. Unless you get somebody’s attention, and get them to take the next step towards you. Either by calling a phone number, or downloading a report. Any one of a number of things. And in the last episode, we had a freebie that you could download that had 17 ideas for what we call lead magnets, or calls to action for these kinds of things.

So that’s kinda the big picture. And of course, today, we’re drilling down to the online methods of advertising and prospecting. Now a couple of episodes ago, we also talked about the concept of getting your prospects to identify themselves. And we told the story of Perry Marshal’s friend the professional gambler.

Do you remember that story?

John Williams: Keep going.

Paula Williams: Okay, so they walked into a casino in Las Vegas, and the first thing he told this kid that he was trying to teach gambling to was, the first thing you need to know is, who is a prospective gambling partner and who is not.

And the way that they did that is, he pulled this sawed off shotgun from under his coat, and he cocked his shotgun, or racked the shotgun I guess is the terminology they use.

John Williams: Pulled the slide back, ejected the shell, or even if no shell, you just pull the slide back and snapped it forward.

Paula Williams: Right, now, this makes not very loud noise if you’re talking about a loud casino with music and dancing girls and everything else. But it does get the attention of certain individuals in the room who are familiar with that sound. So what our gambler said to his young friend is, these are the people you don’t want to gamble with.

These are the kind of people who know what a shot gun sounds like. Those are not the kind of people you ever want to have anything to do with, as far as gambling goes, especially gambling for fun and profit, right?

John Williams: Yeah. Because they’re the charlatans, etc., and card cheats and so forth.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Right. Okay, so what does this story have to do with the price of rice in China?

John Williams: It’s your story, keep talking.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Okay, the reason we’re telling this story is because you have to do the same thing. You don’t need to necessarily rack the shotgun to sort people into one pile or another.

Either people who are interested in your product or service, or people who are not. But you do need to do something. That is going to be a very distinctive signal to people who are obviously in the market for your product and service. And that could be by offering a buyer’s guide to a particular product.

It could be by using language and wording that only airline maintenance people are familiar with, or that only pilots of a Kingair 350ER are familiar with. That’s the way you separate The wheat from the chaff. Or you separate the prospects from the people who are not likely to be in the market for your product or service, right?

John Williams: Exactly.

Paula Williams: Okay, cool. All right, and every aviation marketing campaign has three elements, right.

John Williams: And you all should know them so you can say them along with me.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH]

John Williams: The list, the offer and the presentation.

Paula Williams: Exactly, the list, the offer and the presentation. So, every time you do an advertisement, the list is the people that the advertisement is going to appear to.

The offer is what are you offering. In [LAUGH] similar words, what is the thing that you want them to do. And then the presentation is the form that that takes. Is it a webpage? Is it a brochure, is it a form, is it an email, is it a social media.

John Williams: Or a telephone call.

Paula Williams: Image yeah exactly so those are lists, offers, and presentations. So choosing online marketing tools. You want to think about the list, who is the list of people who are most likely to buy your product. And where do they already hang out online?

John Williams: Which means you have to know the demographics of your potential customer list.

Paula Williams: Exactly. And a lot of people will argue well, my customers don’t hang out on Facebook because I don’t hang out on Facebook. Therefore my customers don’t possibly hang out on Facebook, right?

John Williams: They may think that but you can’t assume anything, because everybody knows what assume means.

Paula Williams: Right. You want to think about where does your list hang out online. What do they do when they’re online? What kinds of things would they be looking for? What kinds of words or phrases what they be typing into Google when they’re looking for your product or service.

Where can you get in their way when they’re looking for the product of service that you offer? And also what gives you the best venue for your presentation. So, if you got a great video or something like that you want to take them to your website. Right?

John Williams: Or to put it another way, wherever all the cars are driving you want a billboard on that road.

Paula Williams: Exactly. You don’t want to build it on a beautiful fabulous LED monster billboard on a dirt road with one car a day. Right.

John Williams: Right.

Paula Williams: Okay, so we’ve talked about prospecting, sorting people into, these people are interested in my product or service and these people are not.

So how do we apply that to search engine optimization or SEO? Okay, what we do is we start with a spreadsheet. We use Google Analytics and it’s actually a free tool that you can use. We do this for all of our clients. So if this is getting too nerdy, you can always just give us a call [LAUGH] and we can handle it for you.

But if you want to do it yourself, basically what you do is you go to Google Analytics, there’s a free tool called their keyword planner. And in that keyword planner you want to brainstorm all of the words and phrases that your customers are likely to use. So, you just type them in.

You can type in a list. You can add a website and have it spider that website for you, meaning that it will go through that website and look for all of those keywords. And you can do that with your own site, you can do that with your competitors’ sites which is really cool [LAUGH] but anyway, you come up with a list of several hundred key words.

John Williams: Sometimes several thousand.

Paula Williams: Sometimes several thousand key words and what we do is we like to sort them by three things. The most important being relevance and relevance is not something you’re going to get from Google’s keyword planner because they don’t know what you sell and they don’t know how relevant these keywords are to you.

You have to remember this is a robot, so it does what it does and it’s not very intelligent. So there is place where human human connections and human thought processes are not duplicatable by any kind of a machine. So you have to determine which of these phrases are relevant to you once you get this big list.

John Williams: In other words, what that means is you’ve got to go down through every single keyword or keyword phrase. And assign a relevance factor of one to three.

Paula Williams: Exactly. So then you take all your one’s and that’s your first sort criteria. Your second sort criteria is how many global monthly searches are there on that keyword?

Now the more the better. Again we want lots of traffic. On this road that we’re going to place our billboard on. So the more global monthly searches the better. The next factor we want to look for is competition. How much competition is there? And this is the classic marketing equation, you want to have something that there’s a lot of demand for but not much.

John Williams: Competition.

Paula Williams: Yeah, not much supply. So high demand, low supply, that’s where the opportunities are. And the way that you tell that using Google’s keyword planner is you look for words and phrases for which there is a lot of global monthly searches, a lot of people looking for that word or phrase, and not a lot of competition.

So that’s an opportunity for you. And on our spread sheet we do some color coding and things like that, so if it has a really high global monthly searches we turn that green, if it has a really low competition we turn that green. And then the third thing we look at is the estimated average bid.

And that estimated average bid is just another way of looking at competition, because depending on how much people are actually paying hen they buy AdWords, which is a service that Google provides for that keyword. And it’s not that we’re going to buy keywords, we just want to see how much people are paying when they do buy an ad for those keywords.

Does that make sense?

John Williams: Well, it does to me. Hopefully it does to them, to our listeners.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm. Exactly so that’s how you determine from the google key word planner where your list is currently is hanging out and also what words to use in your ads especially on line to get really good.

Search engine optimization.

John Williams: By the way, if it doesn’t make sense to you, give her a call.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Yeah. A lot of folks throw up their hands at this point, and I don’t blame you. Honestly, we did all of our own search engine optimization in 2009, and we did all of the search engine optimization for clients at that time and we even had a do-it-yourself package, as we said.

But since things have evolved we don’t do a do-it-yourself product anymore, we do search engine optimization for clients, and I personally, meaning Paula Williams, don’t do it anymore because there are people in the world that are much better at it for a lot less money than I’m willing to charge.

John Williams: And we hire those people.

Paula Williams: And we hire those people, so we don’t even do a search engine optimization for our, or I don’t do search engine optimization for ABC Ice Pages anymore. We hire that done. Because there are people who are so much better at it and because it’s changing every day, and you really need somebody for whom that is their only job.

John Williams: If you look around a bit, you can find somebody that does it for a reasonable price and it has to be reasonable because they need to be on it pretty much every other day or so.

Paula Williams: Exactly, right. So keys to successful SEO. You want to choose words that your prospects are most likely to use, not what they should use.

John Williams: Oh, boy, is that a big difference?

Paula Williams: Exactly. This is a fight that we have with just about every client we have, right?

John Williams: We had a client that says he wanted to optimize for a particular set of keywords, and they didn’t even show up in our searches.

Why?

Paula Williams: Mm-hm.

John Williams: Well, because that’s what they should use.

Paula Williams: Right.

John Williams: Well, he’s still trying to optimize for that and, of course, it isn’t going to happen.

Paula Williams: Okay, and let me give you an example. There’s a photographer who likes the term aircraft photography, but all of his customers use the term jet photography.

Now, he says that that’s not accurate, because he photographs things other than jets, right? So, he calls it aircraft photography. But the thing is there are very few people who are actually looking for aircraft photography. They’re all looking for jet photography, right?

John Williams: And once we convinced him, he was then amazed at the difference.

Paula Williams: Exactly. So, again, you have to meet people where they are, use the words that they use, and then you can teach them better, once they’re clients of yours. [LAUGH]

John Williams: Right.

Paula Williams: So, it does no good to publish great stuff to an empty room. [LAUGH] So even if you’re right, and you may be able to make the logical argument that people should be using this word, rather than that word, you’re not going to win the argument on this side of Google AdWords or on Google keywords.

You have to do this yourself. All right, so online content. And we give some examples of how to judge the content on your site. A lot of people already have websites, blogs, and things like that. You want to look at how many people are actually visiting the articles and other things on your blog already, or on your website.

And whatever those most interesting things are, those are things you want to publish more of, right?

John Williams: Of course.

Paula Williams: Okay, so on our website in 2010, we published an article about pricing strategy, and we get a ton of traffic on that article. So what that says to me is that we should be publishing more materials on pricing strategy, right?

John Williams: Obviously.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Obviously. Right, and you can find that out from, again, our good friend Google, this time Google Analytics, which is another tool, another free tool that Google offers. And we do this for all of our clients as well. We do a report every month that says, here are the most visited pages on your site.

And so these are things that we probably want to do more of. And the least visited pages on your site are probably things that are not worth the time and effort, even though we may think they’re important, nobody else does. [LAUGH] So, other than the things like the disclaimers that we have to have on the site, those are the pages that we really don’t want to spend a lot of time and money doing.

Okay, so let me give you an example of how a blog post led to a sale. Actually, John, why don’t you tell the story?

John Williams: Well, [COUGH] we noticed that our Alexa score was dropping off like somebody dropped an anvil out of an airplane. And we said, now, wait a minute, what’s changed?

So, we ran a report and then come to find out that the site had been hacked, [COUGH] excuse me, with what they call a pharma hack, which means that now we have [LAUGH] links to places trying to sell pharmaceuticals.

Paula Williams: Right, like Xanax and weird stuff that have nothing to do with aviation marketing, right.

John Williams: And so we had our techies go into it, and try to figure out how to get rid of it. And they said, you know, there’s actually a blog out here that tells you what you have to do. So, they sent me the email. I looked at it, and said, hm.

And then there was a link down at the bottom of the blog that said, this company will do this for you. I said, really? So, [COUGH] clicked on the link, went over there, and just did a quick once over the site, said, wow. We called them, they convinced us they were correct, we bought the product, four hours later it was done.

I mean, we’d have spent more time having our techies trying to do that, than have these guys do it.

Paula Williams: Exactly. So, this blog post, and a lot of people are concerned, they’re afraid, especially people in consulting industries and things like that in aviation, they’re afraid that if they tell people how to do something that people will go off and just do it themselves, they won’t need to hire this consultant.

But that was not the case in this case.

John Williams: No, they spelled it out line by line by line, and which file, and which server, and everything, all the way down. And in which sequence you actually had to do it to affect a recovery. And then, what you had to do to get rid of the pages.

Paula Williams: Exactly.

John Williams: And it’s step by step. And I just looked at it and said, you know, I mean, I got a data processing background, too, but no, it’s not worth the time.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm.

John Williams: And then we bought the services and we decided to sign up for a year’s worth, and it’s cheaper than having anybody else worry about it.

Paula Williams: Exactly. So to be real specific, this is a company call Sucuri. We don’t have any relationship with them, other than that we bought their product this week.

John Williams: Yeah.

Paula Williams: But they had an article on their blog called Understanding and Cleaning the Pharma Hack on WordPress, which is exactly the problem that we were having.

And rather than follow the instructions, what the instructions did was they gave us the-

John Williams: Information necessary to say we’ll buy the product.

Paula Williams: Yeah, the confidence that they knew exactly what they were doing. And of course, there’s going to be some set of people, if you publish an article that’s a How to Do X, Y, and Z, there are some people who are going to take your instructions and run with them and do it themselves.

But there is going to be some subset of people that’s going to read How to Do X, Y, Z that don’t want to do it themselves, but now they know that you do. So, they’re going to hire you as the authority on how to do X,Y,Z. And you’ve made a sale because of this blog post, right?

John Williams: And I’m quite sure they have processes that are automated to do all these things, and that’s okay they should have.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm.

John Williams: But [COUGH] we didn’t, and if we’d had our techies go do that, we would’ve paid more to get that done through our guys than if we’d just had this company do it.

In fact, that’s what the tech suggested, we’d have these guys do it.

Paula Williams: Exactly, right. So, our tech found this article and suggested that we do that, and we did it. So, we’re glad that they did that. But to bring that back to marketing for you, keys to successful online content.

Think from the customer’s perspective, what did they want to read about? What problem are they having that you can solve, right?

John Williams: Absolutely, and that was a very good example of doing exactly that.

Paula Williams: Another thing you want to do is you want to publish consistently. That’s another key to successful online content, because about every three weeks, if you haven’t published something new to your site, you end up falling in your search engine rankings, because Google likes to serve the most current information first.

And if you haven’t made any change to your website in about three weeks, they assume it’s stale.

John Williams: No, don’t wait for three weeks. Set aside some time during the week, probably toward the end of the week, and during the week make notes. I mean, use Siri on your phone or whatever, and make notes, and then, at the end of the week, write about it.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm. Another key to successful online content is to write great headlines. Nobody’s going to read your articles if the headlines aren’t good. And that article we just talked about actually was a pretty good headline, Understanding and Cleaning the Pharma Hack on WordPress. The things that we’re looking for are something that’s really specific, something that has the keywords that we’d be searching for.

Something that you know lends confidence, you can be kind of long with your titles, you want to be super descriptive, so great headlines are very important.

John Williams: A lot of writers will spend more time on the headline than they will on the article.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm. That’s absolutely true-

John Williams: That very reason.

Paula Williams: Yep, a great article with a bad headline is not even going to even be seen, whereas a not so great article with a great headline Is going to be seen a whole heck of a lot.

John Williams: And you can translate that to websites. It doesn’t matter if you got a quarter million dollar website, if it’s not getting looked at by anybody, so what.

Paula Williams: Exactly, and then the last key to successful online content is to watch your numbers in Google analytics. Right and adapt accordingly, so if you’ve got an article that everybody is coming to. That’s obviously a problem that a lot of people are having and that’s something you can capitalize on.

John Williams: Ride Apollo onto that.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm. Absolutely. Okay, so next prospecting tool for online is.

John Williams: Video.

Paula Williams: Video. Right. Aviation marketing videos have gotten a lot more popular in the last year or two, because of the expansion of broadband.

John Williams: And video [COUGH] Does not mean necessarily you in front of a camera.

Paula Williams: Exactly. We’re talking MP4 files, or MOV files, or anything that you can publish on the Web that shows moving pictures, you can do that with PowerPoint. You can do that with animation. You can do that with a slideshow of images. Lots of different ways of doing this.

John Williams: With appropriate voice-overs and comments along the way.

Paula Williams: Right. So we have a video on our front page that is kind of an introduction to our company. And a lot of people have remarked on the fact that they feel like they know us, because they’ve seen us on the video.

They’ve heard our voices. It kind of builds that credibility. When they pick up the phone to talk with us, they know what to expect. They know that we can explain things in a fairly simple way. [LAUGH] They know that sometimes we can explain things in a fairly simple way.

And they also know that we’re fairly informal and friendly kind of people. And if that’s people are looking for they’re likely to find us and those are the kinds of people that we’re most likely to have fun working with, right?

John Williams: Yep. Absolutely.

Paula Williams: Okay. So keys to a successful video.

John Williams: There’s a lot of them but probably two of the major ones are pay attention to the sound, because if you’re taking pictures somewhere like NBAA, guess what? There’s a lot of racket going on there, and if you don’t have the right types of microphones and mixers and things, the sound will not be something you want to listen to.

There’s ways to get around that, and it’s all, depending upon how much time you have. And you gotta consider lighting, and so forth. But bad sound is probably the worst thing you can get in a video. And then use something short, I mean don’t get all carried away with 10 to 15 minute segments, do 1 to 2 minutes.

Paula Williams: Right. You actually saw something on the video today that you remarked on, that really caught your attention.

John Williams: This was a video form a company I subscribe to and what they did was, they actually had a guy on camera. So it was a guy on camera, and he did about a 10 second intro, and then stopped the video and had a blue screen and white letters.

It said whatever the question was, and then you had time to read that and think about it. And then he came on a video again, his face and so forth, in their studio, and answered the question with appropriate comments. That was about a 15 to 35 second video, and then he repeated the same thing all the way to about 5 minutes.

It never did get long.

Paula Williams: How long was the total video?

John Williams: Seems to me like 560 or something, 516.

Paula Williams: Okay, but it was broken up into-

John Williams: It was broken up by how they did it, but it wasn’t really a stop start thing. You had to click on anything.

Paula Williams: Exactly. But if the guy had just been sitting there, talking and talking head for 5 minutes, you probably wouldn’t have listened to the whole thing.

John Williams: Nah, I’d have got out of it.

Paula Williams: Okay, cool.

John Williams: And I hired these guys, I mean. [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Okay, so that tells you even if you’ve already made the sale you’re still selling.

So even for things like your tutorials and other intro videos and things like that you want to make sure that you’re using short segments. And also you want to make sure that you have really good sound, I think were the two things that we identified as keys to successful video, right?

John Williams: Yes.

Paula Williams: Fantastic, okay. Aviation Podcast!

John Williams: Have a good time.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Okay, I’ll talk about podcasts. Okay. Podcast came up over and over again this year with some of the best marketing people in the business who had never really talked about

audio or podcast. And there’s a couple of reasons that kept coming up, one is that they’re a very effective selling tool.

People seem to have a much longer attention span for a podcast than they do for text. So if you put those things side by side and we had this same material in a transcript, not very many people would actually read the whole thing. But a lot of people will listen to the whole podcast.

Because they can do that while they’re doing something else like driving or whatever. The second thing is that podcasts are distributed through iTunes. So you are pretty much taking advantage of Apple marketing for you. Especially if you use those keywords when you put your podcast together and make sure that you are being found by people who have an interest in your product or service.

You want to be the one that people find when they go to iTunes, or click the podcast button in their car, and type in the term, for us is aviation marketing. For other people, it would be whatever their product or service is.

John Williams: Which is a good point, all the new, and I’m, don’t know how far back.

But at least last year forward, all the cars have a podcast button in them.

Paula Williams: Exactly. So, keys to successful podcasts. This is a huge pain in the neck to set up-

John Williams: [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: The first time. There are some services like blog talk radio and some other commercial services that will do this for you, but the drawback of that is that they are putting their own advertising in your podcast.

And since your podcast is intended to be an advertisement for your company, you don’t want them putting advertisements in that.

John Williams: So to do that without that you have to do every single friggin step yourself.

Paula Williams: Exactly.

John Williams: And it’s painful.

Paula Williams: It takes, it took me several days, and of course I wasn’t working on this constantly, but it took the better part of a week, to go through all of the steps to get, this podcast that you’re listening to right now, setup with a, with a media host, the thumbnails, the descriptions, all of the stuff that you have to do to get it on your blog, get it publishing automatically.

All of those things, on iTunes, and Stitcher, and the other podcast outlets.

John Williams: But once you have one setup.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm.

John Williams: The subsequent podcasts are much easier to deal with.

Paula Williams: Exactly. So, and again, with all of these media, the key is also to publish consistently. So if you have a one episode podcast, it’s not going to be very effective.

By about our fourth episode we started seeing a pretty big spike in traffic, and suddenly it went from you know a very small number, it went about four times that on about our fourth episode, and its gone pretty consistently higher since then. So I would say, you know, you want to plan a series of at least ten if you’re going to do a podcast you need to commit to a series of at least ten.

John Williams: And then plan for the futures because everybody’s going to have podcast button in their cars, and you don’t even have to have a telephone, just push the buttons.

Paula Williams: Exactly, yeah, so if you can commit to doing this once a week, and for us this is not a bad way of going through.

Here’s some of the material, and some of the things we’re going to be talking about this month in our webinars, and some of the things we’re talking with clients about. So it’s work that we would do anyway, but we can just get together, huddle over the microphone and talk.

So it’s not that hard once you’ve done it the first time. The other thing you can do is get a partner like ABCI. We do this for our clients where we set it up and then all you have to do is send us the audio file once a week and we’ll take care of the rest of it for you.

So That is everything from scheduling your interviews to publishing your podcast. So depending on your level of service, that’s an option for you, as well. Okay, next online prospecting tool.

John Williams: Webinars.

Paula Williams: Webinars. Exactly. So, why are webinars so popular?

John Williams: Well, they’re sort of a step back from podcasts.

Paula Williams: Exactly. They’re interactive media. In fact, they’re more interactive than podcasts because you’ve got people on the other end of the. GoToWebinar session or whatever tool you’re using and asking questions.

John Williams: Yeah well it’s a step back because they have to take time out of their day and schedule and sit there and listen whereas in a car they can do it whenever.

Paula Williams: That’s true that is true. So yeah webinars need to be live and you’re expecting people to participate and so on, but you can also, answer questions live, and you can use audio, video, everything that you’ve got, to explain the answers to questions, and provide information, and everything else.

John Williams: Of course, you don’t want to do any one of these things, you want to do them all.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Right, that’s true. Okay, so keys to successful webinars. One is you want to advertise the heck out of them. Webinars don’t advertise themselves. You know there’s nothing like ITunes for For webinars.

[LAUGH] That we’ll distribute this for you. You know you want to make sure that you’re using email, and using other advertising venues, to advertise your webinars which are then, advertising your products. So it gets a little, convoluted, but-

John Williams: It works.

Paula Williams: It is definitely much more effective, than using Teeny tiny advertisements in a magazine is an example to drive them to a webinar.

There is no way that you could put the kind of information that you could include in a webinar in a teeny tiny advertisement in a magazine. So it really helps you maximize those dollars that you’ve spent on that advertising right?

John Williams: If, absolutely.

Paula Williams: Another thing is, you want to use interactive tools.

Good Webinar is the one we use. They add more features all the time where people can Where they can chat, where they can raise their hands. They’ve got polls. They’ve got handouts. They’ve got a lot of different tools that you can use,

John Williams: And you can record it, and you can get a transcript and send to people if you choose if they pay for it.

Paula Williams: Exactly. To make that work. One thing you definitely want to do is practice with your tools. There have been some incidents on live webinars, and if you are a frequent guest of our live webinars you are very familiar with the fact that things don’t always work perfectly.

John Williams: No, and you have to be Ready, willing, able, and able to get around whatever happens, and keep the thing going.

Paula Williams: Exactly. I need to take a picture of the way that we set up for our webinars, because we are both in the same room, we’ve got two different computers, we’ve got dueling screens going on, a total of four screens-

John Williams: Mm-hm.

Paula Williams: Where we’re looking at The presentation we’re giving, the chat windows, the tools for time going by and all of the different things that we have going on.

John Williams: And run on a server network to see what everybody else sees.

Paula Williams: Exactly. So we can see if the slides are actually advancing for other people and not just for us.

John Williams: And we have had times when they don’t just pass for everybody. [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: Right. Or if the sound goes out.

So all of those things, are things that you need to be aware of. And our way of doing that is a pretty elaborate setup.

John Williams: Well, but it has to be, otherwise you can’t deal with issues as they come up, and you don’t want to drop off in the middle of a webinar.

Paula Williams: Exactly, and again that’s another service that we offer for our clients is to set up webinars for them so basically all they do is Skype in, or go to a meeting in, go to webinar as a tool of Citrix. Same as go to a meeting. So they just basically use their computer, dial in We facilitate the webinar for them, record the whole thing and take care of all of those things but if you’re doing it yourself you want to make sure that you’ve got all the bases covered and that you have spent the time to make sure that all of those things are working right.

Okay last one I think. This is number six. Social media is our last tool that we’re going to talk about today. ADCI publishes a guide to social media in the aviation industry. This is our first annual one. The reason we do them annually is [LAUGH].

John Williams: Stuff changes.

Paula Williams: Stuff changes. Yes. Everything changes. Every year there are new tools introduced. Once in a while one goes away. Once in a while one goes away, and the demographics of each of these tools changes pretty significantly. Like, three years ago Everybody was laughing at the idea of using Facebook for advertising in aviation and now there’s a lot of companies using it very successfully.

The demographics have shifted to older. They’ve shifted to more male than female on a lot of the websites that we monitor, a lot of the social media Facebook pages that we monitor. Just Facebook has changed a lot. Twitter has changed a lot as well. It is a really great place to Get in touch with media contacts because it is so easy to search.

And a search capability is so fast and so granular that a lot of reporters use Twitter to find pictures, to find facts, to find pieces of data that they need for articles that they’re working on.

John Williams: And if you’re keeping up, Twitter’s going to change again this year. They are expanding their 140 characters to somewhere between 140 and 10,000.

Paula Williams: Exactly. It will be interesting to see how that works. I hope they keep the search as fast as it’s always been.

John Williams: Don’t know, but that’s just what I have heard.

Paula Williams: Right, the reigning king of social media and aviation has been for a number of years LinkedIn that’s still true.

But LinkedIn is also changing, they used to have product pages on LinkedIn. They got rid of those and now they have highlight pages and they have company pages and groups where people can have group discussions and other kinds of things. So there’s a lot going on in social media, and that’s why we publish a guide every year.

So that’s available on Amazon, or through ABCI, to get the whole guide. But just to summarize some of the keys to using successful social media. One is, don’t publish ads to an empty room. You know, if you’ve got 10 followers or 100 followers, you’re wasting your breath. You really want to build your audience first.

And the way that you build your audience is, you provide helpful information. You know, you can provide a fact of the week. You can do, like we do our Marketing Mondays, Webinar Wednesdays, Facebook Fridays, or Follow Fridays. Where we talk about marketing issues and also marketing news. We share information from our clients and from the aviation industry to make that more interesting and so on.

You have to think kind of like a magazine editor. What are your readers the most interested in seeing? Ask questions of the people that follow you, ask what people think. Or give them an A or B choice, which is your preference? You can get involved with some of the controversy in the industry, like user fees or drones and other things.

And if you take a position, somebody’s going to respond [LAUGH]. So you have to think that through, but there’s lots of ways to build an audience that are very legitimate. You want to just use those features. You don’t want to ever buy traffic. Because you can always do that.

You can pay some of these companies that promise to find you 1,000 followers, or whatever, within 5 days for 100 bucks, or whatever the deal is.

John Williams: And you get pharma hacked.

Paula Williams: And you get pharma hacked [LAUGH]. [LAUGH] That’s not why we got pharma hacked. That was actually a vulnerability in our comment-

John Williams: Yeah, but Situation Somebody else paid them.

Paula Williams: In WordPress. Exactly.

John Williams: And this was. That’s what they did.

Paula Williams: That’s what they did, exactly. So there’s somebody who’s willing to pay bunch of people siting in a room in some foreign country to click links all day long.

And that is not the kind of people that are worth anything to you. They don’t provide insight into the topic, they don’t add to the conversation, they don’t buy your products. Which is really what it boils down to, right? One thing that I found that it is a lot more robust than I was ever expecting is Facebook’s ad targeting.

If there was one tool that I think you should try this year, it’s Facebook ad targeting. The reason is because you can spend very little money. You can spend $50 or less to do a test of this. And you can get very, very specific about the type of people that you’re looking for.

By geography, by buying habits, spending habits. Do they have a type rating in this particular aircraft? Have they ever worked for this company or that company? Did they go to school at Embry- Riddle? I mean lots of things that really help define a really great audience for you. And it doesn’t cost a whole lot of money, and you get really, really fast results.

John Williams: From a private person’s perspective it’s kind of scary. From a marketing perspective, it’s outstanding.

Paula Williams: Exactly. [LAUGH] It’s happening, it’s just which side of the deal do you want to be on, right? Okay. So, wrapping up. Online prospecting tools. We talked about six of them, right?

John Williams: Yep.

SEO, which you now know is search engine optimization if you didn’t already.

Paula Williams: Yep. Two?

John Williams: Content.

Paula Williams: Online content. Three?

John Williams: Videos.

Paula Williams: Four?

John Williams: Podcasts.

Paula Williams: Five?

John Williams: Webinars.

Paula Williams: And six?

John Williams: Social Media.

Paula Williams: Absolutely. Okay. So next week we’re going to talk about offline or traditional media.

And we’re actually going to talk about four of them. We’re going to talk about events, magazine ads, postcards, and newsletters. So get the tips sheet. Once again, you can get 17 great calls to action. Which has been a really popular tip sheet, we’re going to keep that one out there for another week.

Because a lot of people have really enjoyed that and have mentioned some things about it so that’s great. Yeah, so go ahead and aviationbusinessconsultants.com. And go to the latest episode and you will see that download. So, thank you for joining us. Make sure you subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave us a review.

John Williams: And we’ll be talking with you next time. Happy new year.

Music: [MUSIC]

Narrator: Thanks for joining us for aviation marketing Hangar Flying. The best place to learn what really works in sales and marketing in the aviation industry. Remember to subscribe on iTunes and leave a rating.

 

Did you know . . .ABCI offers Digital Marketing for Aviation companies?

Other Digital Marketing Topics

Aviation Digital Marketing Glossary

Aviation Digital Marketing – Please Enjoy Responsibly!

Print Versus Digital, Round 2

6 Prospecting Methods Using Aviation Digital Marketing

The Digital Citizen – Why You Should Hire One (Or Be One!)

A Quick Tip for Getting More Online Reviews!

#FollowFriday – Aviation Inbound Marketing & Sketchy Prospects

Hashtag Marketing in Aviation Industry