Aviation Marketing Basics – Aviation Websites!

Is a website still important for an aviation company these days?

What should your website do (and not do) for your marketing and sales teams?

How should your site interact with social media, lead capture software, CRMs, trade shows, and postal mail?

“Websites promote you 24/7: No employee will do that.”
― Paul Cookson

Few other advertising venues, even digital, do that without constant attention and divided agendas.

• Social media channels famously have their own agenda above those of their visitors, and even their advertisers.
• Advertising purchased in a publication has to comply with that publication’s rules and schedules.
• Postal mail and other printed materials have limited space and no interactivity of their own. (Few people use self-addressed stamped envelopes anymore!)
• Trade show appearances are elusive. You have to make the trip every year to continue to berelevant.

But aviation websites are a relatively sound investment in real estate on the Internet that you “own.” Granted, it’s influenced by media hosts, service providers, and search engines, but you ultimately get to keep this platform as long as you like and updated if and when you please with any technology you care to invest in or develop.

Your web site becomes a true hub of a great marketing plan!

Paula Williams: Welcome to this week’s episode. I am Paula Williams.

John Williams: I am John Williams.

Paula: And we are ABCI. And ABCI’s mission is?

John: To help all you ladies and gents out there in the Aviation sector sell more of your products and services.

Paula: Absolutely. Like most businesses, we get involved in our clients and things going on and all kinds of stuff. We don’t spend a lot of time on introspection which is not exactly true, we actually try to be introspective but at least for 5 minutes every Monday, when we do our weekly meetings.

One thing that we discovered was that we really have not done much focus on our basic fundamentals as a business. At least in our podcast, we do it all the time with our clients, but we have not updated what is out there about the fundamentals of what we do in a very long time.

John: True.

Paula: We decided to do a short series of podcast episodes about the fundamentals, and it is a back-to-basics, here is what we do, and here is why we do it, right?

John: Okay.

Paula: Okay. This week we are talking about websites. This is still the hub of your online presence even in this day and age. Right?

John: Absolutely. Most people don’t realize that everything you create digitally that is going in front of the world needs to go to the website first.

Paula: Exactly. And there are several reasons for that. One is because you control the environment, so they are not going to put your ad next to your competitor’s ad, right? Or next to something that does not reflect well on you for whatever reason, right next to a online casinos are some crazy thing. On your website, you really own the property and you are able to control every factor of that property. And also, anything that you publish to your website first has a date stamp to it. And if you ever have an issue with intellectual property, you have the means to prove that you came up with it first.

John: Absolutely.

Paula: Yes. We had a lot of situations where we have something fabulous that we built for a client. One of their competitors steals it. [laughs] We can show, it is published on their website first, and often that is a deciding factor. That is another reason.

Lastly, is really being considerate of your customers. It is the most effective way to be the center of all your marketing effort to send out a postcard, you have them come back to view a video on your website. It is to extend everything that you do by having a central point.

John: Works tracing your marketing dollars a little easier.

Paula: Oh yes.

[Music]

Paula: Seriously, I think what we bring to the table is a lot of experience with a lot of different types of aviation industry clients. That is how we developed our business model and this is the array of what it includes, right?

John: That is true.

Paula: Okay.