Are holiday social media posts really worth the time and effort?
They can be! Why?
Because they provide an easy, non-salesy opportunity to make a connection.
In this video, we share four examples of aviation companies that have used an obscure holiday to their advantage.
And we share how ABCI’s templates can help you create fun, engaging posts without spending a ton of time!
Hi! I’m Paula Williams with ABCI. Today I wanted to talk about holidays and how to use them in your marketing. You know we’ve talked about this before, but I wanted to get super specific and introduce some self-service social media post templates that ABCI produces and show you how to use them for your Aviation company to engage with potential customers
and build relationships, and advance your sales process.
First of all, why should aviation companies be spending time on this book? You know, that’s a question that we get a lot. Our clients are very business-oriented, and most of them are business-to-business. They are male over 45, college-educated, former military, you know, all of those demographics that would indicate that they are not really into this holiday thing.
But I will tell you they are some of the most sentimental people that you will ever run across. I happen to know this because I’m married to one of them, pogroming, you know, they really do get into holidays, and they really do enjoy seeing, you know, their friends and family, and other things on social media, and they don’t mind. I mean, they’re the ones that will secretly watch those Budweiser Clydesdales with those Christmas commercials and get a little emotional because, you know, they are really just like every other human being squishy on the inside. So that’s what it really comes from.
And also, you know, in our Aviation Sales Fundamentals Course, we talk about a marketing holding pattern. Now, what this is is there is a space of time that occurs generally speaking in the Aviation industry is what we call long cycle marketing. And that is because we have large ticket sales, complex transactions. There are large organizations that we’re selling to, you know, all of those things add up to more time between the initial contact and the transaction. And so the more time elapses, the more time your client or customer has to look at alternatives, look at competitors, and other things.
And during that time, you can either ignore them, or you can use what we call a holding pattern or a marketing holding pattern to become trusted, familiar, and have repeated interactions and other things. So you want to take advantage of every opportunity to build a relationship. You know, not just because you want to make a sale. But also because you want to increase your network in the Aviation industry, you want to help other people, you want to become friends with other folks in the industry for lots of reasons beyond making the sale.
And to do that, you want to find reasons to engage. And you want to emotionally connect with your prospects. So, what is this look like, and can you only do it at Christmas, right? So, I’m going to give you an example of World Environment Day. You know, that’s not a really well-known holiday. It happens in June. And some of our clients did holiday posts for World Environment Day.
Some of these examples are really cool because they’re specific to the company. They engage emotionally, but they also provide yet another reason to do business with this company. So, Special Services Corporation that’s an FBO and MRO company in Greenville, South Carolina. So they use their local hashtag, which is #yeahthatgreenville. And they talked about using clean, careful procedures to keep Greenville green. You know, and that’s a great social post. That is made possible or made convenient or made relevant by this relatively obscure holiday which is World Environment Day.
Another one is BizAvJets USA. You know, talking about the news. And another thing to take up that. Aviation is always at the cutting edge of technology, and people who fly are passionate about preserving the environment-we get to see it from above, after all. So, you know that’s BizAvJets USA. They have a different take on the same topic.
Turbines Inc., they service PT6A engines. And their clients are people, who are involved in the forest service and fire service and other things like that, and so they are dropping fire retardant and seeds, and they are doing a different take on World Environment Day by making their clients the hero of World Environment Day. So you know, that’s yet another good way to use that holiday in saluting the planes and pilots on the frontlines. Another great way to connect with their potential customers.
And then another one is the Foundation for Business Aircraft Records Excellence. Have you gone paperless yet? Now, this is kind of a tangent from there are reasons that you should digitize your aircraft records, which, you know, often have to do with accuracy and safety and disaster recovery and other kinds of things. But going paperless is an environmental concern, right? So they can use this holiday as well. No reason not to, and you know those are just some fun examples of how some of ABCI’s clients have used a rather obscure holiday to their advantage.
So, not everybody can use every holiday. We totally get that. But it is a super-easy way to engage with your customers. So how can you do this without spending a lot of time? You know there are a million holidays, how do you know which ones are going to be relevant to you? How do you get started with this? And you know, make this, make sense.
So I’m going to share my screen and show you what we do for our clients, for self-service plans. For full-service plans, of course, we take it a step further and customize these. But for our clients that are just using our self-service services in our templates, this is still pretty easy. So, basically, you get a task in the basecamp, which is our Project Management Software. For let’s say International Joke Day. That is a fairly obscure holiday coming up in July. And this one will give you an idea. It tells you when the holiday is July 3rd, that’s a Sunday, and you’ll have the opportunity, basically, to use a template that we’ve created in Canva, which is really, really simple graphic software. So you can click this, and it will open in Canva. You can use this template. You can swap out this image. There’s a whole bunch of clipart for humor and other things. And also, there are a lot of photos about humor in this software. So I’m going to go ahead and just look for photos about humor.
And I can look for something that’s a little bit more relevant, you know, so let’s say I’m teaching classes. I can use this one or, you know, whatever it is that I want to use to talk about this holiday, that makes sense for my company and my clients and things like that. There are a lot of really good ideas in here. Some of these are funnier than others and, you know, depending on what you’re doing, you know, you could talk about how you can make things more fun for your clients. Or how you can save them from being, you know, bored.
We are you going to talk about something that’s relevant to your business. Or you can talk about, you know, just something that’s fun, you know, whatever you choose, whatever, fits the mood, you know, of your company, and your social media persona. And, of course, you can swap out your logo for this one. And you know, I’m going to put in, and you can upload any images you like from your computer. I’m going to upload ABCI’s logo here, International Joke Day, and I can put in a joke or, you know, one of the captions from these suggestions in basecamp. So we include the template. We just looked at that, and then we also included a bunch of different captions that our writers have come up with. And these are just different airplanes, jokes, or jokes, International Joke Day. And some of the reasons that it’s a good thing, you know, lots of different options here, or you can make up your own. But if you start with some ideas, that’s so much easier than having to start from scratch and have to come up with. What am I going to do for International Joke Day? Or am I even going to do anything at all, for now, International Joke Day? Maybe I’ll skip that one and go straight to Independence Day. Whatever suits your style, whatever suits your company, whatever suits your situation. You know, we’ve got an answer for that, or if you want us to create something that matches with your business objectives, of course, we’ll do that too.
So, those are all options. The marketing lab is actually here to help you save a lot of time and give you good ideas, and those holiday templates are just one of the ways that we help you do that and help you build your relationships with your customers. So, think about adding that to your marketing holding pattern for those long cycles, transactions and building relationships with those customers over a long time. You can use these in your social media, you can send them by text, you can use them in your email, you can use them in your newsletters, whatever it is that gets you, you know, whatever marketing tools you’re using, it always helps to add some seasonal events, add some humor at other things but that make that work better for building those relationships.
Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you next week.
