“Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master”

– Christian Lous Lange

Many of our “first calls” or free consultations with prospective clients come after they’ve made a significant investment in digital marketing, and they’re wondering how to make sense of all the data they have acquired.

They know they spent a lot of money, but they haven’t seen quite the avalanche of sales they were expecting. In many cases they also have received a mountain of data about clicks, views, engagement, etc. etc. etc. and are wondering if they have received a return on their investment.

They’ve let the technology run the show, and in many cases, it’s taken over for strategy and fundamental marketing practices.

No judgment here, “shiny object syndrome” is rampant, and it’s often a first step in learning a powerful new technology that will actually yield great results over time.

Since we don’t work for any of the technology companies, we can provide some unbiased help to unscramble what you’ve got and plan strategy and tactics for moving forward and improving on those results.

Better yet, if you call us to help PLAN a campaign before investing in the technology or launching your ad, we can help position it more cleanly and effectively.

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

John Williams: I’m 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 their products and services.

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

And one thing that we discovered was that we haven’t 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 haven’t updated what’s out there about the fundamentals of what we do in a very long time.

John: True.

Paula: So we decided to do a short series of podcast episodes about the fundamentals and it’s just kind of a back to the basics, here’s what we do, and here’s why we do it, right?

John: Okay.

Paula: Okay, so digital marketing includes social media, Google ads, banner ads, pay-per-click, and banner ads on other publications, things like that. Listings in yellow pages. Basically, anything that exists on the internet is digital marketing.

John: Yeah, in the ether.

Paula: In the ether. And digital marketing has really changed the game in aviation marketing and especially since the pandemic took some options off the table as well as the changes in the economy took some of the print publications off the table. So, digital marketing is really risen quite a bit over the last five years or so.

John: By necessity.

Paula: By necessity. And also, it’s one of the fastest methods of advertising. So, a lot of times if you have an event or something with a short time frame, digital marketing can be rolled out pretty quickly.

And it also is very, very measurable, so you can see how many people saw, how many people clicked, how many people interacted. In some cases, you can even see who they are, so it can be creepy [crosstalk] and cool.

John: Yeah. And they even include billboards these days.

Paula: Digital marketing?

John: Hmm.

Paula: Yeah, you can buy digitally, marketing on a billboard somewhere in physical space. So that is also considered digital marketing.

So, there are a lot more options than there were 5 or 10 years ago. They are changing all the time. There is always something in the news affecting Google or Facebook, these are the largest companies in the world. So, they are changing the game all the time and technology is evolving.

John: Yes, it is.

Paula: Yeah. So we’ve been hired to straighten out Google ads accounts that have become so tangled.

John: Unwieldy.

Paula: But it’s hard to tell what happened. Also, Facebooks ads get really difficult. They start out really easy. But by the time you have two or three campaigns running, it can get really hard to tell where your money is going. And if you’re getting…

John: Anything out of it.

Paula: … anything out of it. So Google ads, Facebook ads, advertising, and publications advertising and listings. Other things like that, all of those are fair game for digital marketing, and knowing what to use and when and where best to spend your money is where we come in.

John: Back down to the campaign plan.

Paula: Yeah, and the downside of digital marketing is that it is so easy that people to do random acts of marketing.

John: And they think they’re doing good and they’re just throwing money away.

Paula: Absolutely. And they don’t figure that out until three weeks into a campaign when they realize that they’ve spent a thousand bucks and they have no idea what happened.

John: And don’t have a single sale for it.

Paula: Right. So we’re happy to help with digital campaigns in the process. If we need to come in and do a post-mortem of a campaign that went wrong or if we’re starting a campaign from scratch, either way, we’re happy to jump in and see what we can do.

Seriously, I think, what we bring to the table is a lot of experience with a lot of different types of aviation industry clients. So that is how we’ve evolved our business model. And this is the array of what it includes, right?

John: That’s true.

Paula: Okay.

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