Good design is more than just visuals. Design includes information design - putting some thought into how a customer first encounters your company and what information is delivered in what order and what format. It also includes sales choreography - the steps you take to move a client from first contact to transaction. And of course it includes the technology design of your website.
In Forbes magazine on February 17, you may have read about how Target determined that a girl was pregnant and sent coupons to her home, surprising her family. While some find the story creepy, and others alarming, the larger question for people involved in sales and marketing is this: What are you going to do about it?
Everyone enjoys working with people they feel they know. Bob Jones makes ATP customers feel like “insiders” [...]
Perhaps these are the reasons that people marketing and selling aviation products and services tend to overlook the basic marketing principles of merchandising and packaging products and services.
Starting a business from scratch involves doing a lot of work yourself. Some of our clients are in start up/shoestring [...]
I often advise clients not to reduce their prices. That usually gets a response like this one. "But you don't [...]
The autopilot is no substitute for human intelligence! There are many "labor saving" devices for pilots. We really [...]
Prospective clients often express a lot of frustration. "We have a beautiful web site. We spent a lot of money [...]
Somebody needs to tell him that this just isn't going to work. I was shredding old papers from [...]
Janus is the Roman god of choices, doorways, beginnings, and endings. And it's a good way of illustrating the [...]
If you've ever had a look at your website and seen a "cute" (or not so cute) message that you didn't put there, you understand the sinking feeling of having your carefully crafted marketing image suddenly turned into something that you don't want anybody to see.
In most businesses, sadly, sales is an act, not a process. -Dan Kennedy In aviation in particular, we've found that companies fail in sales for one of two reasons They consider sales as an afterthought, thinking that the "product will sell itself," or They consider each sale as an improvisational act, impulsively cold-calling leads, offering ad-hoc discounts, or otherwise "trying things" in an attempt to make a sale.
I love the Sherlock Holmes movies, and I've liked the books since I was a little kid. There was a [...]
I've always thought that sales was some kind of dark art. Some people "have it" and some people don't, just like in the Harry Potter books, some people have uncanny magical abilities and other people don't. Ordinary people, who don't have the talents that wizards and witches do, are called "muggles."
"How nice it must be to have such a creative job," people say when I tell them I'm a marketing consultant. I always have to smile to myself. For every creative task, there are about five tasks that involve crunching, analyzing, generating, percolating or figuring out how to capture data. Data makes the difference between a powerful, reliable marketing system and "random acts of marketing."
Now, it's equally important to hire based on modern communication skills (which includes videoteleconferencing, tweeting, and a dozen other things we didn't care about five years ago) and the size of their following and influence on the Web.
There are companies in aviation and related industries for companies to get more than half of their business from referrals. If your company has been in business for more than a year or two, you should be one of them.
The vast majority of the companies we consult with spend entirely too much time, energy and money "putting their message out there" without giving nearly enough attention to the actual living, breathing human beings that they are "putting it out" to. This results in a tone-deaf delivery at best.
Rick Andritsch is the "owner in charge" of VJS Lincoln, a company that builds hangars for aviation companies large and small.
Ludo Van Vooren is an expert in social media, internet marketing, global business development, strategic planning, event management. We talk about the show, the current economic and selling climate, and how marketing is changing.