How to Get Your Aviation Marketing Ready for Primetime In 3 Easy Steps

There comes a time with successful businesses when they realize they need to step up their marketing to a more professional level to achieve their business goals – in other words, they want to be ready for Primetime!

Getting ready for Primetime marketing can be broken down into three sections:

1. Understanding the Marketplace – the trends, threats, issues and opportunities that affect the aviation industry and have a direct impact on your business.
2. Setting Goals – these should be S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time bound) goals that your business seeks to achieve to define success.
3. Developing a Plan – the plan will include the marketing tools to be implemented that will help you to achieve your business goals. The marketing plan should include when these marketing tools will be implemented, who is responsible for their implementation, along with funding of your marketing effort to achieve these objectives.

In this post, we will explore the first of these three steps to getting to Primetime – identifying your marketing issues and steps to resolve them. Look for the additional two steps in future posts.

Step One – Houston We Have A Problem!

As with most problems to be resolved, the first step is to realize that there is a problem and to identify exactly what it is. When the issue point to marketing, what prompts this is the realization that the status-quo is no longer working and that one or more of the following apply:

1. Your marketing has been less and less productive and there is a nagging suspicion that it could be more effective.
2. You see opportunities lost to competitors who are doing a better job of promoting themselves.
3. You realize that relying on referrals and word-of-mouth business is not going to sustain or grow your business in the long-term.
4. You need structure, guidance and consistency in your marketing efforts and the burden of the day-to-day execution of your marketing campaign needs to taken away from your company’s management team.
5. You realize that your brand image has become dated and your sales message ineffective. You want your marketing to better represent your company now, and in the future.

One of the best tools for identifying and providing solutions to your marketing deficiencies is to do a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of your business, as well as your competitors and the particular sector of your aviation industry. A SWOT analysis should give you a good idea of what the issues and opportunities are for your business, and insights into how you should move forward to achieve your Primetime objectives.

Getting Your Business Ready for Primetime Marketing – Part Two

Getting Your Business Ready for Primetime Marketing – Part Three

If you would like more information on how to setup and effective marketing campaign, you can get our book titled: Full Throttle Aviation Marketing.