I was up at 1:30 last night banging my head against a wall.

Okay, not literally, but that was about as effective as I was being. We’d grown out of the web hosting service we’ve used for years and I was configuring WordPress and the SQL Server backbone on the new server.

Something was wrong, and I didn’t really know what, so I assumed that the database extract file I had uploaded was corrupted or incomplete.

So I kept uploading fresh files . . .

and hitting the “restore” button. . .

and waiting (it takes about 45 minutes each time) . . .

and still not having the database resolve.

A long night was getting longer.

Finally, I called a contact that knows SQL databases (who I knew was working nights, thank goodness) and he told me to try changing one variable in my configuration file. No database restore required.

It worked the first time in less than five minutes.

I was dancing (quietly) around the house. At 2:10. In the morning. And then I went to bed and slept until about an hour ago.

“Do Your Own Work!”

Now, understand that I was one of those kids that was raised with the “you have to do your own work” ethic. Questions were not encouraged. “Go to the books and find your answer.” My teachers used to say. “No talking in the classroom – keep your eyes on your own desk.”

I used to dread group projects because I was afraid I’d be stuck doing all the work, if we wanted to get a decent grade. In the fifth grade, I stayed up all night (are you seeing a pattern here?) on a group project because I REALLY wanted an A. The other four people rode on the coattails of my ambition.

Reluctant Collaboration

I was in my twenties before I ever had a really satisfying collaboration on a project. It opens a whole world of possibilities when you can rely on people that have different skill sets than you do. A great marketing project may require strategists, writers, artists, website technicians, printers, and stakeholders to work together in a way that makes the most of everyone’s skills.

My early suspicion with group projects is still intact, I’m still pretty self-sufficient. I do most of my own writing, billing, agreements, basic designing, and basic technical stuff (I don’t usually dig into databases!) but I also have a great accountant, and a great lawyer. I know technical people that know just about everything having to do with the Web. (Like my SQL friend, to whom I owe a steak dinner.)   I know fantastic writers on particular topics and I have a list of artists I can call when needed. There is a printer in my town that always has great ideas on how to do a mailing in a more creative or cost-effective way than I would have thought of myself. I’m happy to pay people who provide something I need and can do it better (or faster) than I can do it myself.

The Difference Between Success and Frustration

I found that there were several key points make the difference between frustration and really powerful collaboration:

• You have to trust your collaborators
• Collaborators have to communicate very, very well
• Each party has to be very skilled at their task or competent to do their part in the collaboration
• It helps a lot when both parties have a stake in the outcome, or at least an equal (or close to equal) level of motivation

I’ve sought out great marketing projects with aviation professionals, in part because it works, and in part because I really enjoy these successful collaborations.

I like watching their traffic and sales numbers go up. I enjoy getting phone calls and emails about new deals they’ve landed.

I’m one of very few people I know who can honestly say that I really like every one of my clients and really enjoy the success that we’re building together.

P.S. – Want to find out if a collaboration with ABCI is right for you?

Email me (Paula@AviationBusinessConsultants.com) and ask for my “new client questionnaire.”  You’ll probably learn a lot about your marketing campaigns just by filling it out.

Return it to me and I’ll write you a detailed set of marketing  recommendations that might lead to a great collaborative relationship, or at least a fresh perspective on your marketing that might make all the difference for you.

(Like the change in my configuration file that had me quietly dancing around the house at 2:10 this morning!  I would have been up all night and never would have thought to try that!)

Several months ago, I had discussions with a gentleman who was very interested in marketing a high-ticket-value service.

• He liked our ideas of presenting his services in a way that made sense to potential clients.
• He liked the way we would position his offering so that his most likely prospective customers would find him.
• He liked the “sales funnel” approach of creating a long-term relationship with customers where they take the initiative and proceed through the sales process on their own, reducing the amount of time he would have to spend cold calling and making sales appointments.

Then, when we got “down to brass tacks,” he put on the brakes.

He had initially verbally agreed in principle to the idea that ABCI would charge a 10 percent royalty on sales resulting from contacts brought in using the marketing system we would build for him, but then he started asking around.

“I’ve talked to some business associates, and they think that this marketing system of yours will work so well that you stand to make quite a bit of money.”

“Yes, sir, that’s the idea – ten percent gross for any new customers that we bring in. ”

“Well, I’m not comfortable with that.”

We parted amicably, and several months later, I was approached by a competitor. Since we’d already done quite a bit of research, I was ready to put wheels in motion pretty quickly. The second company (PMI Solutions LLC) has made a potentially lucrative contact before we’d even officially launched the website. Some of the planned features of their marketing funnel aren’t even in place yet, and they already have more business in the works than they were expecting.

ABCI makes most of our income in the form of commissions and royalties.

When we contract with you to create a marketing strategy, we will estimate a compensation structure that may include fees and royalties of 5 to 30% of the gross new sales we bring in, depending on the role we play in the sales process. (More for products sold directly online where no salesperson is necessary, less when we turn leads over to a sales person.)

Why? Because our marketing strategies work, because commissions ensure that we only get paid when they DO work, and they give us an incentive to keep refining and making adjustments to the marketing systems we build until sales are at their peak. You get a long-term partner who literally has a stake in making your company successful and meeting your objectives.

Do I feel badly about selling to the first gentleman’s competition?

Not really.

Although I do wonder if I explained it well enough to start with.

Which is why I’m writing this article. I don’t understand why a smart businessperson wouldn’t “get it,” so it must be that I didn’t do a good enough job of explaining the concept. So, here’s a shot at breaking down the numbers:

Option One – Marketing on Your Own

Let’s say that you have a client that you’ve found on your own that purchases your services. You don’t have to pay a commission to anybody, so you keep the total amount.

Option A Results – You Pay No Commission,
You keep $10,000 Total Net Profit

___________________________________________

Option B – Leveraging a Marketing Partner

Now let’s say that you have this one client that you’ve found on your own, and ABCI brings you three more clients using a marketing system that we’ve developed for your company.

Option B – You Pay $2900 in Commissions,
You Keep $36,100 in Total Net Profit

______________________________________________________

Given these options, and assuming that you like and trust the people you do business with, would you choose Option A or Option B?

Any professor of a business course would tell you to take Option B. The most successful businesses are those that can recognize and leverage good relationships to benefit their company’s bottom line.

Are ads in aviation magazines still a good value?

On a recent Diane Rehm show on NPR, Diane and guests lamented the fact that hundreds of periodicals folded this year, bastion Newsweek was sold for one dollar in exchange for millions in debt.

If you haven’t heard the news, Newsweek’s owner, The Washington Post Company, agreed to sell the magazine to Sidney Harman, the billionaire founder of audio equipment maker Harman International Industries.

Diane’s guests, Cathie Black of Hearst and Justin Smith of Atlantic Media (together with Harman) all indicated that all the magazines that are remaining successful were adapting by changing to a hybrid of print and online content . They marry the credibility and cachet of a magazine “brand” with the immediacy and rich media of the Internet. And to many, that means a blog.

In the aviation industry, we’ve seen the best magazines in the business going this direction for quite some time. Benét Wilson of Aviation Week is well-known for her tweets and blog posts on Business Aviation News and Notes. and Brad McAllister of Airport Business is also an avid blogger and social media participant in the Airport Business Interactive Blogs. And of course, there’s Forbes Magazine’s Business Aviation Blog Wheels Up.

So what does this mean to an industry that has traditionally relied on printed publications for marketing?

1. There are fewer magazines. Periodicals are fighting for fewer subscribers as many readers cut back, read the online version.
2. Magazines are getting smaller and putting more content online. Advertising in the printed magazine costs the same or more than it always has, because some magazines are using the supply/demand rule to keep prices up, and keep their printing costs down.
3. Many are “bundling” their printed advertising rates with an online rate. Many media kits and rate cards include quotes for one or the other or both.

So, what’s an aviation company to do?

There are still two very good reasons to advertise in publications.

First is associating your brand or product with the reputation of the magazine. The second is to reach their list.

• Test your results.  If your advertisement is giving you good return on investment, by all means keep doing what works!  As your business expands, consider investing in alternate media to find new customers for your product.
• If it’s not working, consider the reasons. Consider the quality of their content – is it still up to par?  Do you still read, enjoy and respect the magazine?  Is their list reaching the same number of subscribers or has readership fallen off? (You can determine this from the circulation department.)  Also consider competition from other venues. If you’ve never had a competitive analysis done of the online media your competitors might be using, now’s a good time!
• Try something different. Based on what you found out in your research, divert some of the money your spending on marketing to another channel.  If you’re trying an online campaign, such as a blog,  give that at least three months to get fully up to speed.  You may decide to run concurrently with your publication campaign and compare the two over the same amount of time.  You may try dividing your marketing budget into several channels in a coordinated campaign, such as using a smaller printed ad and direct mail to get prospects to your website, where you have the opportunity to publish more information (plus photos, video, and other features) less expensively.
• Test your results. Again.

We love magazines.  I enjoy the variety at airport newsstands, I love the experience of curling up on the couch with a magazine (I know they say you can curl up with a Kindle or an iPad but I’m just not there yet!) and of course, I love carrying printed magazines on airplanes.  I hope they stay as vital as they’ve always been.

That said, when it comes to spending marketing money, we can’t afford emotional decisions!

Do you feel that magazines are evolving? Do you still advertise in them? Leave a comment and let us know!

I was talking with an aviation professional that worked in a large firm. The marketing department at his firm seems more interested in challenging his ideas than in making sales.

They have very good reasons for having different objectives. Marketing departments in corporations and organizations don’t get rewarded for taking chances. I’ve been on the other side of that fence at Wells Fargo and Pearson, and have worked with marketing departments at CTG and Syntel. (And ad firms both places!) Generally speaking, a marketing professional in a large organization who goes out on a limb is likely to find it being sawed off behind him.

It’s a different mindset of risk vs. reward.

The key objective of a corporate marketer is to please his or her boss. The key objective of a marketing firm is to please their clients and/or win Clio or Webby awards. The key objective of an entrepreneurial marketer is to make sales.

The difference? Culture and compensation!

A corporate marketer spends all day immersed in the corporation. He has a fixed idea of what the company and product is and does. He knows only the techniques his current company has used and not used, and to what effect. Sales are a result of the sales department, who generally report to a common C level executive. A corporate marketing person is not directly accountable for sales. He is, however, directly accountable for his boss’ opinion of the latest ad campaign or press release. His expenses are absorbed by the company.

His objective is to expand his budget for next year.

A marketer in a traditional marketing firm spends all day working on various campaigns, spending the most time on projects where the client has paid the most to the firm. He uses techniques that have been successful for the firm, that is to say, those that clients have liked the most. He reports to the client. He is not directly accountable for sales. He is in the same boat as the corporate marketer regarding the client’s opinion of hte latest ad campaign or press release being the sum of his efforts. His expenses are often paid by the client.

His objective is to expand the amount of cash the client spends with the firm, of which he often gets a percentage.

An entrepreneurial marketer spends all day immersed in different companies, products and services, and sees similarities and differences. He has to please his clients, but also has to make sales to stay in business. He chooses his clients, based on battles he thinks he can “win.” His expenses typically come out of his pocket (based on the fees and royalties his client is paying him.)

His objective is to make repeat sales, obtain referrals, and expand his royalty income by making more sales for his clients.

When proposing a new ad campaign, a corporate marketer is most concerned about whether his boss will like it. A professional at a traditional marketing firm is most concerned about whether the client will like it. An entrepreneurial marketer is most concerned about whether or not it will make sales.

For everything but the largest companies, marketing is most efficient handled outside the company. Even in the largest firms, it’s best to outsource some of the work and keep the marketing department’s overhead small. Which leaves traditional firms and entrepreneurial marketers as the providers of choice.

As the economy forces us all to be accountable for the results of what we spend, the entrepreneurial marketer is in the best position to provide the best value. Corporate marketers and traditional firms are just starting to feel pressure to become accountable, and they don’t like it.

Corporate marketers know that sales is not their job. That’s what the sales department is for.  Marketing firms don’t even do their own sales – they have salespeople that call prospective clients to line up business!

Entrepreneurial marketers do their own selling. They have always been on the hook for every dollar they earn, and are used to that and good at it, or they wouldn’t be in business for very long.

Having worked all over marketing for many years, I would engage an entrepreneurial marketer to sell my product!

We know that more people search Google for your product or service than in any other  single publication.  We also know that to be found online, we improve our chances by publishing more material about our product or service.

One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to generate high-quality, current material that gets indexed and gets found on the search engines is to write a blog.

But blogs require a lot of content.  Some find the idea of writing a new article a week daunting.

ABCI contributes weekly (or almost weekly) articles for nine blogs, not counting the four blogs we ghostwrite, and two clients whose sites have not yet launched.  Many of our clients do a lot of their own writing,  but we work together to varying degrees to develop article ideas.

Answering a customer's question is often the start of a great article.

Here are three  tried-and-true methods to generate great article ideas with real-world examples:

• Imagine you’re standing in the shoes of a potential customer.  What questions do you have about this product or company?  Each of those questions merits an article. And each will be a good one. There’s no such thing as a stupid question, especially when a client is the one doing the asking!
  Examples:
  • Why Should I Buy the Digital Reference Library when some of the information is online for free?
  • What’s it like to work with a ghostwriter?
  • Who Needs DIACAP Certification?
  • How Do I Market My Product Cost-Effectively?
  • Managing Preferred Vendor Lists – Is there an Easier Way?
  • Money and Etiquette – How to Be Polite Without Going Broke!
  • What does a good aviation photographer do before, during and after the shoot?
  • How Do I Use PilotGEEK to get Airport Information?
  • Why Aviation Companies Should Be Competing on Value Rather than Price

• 

  "Behind the Scenes" and "What's New With Our Company" are good article themes.

  What is new with your product, or your company? Do you have any new product developments? Have you added a feature or made something easier to use?  Added a service?  Learned something from a customer that you can apply to others?  People enjoy the “behind the scenes” view of how things are made and done.
  Examples:

  • What has changed with Aviation Regulations as of July 25, 2010?
  • New Software makes Live Chat an Affordable Reality for Aviation Component Vendors
  • DIACAP Packages Held Up at USAF DAA
  • Behind the Scenes at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport

• 

  People buy from people they feel they know, like and trust. Give your customers the opportunity to get to know you and your "crew."

  Show some personality and passion! People are interested in other people, and they buy from people that they like and trust.  Showing a little personality in your marketing almost always improves results. Sharing some opinions, some likes and dislikes, and some passion for your company, your product, your job, or just life in general will make you appear to be more of a “real” person, not just a drone shilling a product.

  A fellow photographer wrote this on Taylor Greenwood’s Facebook page:

  Taylor, with 60% of Americans dreading Monday morning -  it is great to see you; someone so passionate about what they do.

• • Tom Nery, the Original PilotGEEK
  • Once in a Lifetime – You May Ask Yourself, How Did I Get Here?
  • In Defense of Holding Business Conferences at Resorts
  • The Aviation Industry vs. the Conspiracy of the Unmotivated
  • Meet Tammy Brown, VP Helicopter Sales – RHOBI
  • Taylor’s Crew – Great Photographers Don’t Work Alone!

Show your passion! You've gotta respect a guy who'll lie in the mud in public for the perfect photograph!

Use one of the above ideas, or a combination. This article uses all three -

John Slemp has been Busy at Splosh-Kosh

It answers a question (Why hasn’t John Slemp posted lately?) shows a “behind the scenes” glimpse of how things are done, AND shows personality and passion.

Note – it can help to have someone else do the writing, or perhaps interview you,  if you feel awkward writing about yourself.

Each of these articles has gotten a respectable amount of traffic, and each of these blogs is on the first page of Google results for the keywords it’s optimized for, and each of these blogs generates sales.*

Why?

Because all of them have a lot of current, interesting, useful content that’s relevant to the product or service they sell.

And there’s a bonus – if you write a great article, you can use it in lots of places. On your blog, in a customer newsletter, in a brochure, in an email . . .   So each piece you write is a great investment in your company.

*Except for the Forbes Wheels Up Business Aviation Blog – We just contribute to it, we don’t manage it – and it has a different purpose – to provide high-quality content for the publication, not necessarily to sell a particular product.

This month’s video and workbook for our self-service SEO package is about Troubleshooting.

If you’re not a subscriber, here’s a brief overview:

Here are some questions you should ask, whether you’ve done search engine optimization yourself or had a consultant do the work for you:

• Is traffic to the site improving?
• Is the traffic meeting your business objectives?
• Are sales improving by some predictable percentage of the new traffic?

To answer these questions, you need to keep good metrics.  We keep these for our full-service clients and teach our self-service clients how to obtain and keep these numbers with videos and workbooks:

This is a sample set of data:

Keeping good data is key to determining which Search Engine Optimization efforts are having an impact

From this data, you can create some graphs from Excel that might suggest a cause-effect relationship between your efforts and the results. If you notice that an upward spike on the green line (blog posts) often precedes a spike in the blue month (sales) the following month.

This graph may suggest a cause-effect relationship between the number of blog articles published one month and an improvement in sales the following month

From this, you might conclude that writing more blog articles results in more sales the next months. To test this theory, try writing a few more blog posts this month and see if the effect continues for a rise in sales next month.

Keeping good data and seeing these relationships is key to ensuring that your sales continue to improve over time.

In the Troubleshooting video and workbooks, we go into detail about what to do in these cases:

No Improvement in traffic?

• Check keyword popularity
• Check to see if the site has been indexed by the search engines  (and fix it if it hasn’t!)
• Check competition to see what they’re doing with Search Engine Optimization that you’re not.

Improvement in traffic but not sales?

• Check the relevance of keywords
• Check with a neutral third party about the clarity and persuasiveness of your copy
• Check the shopping cart or transaction mechanism (make sure it’s still working – strange how often this is a problem!)

It’s important to keep good data and ask the right questions to be sure you’re getting good results!

For more information about ABCI’s Search Engine Optimization programs, you can read more about

• Full Service Search Engine Optimization Consulting
• Do-It Yourself Search Engine Optimization Kit
• Which option should I choose?

“Get someone else to blow your horn – and the sound will carry twice as far.”

- Will Rogers

Most of us understand that what OTHER people say about a company or a product is much more credible than what the company says. It’s much more believable when a customer says that a product is fantastic than when the president of the company that makes it says so.

In marketing parlance, something nice a customer says is a “testimonial.”

Here are some examples:

As you can see, testimonials can be short or long, specific or not.

The problem is that most of our customers don’t go around singing our praises, even if they like our product. Sometimes we get fan mail out of the blue, but people are busy and don’t always think about things that are going well. Especially if our product is something fairly utilitarian, people just expect it to work right.

So, how do you get testimonials from customers without sounding like you’re “fishing for compliments?”

• Do a customer service survey. Ask for any kind of comments, and have a prize drawing from each entry, whether their comments were positive, negative or neutral. Indicate on the survey that you reserve the right to use any written comments in your marketing materials. Use the negative comments to improve your product or service, capture the positive ones as testimonials. Some companies make it a practice to follow up with customers a certain number of days after the sale to answer any questions and make sure they’re happy. This is a great time to collect testimonials as well, just be sure you ask permission to use them in marketing materials.
• Write a client feature for your newsletter or blog. Ask one of your current clients if they mind being featured in your publication, and then interview them about how they use your product, if it’s saved them time or money, and so on. We received the quote above about RHOBI while I was writing a feature on how a client had added the RHOBI inventory management software to an all-Quickbooks environment. – See the article here.
• Use a third party. It’s very natural for me to call one of my client’s customers and ask them questions about their experience with my client’s product or service. They are sometimes more open with me as a “neutral” third party than they would be with the company or rep that sold them the product. If the customer happens to say something particularly positive or unique, I’ll ask them if they would mind if I used it in their marketing materials. Another great thing about this method is that I can ask specific questions about a particular product feature or service area, when I know a testimonial about that factor would be particularly useful.
• Request endorsements using LinkedIn. If you’ve done work with someone and are connected to them on this social network, you can request an endorsement by clicking a few buttons. The software does a pretty graceful job of allowing the person to respond or decline without the situation being awkward for either party. Request an endorsement whenever someone you’ve worked with requests one from you as well. More about What Aviation Professionals Should be Doing with LinkedIn

Once you get a few good customer testimonials, use them to improve your marketing materials. Here are some great places to use them:

• Add them to your “About Us” page on your website. This is where people look for reassurance that your company is credible and they should do business with you.
• Near your order form or “buy” buttons on your website, or the order form in a direct mail piece. Customers need to be reassured before they buy from you.
• On product sheets, brochures, proposals, or recommendations.
• Set them apart visually from the rest of the text, using a different font, color, lines or boxes, This lets readers know that “someone else is speaking.”
• Testimonials are best when they come from someone who is likely to be knowledgeable in a relevant field. For that reason, it’s best to use names and titles attributing “who said it” whenever possible.

One more thing about testimonials – sometimes they’re not entirely positive. Customers don’t always say what we want them to say. My advice – use them anyway. It’s okay to clean them up for grammar, length or continuity (ask permission of the person who gave them to you to use the shortened or altered version) but don’t change the meaning.

The testimonial about Taylor Greenwood, as an example, (above) hits a potential concern right on the head. Greenwood is in his early 20s and would probably prefer that his age not be mentioned at all, but since it is a concern of some of his potential customers it’s very effective (and courageous!) to address their concern head-on.

Of course, if a comment is completely negative, don’t use it in your marketing materials! If it’s a valid concern, do what is necessary to improve your product or service. Your customer still did you a favor by going to the effort of saying (or writing) something.

Honesty and credibility is what we’re looking for, so we’ll take the unvarnished (or not too varnished) truth!

Scared of working with a ghostwriter? Don't be!

Where do you think CEOs, politicians and busy businesspeople find the time to write all of their blogs, tweets, speeches, presentations and  letters?

The secret – they don’t!

They have ghostwriters!

A ghostwriter is someone that they trust to do the research and writing for them confidentially.

A good ghostwriter is one of your best allies in marketing, PR and advertising. Establishing yourself as an expert in any given field may require public speaking, writing a blog, writing articles, posting to social media channels and other activities.
The important things to remember about working with a ghostwriter:

• Your ghostwriter should be able to write in a style compatible with your own.
• His or her research and facts should be impeccable (if you have to re-check everything, it doesn’t save you much time.)
• He or she should deliver finished work on time. Every time.
• He or she should know he industry and the vocabulary. (We speak aviation, finance, software and business.)
• You should be able to trust in their confidentiality (and have written agreements in place.)

Other than the confidentiality and style of the finished writing (which has to sound like something the client would say or write)  the process of ghostwriting is much the same as any collaborative writing process.  The process depends very much on the client’s needs, abilities, and work style.

On one end of the scale, I outline an editorial schedule and project management and editing services to produce a deliverable, such as a book. The client does pretty much all of the writing.  I manage the publishing process (getting ISBN number, library of congress number, etc.) and subcontract the cover design.

In another example, I do all of the planning, writing, and production. The client simply reviews and endorses the material as his own.

Most of the ghostwriting I do falls somewhere between those two extremes, depending on the client’s preferences.

People sometimes ask us if they can just do search engine optimization as a one-time exercise,  get to the first page of Google results, and leave it at that.

It’s a tempting idea, especially for goal-oriented Aviation types, to set a goal, meet it, and move on with other things.  But once you’ve invested the time, effort and money in a good search engine position, you’ll want to continue to invest a smaller amount each month to maintain your position.

When you earn your pilot’s license, you are safe and legal to fly in that type of airplane for a finite amount of time.  As months and years pass, you’ll have to keep current on regulations affecting aviation, policies at your local airport, medical certificates, and legal requirements for your license.  It’s a good idea to fly with an instructor if it’s been awhile since you’ve flown. Those hard-won skills tend to get rusty if not used regularly.

When you’ve lost weight or spent a lot of time and energy getting physically fit, you can quickly “get rusty” or slide back into old patterns of behavior. If you continue to eat in healthy ways and exercise, it’s much easier to maintain your new physique than it was to obtain it in the first place, so maintenance is key.

With search engine optimization, there is a similar tendency to “get rusty” if you don’t keep up with regular SEO (search engine optimization) maintenance.

Reasons for this:

1. Search engines change their algorithms. Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others are striving to be the most-used search engine. To do that, they want to give users the best-quality results when they do searches.  The technology that decides how websites are ranked is based on complex calculations of traffic, inbound links, use of keywords, and how recently the site has been updated, among other things.  The recipe for this cocktail changes frequently as technology evolves.
2. Industry terminology changes. Some similar terms like “aircraft maintenance” vs. “MRO”; or “airline” vs. “air carrier” fall into and out of usage based on popular news stories,  industry convention names, and so on.  It’s good to look at actual search results quarterly to be sure we’re optimizing for the most popular terms.
3. Your business changes. Three months ago, everyone was looking for a particular product or service, now they’re looking for something else. Consumers want different things depending on seasonal fluctuations, evolution, or regulation changes.  It’s important to be ranked for what they’re looking for today.
4. Your competitors change. Your competitors are working on their search engine optimization and may be improving faster than you are. It’s important to keep track of what they’re doing.  Monthly status and competitive analysis reports keep you on top of changes in the marketplace.

So, what do you do?
Both our Full Service and Do It Yourself Search Engine Optimization packages are designed to keep your hard-won search engine position, month after month, in a cost-effective way.
For Full Service Consulting, you receive a report each month that outlines your position, your improvement from last month, and where your competition stands.

Monthly updates from the Do It Yourself Program include a new video on CD and a new workbook each month with a new SEO technique.

The Do It Yourself program sends you a new module with a video on CD and workbook each month so that you’re continuously improving your position. You’ll also learn how to run competitive analyses and monthly status reports.
Either way,  you can stay on top of all the important data and protect your position and your investment.

This article was first published at Forbes.com on the Wheels Up Business Aviation blog.

I was talking with a fellow passenger on a commercial flight recently about all the cost-cutting on the airlines. He remarked that it’s unfortunate that Travelocity and other websites have “trained” consumers to look for the lowest fare from point A to point B. Most consumers don’t realize that costs add up when you actually calculate the charge for extra time, extra connections, extra baggage fees, extra lodging to get the “best fare” days, and extra bad airport food during layovers.

The casual customer may end up spending a lot more on a trip than he or she expects to spend.

Hence, the public has acquired the perception that travel is not for the budget-minded. (And who isn’t budget-minded these days?) We can’t help but wonder if it’s contributed to the popularity of online meetings, and the newly coined term for family “staycations” for families who vacation without traveling.

In Jeffrey J. Fox’s classic book “How to Become a Rainmaker,” Fox emphasizes the need to “show them the money” for each deal for each prospective client.

To do this, you have to understand what the customer is actually buying.

What the customer really values

To use the example from the book,  let’s say you are in a paint store evaluating two brands of house paint. Brand A is $10 a gallon and Brand B is $18 a gallon. Brand A has the lowest price, but Brand B has more pigment, thereby requiring one less coat of paint than Brand A.  Which paint is the better value?

If you want a gallon of paint, Brand A is the better value.  If you want a painted house, Brand B is the better value, assuming you would use half as much paint – even before you calculate time spent painting!

A key activity of anyone in business is to figure out what the customer is really after, then offer him the best value for his dollar. This doesn’t necessarily equate to the cheapest product or the lowest fare.

Most people don’t buy a product or service, they buy the means to meet their agenda.

Very smart people in aviation companies (some of whom also happen to be ABCI clients) have done the hard work of figuring out what their customers really value.  It’s more than a difference of semantics –it’s a difference of mindset, and it seems that for the airlines, it’s gotten lost in the recent fray over price.

Examples of value propositions from the aviation field

• Taylor Greenwood understands that his clients aren’t necessarily just buying pretty photographs. What they really want is to improve their odds of selling an aircraft that is listed in a sales publication with many others of its type. His client’s aircraft has to be noticed first and has to command a better price.  This impacts the way Greenwood approaches the job. He’s keenly aware that he has to inspire the viewer to buy the aircraft, and focuses on the features most likely to add to the desirability and selling price.
• Aerographs’ clients don’t necessarily just want a  fine art print of a vintage aircraft. These clients want to enhance their office with an elegant feeling and a touch of class and nostalgia. These aviation attorneys, tax specialists, real estate agents and insurance folks know that an appropriate piece of art makes a connection with clients and other visitors to the office.
• Summit Aviation’s clients don’t necessarily just want DVDs of aviation regulations. What they really want is the ability to make critical decisions faster, the ability to get more done without hiring more people to do research, and the peace of mind that comes from knowing they’re in compliance with the latest in a formidable body of aviation rules and regs.

The Value of Air Travel

In the case of commercial air travel, what customers want is the means to get a job done in a distant city or a nice vacation with the family. If commercial air travel becomes so inconvenient that it gets in the way of the real value of air travel, they lose customers, no matter how cheap a ticket might become.

I used to fly commercial from Salt Lake City to San Francisco to teach business writing seminars.  I’d fly out in the morning and be back in time to pick up my son from school.  If I couldn’t be on time getting to San Francisco, a roomful of grouchy people would be waiting for me, or more likely demanding their money back and vowing never to have anything to do with my company again. If I was late getting back to Salt Lake, it was even worse –  I’d have a grouchy 9-year-old. Precarious as it might sound by today’s standards, (with about an hour and a half of margin planned on either end) I was able to keep this schedule up, month in and month out, for several years.

When the on-time statistics started to slip, I started delivering my seminars on the web. I missed being in the classroom with students.   I didn’t make as much money – a classroom seat in a seminar commands a higher price than a “virtual” seat in a webinar.  But I couldn’t afford the risk.

An airline ticket, at ANY price, was worthless to me if it didn’t get me there and back on time.

Actually, it was worse than worthless if it ruined my reputation with my customers or with my kid.

Now that I know of some cost-effective business aviation alternatives, I would probably do that.  Spend less money, enjoy it more, and get full value for my money.