AMHF 0021 – Tips from Master Class Members about Marketing In Aviation

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Transcript of Tips from Members for Marketing in Aviation

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Announcer 00:00:10 You’re listening to Aviation Marketing Hangar Flying. The community for the best sales and marketing professionals in the aviation industry. You can’t learn to fly just from a book. You learn from other pilots who know the tools, the skills, and the territory. Your hosts John and Paula Williams are your sales and marketing test pilots.

They take the risks for you. They share strategies, relevent examples, hacks, and how to’s. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, so you won’t miss a thing.

Paula Williams: : 00:00:47 Welcome to aviation marketing Hangar Flying Episode Number 21. Today I’m kind of excited because we’re going to hear from our Master Class members about some of their favorite aviation marketing tips.

And I think we’re going to do this periodically so if you have a marketing tip and you are a master class member, we’d love to hear from you. The instructions for how to record your marketing tip are on our web site or you can contact me and I’d be happy to share that with you.

So today we have Bert Botta, who is our Facebook facilitator as well. And Shane Ballman, who is kind of a new member, and he has a really exciting business. So we’re looking forward to hearing from them.

Bert Botta offers tips on building trust

Hi, I’m Bert Botta, Botta Aviation Copywriting. My job is to help your aviation company, either your FBO, your charter company, your aircraft sales, or your aircraft management company solve your on-going challenge of attracting and keeping new customers.

I do this by helping your company personalize your advertising. I put a face on your company by doing in-depth research and personal interviews of your company employees. I’ve learned that especially in today’s disconnected world the more approachable you are the more connected you become with your customers. And the more your customers know, like, and trust you and your company’s story the more business you’re going to attract and keep.

So, thanks for listening, and if you’re in the market for my system of personalized advertising for example, email campaigns, blog posts, website content in my in depth personalization process. Why don’t you take me up on my free offer of a one half hour of consultation and evaluation of your entire marketing message.

Sometimes I run over a half hour. i just can’t help myself. But that’s my problem. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

Shane Ballman, Synapse MX on SEO

Shane Ballman: 00:02:28 Hi. My name is Shane Ballman and I’m the CEO of Synapse MX. We’re a cloud based aircraft maintenance platform to help people plan, track, and comply with their maintenance from anywhere on any device.

Today I’m going to share some hidden truths about how to make SEO or Search Engine Optimization work for you. This is a pretty long process and it builds from the bottom up. Building a competitive ranking on Google can take six months or longer. And just because you don’t see sales from SEO doesn’t mean that you’re not doing good at SEO.

And this will get into the weeds a little bit, so if you don’t follow everything that’s okay. Just send this podcast on to your tech person. All right, so here are ten tips that we picked up to help you move towards page one on Google.

 

First off, your URL or document names.

You need to keep those human readable, so avoid all sorts of craziness like query strings and things like that, and never change these things if you can help it, because when servers send out redirect messages, that is absolute murder for your page rankings. You lose all value from that page, and essentially have to build up the value again from scratch at the new location.

 

Second, your URL structures. Keep things as flat as possible. Always ask yourself is it necessary to do this. Do you really need to bury a page under slash team slash person slash name, for instance. You have to keep things very, very simple and along those same lines,

 

Number three, is page titles.

Again, keep it simple, and density matters. Stay away from fluff like company name, title on every single page, because that stuff doesn’t help you with your rankings. People still know if they’re on your website. Google still knows it too. It’s much better to put high volume keyword things in your page titles.

 

And number four, content goes hand in hand. Content tags on your website matter, because they’re a description that people read. But the content should cover the topic using a sane amount of keywords, so don’t do key word stuffing. Do not list every competitor you have for instance. Don’t just shove content in there to have content.

Quality is far more important than quantity.

 

Number five is subdomains. Links to subdomains do not help out your root domains. Things like blogs.yoursite.com, for instance, don’t help out your page ranking on yoursite.com when it comes to Google. That being said, links drive rankings. And there’s a case by case argument to be made for these things, but as a general rule, do not use subdomains.

Put everything on your website and leave it there.

 

Number six is mobile friendly websites. It’s 2016. If your site does not resize to fit a mobile device, called a responsive website, you need to fix that right now. Google cares about that a lot, so you should care about that too.

 

Number seven, page load speed. Search engines are incentivized to deliver the best experience possible, so if your website loads slowly it will cause you to drop in the rankings. Why? Because Google makes money providing data. And they rank the pages by how quickly your page loads. So, don’t bog your website down with lots of tracking bugs or gigantic pictures for instance.

Keep it neat. Keep it clean. keep it loading fast.

 

Number eight, domain, age and history. So this is a very interesting concept here. Domains with zero history take a lot longer to rank. If Google has never seen that website before, it’s a brand new domain name, it will take time to come up through the rankings.

Domains with history are preferred, if Google has seen that domain before, and knows it, that’s a good position to be in. Domains with relevant history are mega preferred. If that domain was previously associated with a blog about aircraft insurance, for instance, and now you’re selling aircraft insurance, that’s perfect.

And you will benefit from that extremely well. You need to speak with someone who knows SCO before buying a domain however. There are some domains that will hurt you a lot if you get associated with them which is number nine on our list. Shared IP addresses or the phone number if you will, to how your website is found on the Internet can be problematic.

Don’t use shared hosting sites like Go Daddy because some clown blasting spam out onto the internet will drag you down. Google believes in the adage that you are the sum of the six people that you hang out with. And these addresses are assigned to the server level, so a shared hosting site is definitely a problem.

Get our own server with a dedicated IP address. And finally number ten, use transcripts for all your videos. Go onto a website like www.fiverr.com, F-I-V-E-R-R.com to hire somebody to transcribe the audio into text for you and then put that text on the same page as the videos that Google will rank you for.

Ultimately, we’re talking about links here. And what do links mean to Google, anyway? Getting other people to link to you with your keywords is the best way to build value, in Google’s eyes. Google thinks about links as a popularity contest. And you want people linking to you, more than you link back out to them.

And that comes back down to a concept of white hat versus black hat. And just like in a western, the good guys wear white and bad guys wear black. That’s easy enough to follow, right? The truth is that there’s nothing that I’ve shared here that falls under black hat techniques.

But, there’s nothing but reality. Something okay today could not be okay tomorrow and you could be penalized for it. So, know what people promoting your website are up to. If you’re not sure what’s black hat or white hat just follow the money. Don’t buy links from other people.

Don’t ever, ever, ever do it, Google will blacklist your website and you will never be able to use it again, if showing up in Google search is remotely important to you. Thanks for listening. I hope this was useful for you. And if you’re looking for ways to help you improve your dispatch availability and run a more efficient maintenance organization, let’s talk.

Our Cloud based solution is like nothing else on the market. Not only can we help your maintenance team work better, but we can help you find hidden truths in your data. Find our more at SynapseMX.com.

Contact information for Shane and Synapse MX is here:

• Find Shane and Synapse MX on the Web
• Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/SynapseMXinc/
• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/9256760
• Twitter – https://www.twitter.com/synapsemx

Paula Williams: 00:09:33 One of the very best things about the master class is the quality of the people in it and that was just an example of two very different business owners.

Bert Botta with his copyrighting business and Shane Ballman with his technology company that really know their stuff and really contribute a lot to each other and to the group in terms of their knowledge and their skills and everything else. And people in the Master Class get as much out of those associations as they do out of any particular knowledge or tips.

But, that being said, I’m gonna share a marketing tip, and that is to get connected. A lot of people feel like we are all alone in our business. And using opportunities like this one to share tech tips with other marketing people in aviation. Taking advantage of opportunities to speak to different organizations, to guest write posts or articles for association newsletters.

There are lots of opportunities if you open your eyes of people that want your contribution and your content and will in exchange give you those high quality links that Shane was talking about in search engine optimization. But even more than that, make real-life quality links with real people.

So, if you can, if you have more money than time then of course you just want to buy advertising. If you have more time than money, you want to look for opportunities to use your time and your skills and your expertise, this is one of those opportunities. So, I hope you’ll take us up on it.

Once again, the instructions for filing a marketing tech tip or a marketing tip are on our website. So, we hope you’ll join us for next week’s episode. We’re going to be talking about phase three, which is the most profitable part of aviation marketing. We sometimes joke that the only reason we bother with prospecting and closing our first sale with a customer is that we have a repeat customer, because that really is where the profit, where fun is in aviation marketing, is with people that already know that they can trust you.

So that will be our topic for next week. We look forward to seeing you then.

Announcer: 00:11:54 Thanks for joining us for aviation marketing Hangar Flying, the best place to learn what really works in sales and marketing in the aviation industry. Remember to subscribe on iTunes and leave a rating.

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