With years of experience and a wide range of clients in the aviation and aerospace industry over the years, the experts at Communications Strategy Group (CSG®) have seen firsthand the value of balanced, purposeful marketing strategies for aviation and aerospace businesses. This guide will explain the benefits of such a strategy, the way aviation and aerospace marketing works, which products and services best lend themselves to marketing, common challenges aviation and aerospace companies will face in their campaigns, common templates for marketing strategies, and more.
What is Aerospace and Aviation Marketing?
Aviation and aerospace marketing is the use of strategic communications to promote an aviation or aerospace company with decision-makers. As the aviation and aerospace industry has diversified and become more competitive, this sub-field has likewise become more sophisticated, more effective and more important. Aviation and aerospace companies today need to highlight their accomplishments, distinguish themselves from competitors, target potential customers, partners, and investors accurately and build enduring brands that people trust, often with their personal safety.
How Does Aviation and Aerospace Marketing Work?
Aviation and aerospace marketing consists of many forms of promotion. These can include traditional broadcast or print ads, digital or social media ads, content marketing staples like social media posts or blog articles, special announcements on company web pages and much more. All these strategies can be leveraged to raise brand awareness, secure valuable contracts,generate leads or boost conversions, or to improve a company’s SEO performance, multiply backlinks and strengthen domain authority. Aviation and aerospace marketing can also create public excitement about emerging technologies, new products or expanded services that a company is poised to deliver. Whatever promotion a company chooses may travel through channels like social media, broadcast media, industry trade media outlets, speaking opportunities, bylined articles, , third-party websites, and search engine results. All strategies in this vein imply the additional tasks of audience analysis, KPO tracking for ads and content and other back-end analysis. With so many strategic options and so many factors to consider within those options, many aviation and aerospace companies opt for help out-of-house when launching marketing initiatives.
Marketing For Different Aviation And Aerospace Products & Services
The aviation and aerospace industry is wider and deeper than ever, making the following aviation and aerospace products and services all opportune substrates for marketing activity:
Spacecraft Manufacturers
With technological advances making spacecraft builds and launches cheaper and safer, the allure of space now being commodified for any number of reasons, including as an unforgettable experience for the everyday person. This means more launches, greater demand for spacecraft and space logistics services, and thus, a golden chance for marketers to promote the spacecraft manufacturers and industry providers all lining up to lead a projected market boom.
Commercial Aerospace Manufacturers
Space is the new frontier, but the commercial aerospace manufacturers who jostle for position underneath it need marketing every bit as much as ever. Boutique and established airlines, freight companies and the like all require not just aircraft, but aircraft outfitted with highly-advanced instruments and controls. As a result commercial aerospace manufacture is fertile soil for companies who build anything from entire aircraft to a single type of temperature sensor. The success of each of these specialties hinges on B2B and B2C product marketing carried out with insight into its customer base.
Satellite Communications
Demand for small satellites in particular is on the rise. The trend here is toward many small satellites carrying out continuous observation of locations on earth and space communications of. This gives satellite companies unprecedented space to stake a claim in the industry. Through marketing, they can reach a receptive audience with their value propositions.
Space Logistics and Infrastructure
With the rising industrial interest in sending people, material and information through space and housing them within it, logistical questions have emerged. How do you organize, transport, store, maintain and account for all these elements? Logistical companies are expanding their expertise in the cataloging and transport of material and digital items to include areas beyond the atmosphere, and using marketing principles to showcase their newfound capability.
Education and Government Agencies
As our partnership with NASA for their GLOBE Program shows, even established aerospace entities can often achieve greater engagement, greater reach and a rejuvenation of their brand voice through informed marketing strategies. Drilling down to the core of an audience’s motivations with marketing tools like CSG did for NASA allows for a number of downstream benefits including more effective content generation and more effective targeting.
Airline Industry
Airlines operate in high-stakes contexts where public perception matters greatly, since customers in this space are putting their physical safety in companies’ hands and accidents are widely-publicized. Cultivating authority and credibility for brands is key, with digital marketing and SEO components in particular offering a way forward. Beyond this, marketing for airlines often emphasizes quality of service, performance over time, and reliability regardless of demand volume.
Airports
Marketing for airports is commonly a way to announce improvements, expansions, sustainability initiatives and renovations, and also to address misconceptions around price, convenience or safety that are causing people to hesitate to use air travel.
Common Aviation and Aerospace Marketing Challenges
Aviation marketing involves a host of unique challenges. For companies in niche areas of the industry, marketing material must often walk a fine line between being abstruse and failing to demonstrate technical expertise. Especially when a company is trying to close large, recurring B2B deals, their partners often want to understand every step of their internal processes while also getting a clear sense how they differ from their competitors and what gives them special authority in their space. This means their marketing materials must be crystal clear without sacrificing technical detail, and any aviation marketing consultant or service they hire will need inside industry knowledge along with a high degree of skill in analyzing and reflecting customer emotions to find this balance.
Because it deals with an energy-intensive sector in which alternative fuels have made little impact so far, another challenge aviation marketing may also come up against is ESG framing. Designing marketing campaigns to tell the stories behind companies’ efforts to reduce their environmental impact can connect company values to customer lives and assure people that the businesses they support are in line with what they hold most important.
As the world economy moves unpredictably as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, all businesses in the hospitality industry, including airlines and airports, face another challenge in convincing people to make room in their lives for the kind of unrestricted travel they did before. Marketing pushes that highlight price competitiveness, convenience, the value of human connection achieved through travel, and safety protocols to limit infectious disease spread will all touch on the pain points at play in this respect.
Aviation and Aerospace Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business
No two aviation or aerospace companies are identical, and therefore their marketing strategies will, and should, differ as well. Effective marketing requires custom-built solutions that start with deep analysis of customer journeys, company voice, and company goals. That said the solutions chosen may commonly fall into one or more of these categories:
Paid Advertising
Whether placed on search engine results pages, third-party websites, social media, or in print media, traditional ads have retained their impact even as the importance of content marketing has increased. Using a balanced approach that does not exclude these tools simply for the sake of what is most fashionable, but does not lean on them too heavily either, has proved effective for our aviation clients in this industry.
Digital Marketing
The online experience is vital to customer decisions today. Meeting customers where they are demands expertise in digital marketing, as people congregate around search engine reviews, video explanations of products and services, recommendation from social media influencers and the like.
Social Media
One manifestation of the digital transformation of marketing practices is the use of social media content to generate awareness and leads, recruit talent, make company announcements and drive traffic to owned content. An aviation marketing agency should be equipped to take advantage of this trend with engaging, on-brand social content that does its job at or above industry rates, as part of a long-term strategy to expand a company’s customer base by increments.
Content Marketing
With paid content on one side of a marketing arch and content marketing on the other, aviation companies have a resilient strategy capable of enduring stress and spanning the distance between them and their target audiences. Using social media, blog posts, video, contributed content, infographics, educational articles and other content, these companies may give themselves opportunities in over 80% of individual consumer decisions and around 70% of B2B purchases.
Website Design
Conversions live or die on an aviation company’s website. An unsatisfying page visit will prompt the majority of users to pursue other options. And as competition intensifies in this industry, the expectations of users are only going higher. Glitchy, unattractive website design bare of content to show authority, bare of customer testimonials or case studies to show results and unable to address the concerns of the audience in advance will not make the cut in today’s aviation business marketing. The solution for aviation companies is to find a partner with expertise in digital design who can display the messages needed in attractive, user-friendly interfaces that remove, rather than add, impediments in the customer journey down-funnel.
Develop Your Aviation and Aerospace Marketing Strategy With Us
What is aviation and aerospace marketing? It is an entire world of strategic communications waiting to be explored, one that may hold the answers to a host of business problems. Whether for the sake of boosting traffic or impressions, improving conversion rate or improving your content performance in key metrics such as SEO ranking, time on page and scroll depth, this single discipline encompasses the strategies you would need to master for the outcome you want.
But you don’t have to do that alone. CSG knows aviation and aerospace marketing inside out. With specialists on our team who leverage advanced tools in this space and deliver real results for our clients, we’re ready to help your business dreams take flight. Let’s get started.
