Running an aviation company in today’s market is not easy – ever-changing regulations paired with increased competition on routes make for a busy schedule before you have even done your preflight checks. You’ve got a handful of good clients with rolling bookings for quarterly business trips and events schedules, and word-of-mouth referrals keep new business trickling in, so marketing is an obvious place to shave minutes out of your hectic schedule. However, leaving your aviation marketing activities to chance could be a serious leadership misstep. Today we’re giving you the three keys that will help you on your way to a stress-free, successful marketing strategy for your aviation business.

Embrace Inbound Marketing

First things first, inbound marketing isn’t anything new or complicated, it’s just a hip term for something all good business people have done for decades: find ways to draw potential clients into their store.

The twist here is that in general, inbound marketing is for the online world – that doesn’t mean you need to run out and set up a Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and LinkedIn for yourself and your firm right this second, but it might be an idea to blow the dust off that old blog you used to keep off the side of the corporate homepage and tie it to a networking site.

For aviation marketeers, inbound marketing can be as simple as posting a stunning landscape shot captured from the cockpit every Wednesday along with a link to a modest discount or other promotion valid for the destination highlighted, or on Wednesday departures. Something consistent, something simple, something that leads us to key number two.

Streamline Your Communications

I know we promised that aviation marketing wasn’t going to eat away at your time, then the first thing we asked you to do was post a picture on a blog you haven’t looked at in five years, assuming you ever had one at all. But please understand – the ease with which you can snap that picture on your phone and then push the image and a short message out to multiple channels with a few simple clicks is truly astonishing.

A couple of hours with a decent marketing solutions guru will give you all the tools you need to truly streamline the business of marketing your business. It really can be as simple as sending a three line email with the photo attached to a specific address, and your blog, social sites, even the corporate mailing list, are all updated and alerted about your latest special offering. Which brings us tidily around to key number three.

Encourage Interactivity

To truly maximize your investment in aviation marketing, you need to cultivate campaigns that do most of the work for you by generating inbound leads through interactive posts. Let’s take a minute to really examine the power of that quick phone shot you took of the epic sunset over Saint Louis last Wednesday.

You attached it to a short “Wow on Wednesday” post with a link to special discounts available for departures on Wednesday or flights to Saint Louis – you gave your followers something to interact with immediately. They click the link, they see the pricing, maybe they book or maybe they don’t. The key here is to follow up each week offering new and exciting content.

Kick this strategy up a notch by once a month inviting your clients to submit their own “WoW” snaps to win something amazing. Let your fans vote for the winner by liking their favorite photos. Presto, you’ve got an enviable interactive aviation marketing campaign up and running.