Plane Conversations

High Speed transportation has great value for a community and an economy.  If a company like Boeing or Airbus were credited for the amount of time their products restored to the global economy (over the prior fastest transportation technology), their value would be counted in the trillions of dollars in increased productivity.

Introspect marketing

Perhaps this is the way the private aviation community needs to market itself.  Flying private saves time and time has value.  So, just because empty seats are difficult to sell, it does not mean that they don’t have value.

Follow the productivity

The trick is to market the “productivity” of the person sitting in the seat.  This is easy for Corporate Executives to understand, but what about a team of doctors going to a conference?  A single doctor would not charter a full jet, but 7 or 8 may very well afford to fly together.  Same day travel in the medical field is certainly worth the higher cost of a private aircraft, but how would you find 8 doctors who want to fly together?

Hey, Let’s Advertise

Advertising in a Medical Journal averages $45.00 – $88.00 per 1000 impressions of doctors starting at about $10,000 – or you could offer your free empty leg schedule to hospitals in every city where you fly. Guess how fast the word would spread?

Marketing is expensive: (From WebpageFx blog)

• The average price that advertisers pay to access people in the Travel market is $20.00 per 1000 impressions
• The minimum cost for producing and running a National TV advertisement is $100,000 minimum and several million maximum.
• National Magazine Ad cost between $5000-$50,000 for a full page
• Direct Mailing costs $1500- $15000 plus $1.00 – $2.20 per addressee
• Search engine optimization costs $2,500 – $10,000 website development plus content creation and ongoing maintenance of $2,500 – $5,000 per month
• Pay-per-click marketing costs $4000 – $10,000 set up fee plus $.20 – $3.00 per click through.
• National Email Campaign $4,000 – $10,000 to set up plus $500 per month labor, plus content creation for newsletter, and additional to buy email databases other than your own.

Worse yet, most marketing books say that it takes  seven (7) impressions to gain a customer – and that number may be increasing with ad saturation in social media!!!

Solution:

Social Flights collects marketing data, operations data, event data, community data and hospitality data and formats it in a way that allows true cost to be extracted and compared with seat value.  Then we can look into the community to find influential persons who would feature your company in exchange for the seat. We’ll find doctors, executives, bloggers, media, or VIPs who can deliver a targeted marketing message for far less than the cost of hiring marketing staff.

You cannot receive any value for empty legs unless they are listed and available to our network of entrepreneurs, operators, corporations, and media allies.  Social Flights listens to the community to find the NEED, then serve the need wherever appropriate in order to access the free publicity and amplification with which the aviation industry is endowed. Social Flights is the platform for such business development systems.

A study released by Adify analyzed the average CPMs paid by various vertical categories of advertisers. The travel industry, generates 8.5 Billion image-based ad impressions per year in a highly competitive category.  Travel is a very reliable source of revenue for media networks and major publishers.  It is no surprise then that the average amount of money that an advertiser would pay for 1000 impressions (CPM) in the travel sector is $19.89 .

Yes, an advertiser would pay 20 dollars to put their name in front of 1000 travelers.  That is real money.  Suppose that the price of  filling an empty seat on an empty leg (in aerodynamic drag) is 100 dollars for a given distance. If that person is a travel blogger they would need to have a minimum readership of 5000 in order to equal the value of the seat in marketing dollars.

Unlike the pre-Internet world, today there are literally thousands of people walking around with 100,000 Twitter followers, 50,000 blog hits readership, YouTube views in the millions, layers upon layers of Linkedin connections and Facebook friends; never have so many people had such levels of influence.  This is unprecedented in marketing history. A jet operator can easily leverage this value straight on to their balance sheet.  The Social Flights Platform will be able to bring the the operator the types of relationships that translate to the bottom line and increase net sales.

The Private Jet Amplifier

Aviation is a very important industry for many important reasons.  Powered flight has captured the imaginations of generations of people because airplanes appeal on a very deep level in terms of pride, technology, freedom, and adventure.  People pay attention to news articles involving aviation. Aviation and aerospace are the most desirable industry for economic development communities. In fact, many things that are not news, become news only because they happened on or near airplanes.

This is a built in advantage that any brand manager would love to have because aviation amplifies a market message. So while empty seats on empty legs may be hard to sell outright, they may still contain a huge amount of value for the private aviation industry.

Private jet travel has the ability to amplify the image of the brand.  As Rolex and Breitling have known for years: associate the brand with high performance and the image of quality is reinforced well beyond actual value.  A hotel whose guests arrive by private jet is amplified as a preferred service provider.  Products used by people who fly private are considered to have the highest performance. An event that attracts private jet passengers is one that should not be missed. Etc.

When you combine the two effects of high CPM and Jet Amplifier; there are many combinations and associations of passengers and sponsors who would  make the effort very worthwhile for the operator to fill empty legs with influential people.

If the operator offers empty legs to a hospital, their patients and their families, they will get brand recognition among doctors and executive administrators.  If the operator offers empty legs to a local charity, they will earn brand recognition among politicians and community leaders.  If the operator offers empty seats to industry conferences, they will gain brand recognition among corporate executives and VIP speakers.

Social Flights can translate this value and deliver it to your bottom line. It’s only a matter of being in the right place at the right time – that’s a game you can win playing by your rules.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-cpm-verticals-2009-8#ixzz1mNamoUJb