Plane Conversations

Social media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) are no longer just the shiny new soapbox for advertisers, they have become powerful tools for organizing communities.

We all know that social media campaigns have become the PR machine of the modern airline, but they still fail to understand the difference between community awareness and harnessing the power of community engagement.

Who has time to Twitter?  

Many private operators are too focused on the day-to-day business of keeping their fleet in top readiness to start the long haul learning curve of social media marketing and SEO.

As a result, those same few brokers and agents (you know who they are) appear on the top of the search engine listing even in your city search!   While paid search placement may buy some brand awareness for the brokers, only active blogging, worthy cross linking and strategic partnerships produce the powerful engagements that bring you customers who bring you customers who bring you customers, and so on.

Building these relationships can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive. 

Social Flights has trained and experienced account managers that can efficiently carry out the most productive social media presence for  private operators and their respective traveler community, economic development agencies, and hospitality partners.

Social Flights offers:

• Syndication of Social Flights blog articles
• Unique blog contents specific to your operation and community.
• Cross linkages with other operators, tourism boards, hospitality, and corporate business centers
• Strategic Twitter campaigns, Facebook pages, G+, press release support, and cross posting with sister cities
• Package formation with festivals, recreation, conventions, and events; locally and across North America
• Cooperative marketing with sister city operators.

Social Flights draws on our unique experience in ride sharing systems and yield management for private aircraft inventory. Social Flights uses up-to-the-minute social media techniques to organize communities around available private aircraft capacity, public charter opportunities, and empty leg fulfillment.

Social Flights draws from our national databases of event organizers, universities, corporate clusters, and diverse industries allowing us to help you identify, influence, and match supply and demand for private air service priced on a per-seat basis.   This allows travelers to form a true comparison of the “time-value” of private air service versus commercial air service.

Finally, we also provide you with ways to spot opportunities that commercial airlines simply cannot serve at any price.

Please consider adding Social Flights Services to your marketing mix.   Give us a call for a free strategy session and let’s see where we can integrate your air service operation with the entire national travel services industry.

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.