When it comes to detailing a marketing plan to increase interested in your aviation business, finding the right place to start can be a daunting prospect. We recommend starting with the basics – marketing personas.
For those who are unfamiliar with them, marketing personas are an in-depth look at your target customer base. While you may feel you know your audience, writing down their qualities and challenges can be an effective way to determine new content pathways missing from your current plan.
How to Start Your Persona Document
There are a few quick ways to get started with your personas. Research, interviews with your target audience, previous sales knowledge and identifying trends are all great pathways to explore.
The first question you should be asking, however, is who your target customer is. For example, are they:
- An aircraft owner looking for the latest technology to upgrade their aircraft?
- The CEO of a Fortune 500 company looking to introduce a private aircraft to the company’s assets?
- Someone with a fleet of aircrafts looking for vendors that can handle MRO solutions.
The aviation industry serves a wide-variety of customers, so identifying who you will be interacting with on a daily basis is the first step in persona building.
What Are the Right Questions to Ask?
Some of the questions used to build persona sheets may seem dated or silly, but each of them play an integral role in determining new marketing strategies for your business.
To better understand your customer, you must first get insight into their buying habits. These include:
- Determining the initiative for using your product or service
- Defining their goals and criteria for success
- Identifying any barriers they may have
- Analyzing their criteria for making a decision
- Outlining the buyers journey
Defining goals and initiative is a crucial task for building great aviation personas. What does success mean to the customer? What are the challenges to find when searching for success? What are they responsible for and what would constitute as failure? Everyone has job functions and requirements. If your product can help the persona achieve success, they may be more likely to work with your company.
When defining the Buyer’s Journey, we recommend breaking it down into two separate sections.
First, you want to identify what role your persona will play in each step of the process. Will they be the decision maker through the entire journey or will they be presenting your solution to someone else at the company? When you have established this, you can start building out the map of how your buyer will establish trust and authority when choosing a product or service.
How Can the Personas Be Used to Close Aerospace Customers?
Now that you have a bird’s eye view of the target customer, you can use the information to tweak or create new marketing goals and activities.
For example, say you’ve determined your ideal customer is a 55 to 65-year-old CEO looking to upgrade his private aircraft used for business travel. He values safety and comfort and often reads aviation-related websites.
This is a great start to determine some new marketing activities:
- Establish authority with aviation-related websites and propose a news story or guest post
- Create a brochure highlighting the safety features of your product
- Create a downloadable case study on a CEO you’ve delivered results for
By determining the goals and challenges of the customer, you can create content that resonates and convinces while setting yourself apart from the competition.
Personas are easy to create and a valuable tool for anyone in the aviation space. By understanding the needs of your target audience, we believe creating a plan to delight them becomes easier than ever.
