Two decades spent in aerospace marketing have provided BDN with a great vantage point to identify trends and to see what works and what doesn’t for our clients and for ourselves. These are the 3 essential best practices necessary for successful aerospace marketing.

1. Be Different

Walk around an industry trade show or event. Look at a few websites. Page through some collateral. You’ll notice that most companies look and sound a lot alike. Blue is the color of choice. Many use complex graphics, too many words, and too much technical jargon. Grainy photos abound. Most are a little conservative and a little behind the times.

The messages are not much different. Everyone talks about passion, commitment, trust, and dedication — and don’t forget value, efficiency, and innovation.

It’s the same thing over and over and over again, so when someone presents a brand in a different way, it’s hard not to notice. Here are 3 ideas to begin standing out from the crowd.

• Rethink Color Don’t be afraid. Bold color can be a marketer’s best friend. Think about how you might spice up your palette with an unexpected hue. There’s no reason to be afraid. The folks at Leidos Holdings, Inc., have paved the way. We couldn’t help but notice their pink and purple exhibit at this year’s Army Aviation Mission Solutions Summit. Pink and purple is an unlikely choice, yes, but with first quarter revenues of $1.2 billion, Leidos seems to be doing just fine.
• Simplify Retool your messaging to be simple, bold and powerful. Get the audience’s interest quickly, with crystal clear visual and verbal communications, then drive prospects to your website (where you can track them) for more information and technical detail.
• Quality Matters When you use photography, use only top quality, high-resolution images. A grainy, out of focus shot of your pride and joy widget is always a bad idea. It says that you don’t care about quality, and makes you look homegrown. No matter how you are presenting yourself, do it right, or don’t do it at all.

2. Don’t Make it About You

The best marketing is customer- and audience-centric. Too many aerospace marketers are writing copy simply to please their bosses. We see it time and time again, and the result is company- and capability-centric messaging that fails to resonate with anyone but senior leadership. Understanding your audience’s needs and pain points, and tailoring messages to show how you can help, is the key to success. Taking a fresh look at all of your marketing from your customer’s perspective could change everything.

The folks at Guidance Aviation are doing a lot of things right. On their website, for example, they clearly state who they are and what they do, and immediately transition to simply presented customer-focused navigation, messages and calls to action. This is how it’s done: www.guidance.aero.

3. Up Your Game & Stay Current

Slowly but surely, aerospace marketers are shifting from doing what has always been done, to doing what works now.

Splashy, classy, and cool, Airbus Helicopters’ H160 Heli-Expo unveiling set a new standard in product launch events.

The most conservative defense contractors, and even the DoD itself, are Tweeting and Facebooking, and their posts are becoming increasingly interesting and relevant. The U.S. Army, for example, is active on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Flickr, and SlideShare, and even has a live blog.

Infographics are a great way to showcase expertise and thought leadership. Kudos to the marketing team at Honeywell — their visual presentations are interesting, informative and audience friendly, and worth a look.

Here are 3 more ideas for creative approaches that may work for you.

• Presentations PowerPoint is dead. At the very least consider Keynote or Prezi — you’ll make a better first impression. Or, try this. BDN recently created a landing page in lieu of a conventional presentation, and the prospective client couldn’t stop talking about it. After our meeting we simply gave them the link to review at their convenience, then tracked their activity and areas of interest every step of the way.
• Personalization Someone at the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) gets it. The organization recently sent out a personalized eblast message, and their attention to detail did not go unnoticed. Personalizing your marketing is important because it works. Personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates, but 70 percent of brands fail to use them.
• Live Chat Don’t just talk about your company’s great customer service. Steal a page from the consumer marketing playbook and use a live chat feature for your website. It sends a powerful message about your customer commitment, strengthens relationships as problems are solved, and provides valuable information about your customer’s needs, questions and pain points.

Confronted with unprecedented pressures and changes, aerospace is an industry in transition. Weak and less strategic businesses can’t survive, and those who remain now find themselves competing at a higher level. Those who survive and thrive will distinguish themselves with smart, strategic marketing that is firmly founded in these critical best practices.