How Flight School Digital Marketing Helps You Grow

Grow Your Flight School With Targeted Digital Marketing

As a flight school business owner, you know that attracting new students is essential to success. While traditional marketing methods such as advertising in aviation magazines or sponsoring local events can be effective, the digital age has brought about new and more powerful ways to reach potential students.

Below, we'll explore the importance of using a website, content, and digital marketing to drive awareness about the benefits of becoming a professional pilot and why your school is the best option for the audience you reach.

One of the biggest benefits of flight school digital marketing and advertising is the ability to reach a very targeted audience. With traditional marketing methods, it can be difficult to know exactly who is seeing your ads or attending your sponsored events.

With digital marketing, however, you can use tools such as Google Analytics to track the performance of your ad campaigns and see exactly who is interacting with your content. This is especially helpful for flight schools, as you can target your marketing efforts to reach potential students who are interested in aviation, or becoming an airline pilot.

Digital marketing also allows you to be more agile and responsive to the needs of your target audience. Rather than waiting for a magazine or newspaper to be printed, or an event to be scheduled, you can use digital channels to quickly share updates, answer questions, and engage with potential students in real-time.

This can be very useful for flight schools, as the process of becoming a pilot can be complex and students may have a lot of questions along the way.

In addition, digital marketing can be more cost-effective than traditional marketing methods. While the initial cost of setting up a digital marketing campaign may be higher, the ongoing cost of maintaining and measuring the performance of your campaigns is typically lower than the cost of advertising in a magazine or sponsoring an event.

This can be important for small flight schools that may have limited marketing budgets and are competing against major corporations.

Overall, the importance of using digital marketing to drive more students to your flight school cannot be overstated. By leveraging the power of the internet, you can reach a wider and more targeted audience, be more responsive to the needs of your potential students, and do so in a more cost-effective manner.

By investing in digital marketing, you can give your flight school the best chance of success in the competitive aviation industry.

Now that we've covered the general importance of digital marketing for flight schools, let's delve into some specific advertising channels that you can use to reach potential students.

One popular and effective channel is social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter allow you to share updates, answer questions, and engage with potential students in real-time.

You can also use targeted advertising on these platforms to reach users who are interested in aviation or flight training.

Another effective channel is search engine marketing, such as Google Ads. By creating targeted ads that appear when users search for keywords related to flight training, you can reach potential students who are actively looking for information about becoming a pilot.

Another option is email marketing. By collecting the email addresses of potential students and sending them targeted newsletters or promotions, you can keep your flight school top-of-mind and nurture leads until they are ready to enroll.

Finally, you can use content marketing to attract potential students to your website and educate them about the process of becoming a pilot. This can include creating blog posts, videos, or other resources that provide valuable information and position your flight school as a trusted resource in the aviation industry.

In conclusion, there are many different digital advertising channels that flight schools can use to reach potential students. By leveraging the power of the internet, you can reach a wider and more targeted audience, be more responsive to the needs of your potential students, and do so in a more cost-effective manner.

By investing in digital marketing, you can give your flight school the best chance of success in the competitive aviation industry.

5 Local Marketing Ideas for Flight Schools

FLYTSITES is all about digital marketing, but sometimes some traditional marketing can really help a flight school get fast results when it comes to generating new students. Using these techniques can add up to make a big impact.

Here’s our list of 5 ideas to try:

Tip #1: Drop Off Pilot Career Brochures To Local High School Counselor Offices

High School guidance and career counselors are always looking for new ways to get their student population excited about their opportunities in the future. Create a stack of compelling brochures about the benefits of your school, career options, financing, and scholarship opportunities. Offering a special on a discovery flight in the brochure is a great way to get these students introduced to aviation. 

Strategy #2: Attend a Local Career Fair

High schools frequently host career fairs and it’s a great way to get face to face time with potential career students. These events are typically free and the only costs will be marketing materials and booth design. 

Here’s a couple of tips:

1. If possible, bring a couple of pilot colleagues from different fields in aviation to speak about their direct experience. These can be from any industry, such as medevac, airlines, charter, cargo, military, LEO, fish and game, local airport ops, air traffic controllers, etc. 

2. You can partner with non flying aviation businesses to help offset costs in booth design and marketing materials. These can be large corporate businesses like Boeing or Garmin, charter operators who need flight attendants and schedulers, major airlines, local airports and more. 

Strategy #3: Target Graduating Seniors With Direct Mail

Colleges, Universities and even national flight schools have all seen the benefit of sending direct mail brochures and info packets to high school seniors during this pivotal transition period in their lives, and now.. it’s your time. 

There’s a lot of different ways to create compelling marketing materials for direct mail, from doing it yourself on software like Adobe’s Creative Cloud or hiring a professional copywriter and designer. Don’t forget however, the quality of your marketing reflects on the quality of your brand and your service.

If you don’t really know what you’re doing, we suggest partnering with experts like the team at FLYTSITES to design your content. A small budget targeted correctly can go a long way, but you’re still competing against large brands who have deep pockets. 

Strategy #4: Host Career Day at your Local Airport

Hosting a local career or aviation discovery day event at your local airport is a great way to increase interest in your local community. Kids love aviation, and parents and grandparents love to see their kids around airplanes, even if they aren’t pilots. It’s why you frequently see those random cars parked along airport perimeter fences with smiling faces looking to the sky.

The key to any good event is about two things. Promoting the event to make sure you have a successful turnout, and successfully running the event to everyone’s expectations. 

*Pro Tip*  Often times, the airport will cosponsor these events and provide additional benefits for the event such as the AARF Truck and Firefighters, Airports Ops Staff, Air Traffic Controllers, and other aviation personnel to show the different careers available in the field of aviation.

Strategy #5: YARD SIGNS Placed Strategically Near Colleges and High Schools

Yard signs are a simple and cost effective way to increase visibility. For a few dollars you can create several signs and place them in strategic locations around educational facilities and other high traffic places. 

Now it’s time to get out there and get some of these a try. Good luck!

As always, reach out to the team at FLYTSITES with any questions or help with digital marketing and content creation needs.

Why You Need To Use Captions In Your Flight School Videos

Subtitles are often one of the most overlooked things when it comes to a successful flight school video campaign. While traditionally considered only useful for the hearing impaired, it’s quickly become a critical aspect of your video for a much different reason. Silent video… that’s right, Facebook alone is now reporting that 85% of all mobile video views on their platform are viewed silently!

Now imagine simply turning off 85% of your potential flight school student leads.. not pretty right? Subtitles allow you to communicate with this audience of viewers in the way they actually want to learn, and it’s not as hard as you might think.

There are many tools available to you, we use a mix, depending on the specific application.

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Youtube: After uploading a video into your flight school’s channel, you have the option to upload or create subtitles directly on Youtube. This allows you to simply write in the text as you follow along the video, and you can easily adjust the timestamps and order of captions to match your video.

Facebook Ads Manager: By far the easiest and quickest free option if you aren’t a video editor and have access to a Facebook ads account. First, create a new ad by selecting ads manager.. then new campaign… choose the video views objective.. set up any parameters and hit next. Now upload your video as if you were creating an ad. Once the video has finished uploading, select customize video. Now select closed captions and then hit the generate captions automatically button.

After Facebook generate the captions, you have the option to review and edit each line of text to ensure there are no errors. After verifying everything is 100% correct, save the captions. You know have the option to download the .srt file containing the captions.

Final Cut Pro / Adobe Premier: While considered more advanced video editing software, these both allow you to add and edit subtitles directly in the timeline of your project. One of the advantages of using this option, is the ability to “burn in” the subtitles directly to the video. Going this route can be great if your typical demographic is older, as they will still see the subtitles, even if the volume is on/up.

The other benefit of using professional video editing software is the option to customize the captions with different fonts, colors, backgrounds, location, as well as fade in the words as they are being spoken, instead of line by line.

Wistia: Our favorite for anytime you need closed captions, but simply have no time or desire to create them yourself. Wistia is a video hosting and tracking platform that we suggest most of our clients use. One of the great features available with Wistia is that it allows you to request 100% human generated captions with nearly perfect accuracy for the low price of $2.50 per minute at the click of a button.

Interested in creating videos that move the needle for your business? Reach out to our team for a free consultation

Where Should I Host My Flight School Website Videos?

There’s a lot of options out there to upload and host your flight school’s video content. But that doesn’t mean they’re all right for your business. For example, while Youtube is a great free option for a lot of your content, this can be a disaster for embedding videos on your website.

In 2018, Youtube removed the ability to disable the “show suggested videos after video ends” option on all embedded videos. Why should you care? Well due to the nature of the algorithms, competitors videos can and will start showing up as suggested next videos at the end of your videos on your website!

Not cool right? The ability to have complete control over your flight school’s content on your owned channels can make a huge different on your bottom line. I’m sure you wouldn’t sell ad space on your website to a direct competitor, so why would you let them do it for free? Check out FLYTSITES creative services when you’re done!

The Top Video Hosting Platforms For Flight School Websites

WISTIA - A powerful platform for aviation sales & marketing videos

Heatmaps

See how individual viewers interact with your videos.

Engagement graphs

Get insights on audience behavior on an even larger scale.

A/B Testing

Put two videos, or any customizations, head-to-head to find out what’s driving engagement.

Calls to Action (CTAs) and Annotation Links

Encourage your audience to take action right from your videos.

Email collection

Gate your content and drive qualified leads with a sleek email collection form, Turnstile.

Marketing automation integrations

Send your video data to marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot.

Turn a collection of videos into an immersive Channel

Easily create a Channel that lives right on your site, ensuring your viewers see more of your content (and none of the competition's).

Brandable player

Pick your player color and upload your logo to match your brand.

Customizable thumbnails

Include a photo, looping video, or text to create eye-catching thumbnails.

Ad-free experience

Play your videos without distractions from ads or suggested video content.

VIMEO - A great option for businesses on a tight budget

Powerful engagement tools let your videos do the marketing work: drive conversions, track engagement, capture leads and grow your business.

Use Showcase to effortlessly create stunning video sites to engage your clients and audience, wherever they are. Create fully branded video marketing pages, embed a playlist on your own existing site, or even turn your video collections into channel-like video destinations for TV (accessible on Roku and Amazon Fire).

Capture emails right from the player, follow up on leads, and build better relationships with your people.

Create custom, mobile-friendly cards and end screens to keep your audience engaged, even after your video ends.

Connect with your audience live and in real time. Create unlimited live events, stream to unlimited viewers, simulcast to your favorite social platforms, and interact with everyone in a live chat.

Replace any video without changing the URL or losing your stats, likes and comments. You can even update your video right from Final Cut Pro X with our macOS app.

Track your video’s performance on Vimeo, on social media, and anywhere it’s embedded, all from one dashboard. With real-time data and long-term reporting, you can spot trends as they’re breaking and for years to come.

Learn exactly how people are watching your videos and (gasp!) when they're dropping off. You can even replace your video with a new, optimized version without affecting the URL, stats, likes or comments.

Find out how people are finding your video, where they live in the world, what devices they’re using, and learn even more about your viewers.

Natively publish your videos to social media and monitor every play, like, share and repost. And compare different platforms side-by-side to see where your audience is thriving and where they need a little more love.

VIDYARD - A feature rich platform built for business

Interact with your flight school prospects while they’re at peak engagement with pre and post-roll calls-to-action like forms, gates, links, and more.

Customize your Vidyard video player to maximize first impressions. Make it yours, embed it anywhere, and of course – it’s responsive across all devices

Turbocharge your demand-gen and account-based marketing (ABM) with video engagement data. With Vidyard you also get free automatic transcriptions, the option to create captions in other languages, and the ability to A/B test up to 16 thumbnails.

Vidyard tracks everything down to how individual users interact with each video. Did they share it? Rewatch one part 10 times? Click the CTA? Use data to optimize your videos or channels and score leads and accounts based on engagement

Schedule reports, control permissions, and push video data into your CRM,
marketing system, and BI tool via best in class integrations.

Personalize your video to deliver a unique, individualized experience to thousands of viewers.

Include personalized video on your landing page to delight your audience, and qualify the most engaged leads

Sales can easily send personalized videos tailored to each lead with the simple push of a button.

Vidyard videos optimize themselves for SEO. As soon as you upload a video, a transcript is created. This is combined with other information like XML sitemaps and then added to your video automatically. Google is going to love you!

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Need high quality sales and marketing videos to help grow your flight school? Reach out to our team of experts to get a free video strategy and learn what videos your business should be creating!

4 Reasons To Use A Flight School Specific Digital Marketing Agency

Flight School Marketers Speak Your Language

IFR Certificate? Flight review? CFI or MEI? Good flight school marketers are already intimately familiar with the unique language of aviation. If you aren’t succeeding, then we aren’t succeeding and it’s our job to know exactly what you’re talking about. We know what you offer, how to position flight training in the market, how to entice prospective flight students, and we know how to get them through a sales funnel to get a phone call or book a discovery flight. Having the unique skill set of understanding digital and local marketing, but also focusing solely on the flight school and instructor space allows us to go deeper into what works, use data comparisons to make decisions and to leverage the successes of other flight schools into the successes of your business.

The FLYTSITES Approach

At FLYTSITES, we value client service over everything we do. Our mission is to deliver the best flight school marketing in the industry and dominate digital marketing for our clients… We may not be based in your town, but we’re in the client service business and we know what it takes to become a true partner. Making sure we pick up the phone when possible, responding to emails as soon as possible, and ensuring we have opportunities to discuss performance and results. Whether that’s over the phone or a Zoom video call. We always go the extra mile for our flight school clients, because when you’re a FLYTSITES client, you’re family. We’re great communicators and are a results-driven agency.

We Know Aviation

Local agencies can pretend they understand you and send your flight school services on the same path as they send restaurants and retail stores. The reality is reaching new flight school students for a business owner is not as easy as it might sound. The fact is flying is not as easy of a sell as cheap gifts, clothes, new restaurants, vacations, electronics...you get the point. Local agencies typically struggle to adapt to the aviation and flight training market.

We Have Flight School Specific Processes

Our aviation roots have made us very efficient and effective in working with flight instructors. Our teams’ processes, ideas, and efficiencies have been refined to work in the flight training market. From our reporting to our approval and creative process, we do what works for our flight school owners and what is in the best interest of their businesses.

Whether or not you call FLYTSITES when you’re evaluating your flight school marketing options is your choice, but we strongly encourage you to work with a marketing agency that prioritizes flight schools and combined with the service of a local agency as you search for the right partner for your business.

~ Reach out to our team for a free consultation