ABCI’s Williams: Prepare and ‘Book Solid’ for BACE

Companies participating in NBAA-BACE should plan early, focus on quality meetings versus quantity, and remain engaged and prepared for their audience, according to marketing specialist Paula Williams, who founded Aviation Business Consultants International (ABCI).

Williams, who is attending NBAA-BACE to support her clients and engage with potential new ones, provided strategies on how to manage a busy show where it can be hard for small companies to get noticed. This starts with preparation, she said.

“We have a checklist that actually starts 90 days before the show for our marketing clients, whether they’re actually working the show or exhibiting,” she said. This includes doing research on who they are going to meet, deciding on how they can add value, and “book themselves solid while they’re in town” so they can do as much in person as possible.

“It’s so nice to be in the same town, and it puts things on a different level if you can sit across the table with somebody and work with them,” Williams said.

Emphasizing the need to have quality meetings, she added, “If you are a small or medium-sized company, you can’t get a bigger booth. That's why I recommend doing the work ahead of time so that you're bringing value to the table. Then it’s always quality over quantity. So, the people that you most want to meet with, you’re doing that. If you can do 10 of those appointments over the three days that you're there, I think it’s more valuable than having thousands of people come to your booth and take a pen and run away.”

Williams also detailed common mistakes she’s seen made at conventions, key among them a lack of preparation of their teams. “Some companies will have a booth, and they haven’t really prepared their staff. They haven’t done an FAQ. They haven’t done role-playing,” she said. “It’s fairly obvious because the people who are in the booth are a little uncomfortable. They’re spending a lot of time on their phones or their tablets, and they’re not really that approachable.”

And when they are approached, she continued, the staff may not be prepared. “I think role-playing is vastly underrated. It’s so hard to do, but it’s so valuable to help people feel comfortable.”

For a strong marketing framework, she said companies must focus on the list, offer, and presentation: Who is the ideal customer, what can the company do better than the alternatives, and how and where are you communicating the message. “Then we can figure out all of the decisions come from those three elements.”

She also noted that social media can be a good tool for support, but it is more effective with integrated with other marketing tools, such as shows or advertising. “I think that Covid really exposed some of the value of social media as part of a marketing campaign. I think social media is a great extension of lots of other presentation formats in marketing, but I don’t know that it’s that effective by itself if it’s all you're doing because our demographic is old school.”

Williams has seen a growing need for marketing support for smaller aviation firms, especially post-Covid. “I think it used to be pretty traditional to have a marketing person on staff or a marketing team or a sales and marketing team. A lot of folks have downsized since [Covid] happened,” she said, adding that ABCI strives to serve as a “fractional marketing department” to support these companies or others that need additional help.