Why Your Aviation Blog Is Your Best Sales Tool (And It’s Gathering Dust)
We’re aware that a blog post on a company blog, about why companies should have a blog is perhaps the communications equivalent of a barber telling you that you need a haircut.
We’ve been doing journalism, PR, content, marketing long enough to have watched product categories come and go. Airlines and vendors have merged and dissolved. Trade show floor plans have been rearranged and relocated. And through all of it, companies that communicate well are the ones that get noticed. It’s not the biggest, nor the ones with the fanciest booths. Rather, it’s the ones that have something to say and take care and attention to communicate it.
Quick test: go to your company blog and check the date of the last post. If the answer made you wince, you’re not alone.
To our eyes, there’s nothing sadder than a corporate blog that resembles a tumbleweed ghost town: Three posts from 2021. One announcing a new VP of Something. Another recapping of a trade show that nobody remembers. A third titled “Why We’re Excited About the Future.” Then, there is nothing but a copyright date at the bottom of the page that’s two years out of date.
The problem is nobody sat down and worked out what they had to say and developed a coherent strategy. Blogs invariably get set up because someone at a leadership meeting said, “We should have a blog,” and then an intern got handed a login and a vague brief about thought leadership.
A blog isn’t a press release archive, nor is it a vanity project. At its best, it should be a space where your company demonstrates that it understands its own market and has a point of view.
In aviation and PaxEx the buyer pool is small. Everyone knows everyone. Decisions play out over long timescales and often come down to trust and relationships and not just what’s on a spec sheet. The people evaluating an IFE system, catering tech, or connectivity solutions will look you up before they agree to a meeting. What do they find? A homepage with a hero image of a smiling passenger and a tagline about “innovation”? Or evidence that you know what you’re talking about?
A blog won’t close a deal, but it can warm one up. It keeps your name circulating between events and gives your sales team a reason to email a prospect that isn’t just “checking in.” Bu it also helps with the trade press. As a team of ex-aviation trade press journalists, we know that editors notice companies producing interesting content, which makes them more likely to pick up the phone when you pitch them something. We used to be the editors who didn’t pick up the phone or respond to the half-baked email pitch.
A blog won’t transform your sales pipeline overnight. But in a small market where impressions compound, and reputations travel fast, having nothing to show for yourself online is a bigger liability than most realise. Blogs demonstrate expertise and relevance without asking for anything in return. They give journalists a reason to consider you a source, not just another pitch in the inbox. And it helps with SEO.
There are only a few editors and journalists covering IFEC, or aircraft interiors, or airport technology. They’re busy, and they’ve reads of thousand press releases that sound nearly identical. Many have sharply tuned BS detectors. However, if your company shares genuinely interesting analysis or commentary, rather than rehashed announcements with words like “delighted” or “game-changing” in the first sentence, content like this gets noticed. We used to be those editors. We were the ones deciding what made it into the magazine and what went into the bin.
The aviation events calendar creates natural content rhythms that most companies overlook. AIX, APEX/IFSA, WTCE – these are moments when the industry’s attention is focused. There’s a window, maybe a week or two, where people will read what you’ve written. Publishing a sharp take or a smart recap in the days after a major show is infinitely more valuable than posting a generic “Great to see everyone at AIX this year!” on LinkedIn three weeks later, accompanied by a blurry iPhone pic of a pile of lanyards in a dimly lit Hamburg Messe Hall.
Figuring out what to write about is where most companies go wrong. They treat the blog as a channel for corporate news. New hires, contract wins, milestone anniversaries. These things have their place, but they’re not what builds an audience.
What builds an audience is usefulness. Insight someone in your market can learn from. A genuine point of view on where the industry is heading, rather than safe restatements of what everyone already agrees on. That’s the content that gets bookmarked and forwarded. The companies we work with that take content seriously – who show up regularly, with something worth reading – consistently outperform those that don’t. Not because blogging is magic. But showing up builds trust over time. And in this industry, trust is the whole game.
If your company blog looks like a ghost town, or if you don’t have one at all, that’s probably worth a conversation.
