Flight School Marketing Tips for Budget-Conscious Flight Schools

You want your flight school marketing efforts to take off this year, but there’s one thing that could be standing in your way—a sizable budget to promote your school and raise awareness. 

Marketing dollars might be tighter at smaller trade schools than they are at massive state institutions. While publicly funded colleges and universities could spend billions in marketing and advertising each year, institutions that are still growing have to watch those dollars more carefully and use them to their full advantage.

We’ve got good news. You can still advertise your flight school effectively, even without breaking the bank. In this post, we’ll discuss experiments to try if you want to spend carefully while boosting admissions and enrollment among potential pilots this year.   

Factors to Consider When Building Your Flight School Marketing Budget

How much budget should you devote to each channel? What’s a realistic way to spend marketing dollars based on the current size and rate of growth for your flight school?

Although these answers might be difficult to pin down at first, knowing your starting point is the best way to build a budget that works in your favor while utilizing the right tools for the job. There are also several factors to consider during any new planning session or enrollment meeting.

Here’s the blueprint for finding a budget that aligns with your comprehensive school marketing plan and recruitment process.

Create Enrollment Offsets

When planning your flight school marketing budget, determine how much each new student “costs” prior to enrollment. 

Think of this student acquisition in the same way that a business thinks about its customers. This is often called the “customer acquisition cost" and describes how much it costs to market and convert a new prospect.

How much of your school’s money is required to attract, reach, and enroll a new student, assuming that you were to stick with your current recruiting playbook? An example of these costs might include:

• Fees and associated costs for recruiting fairs and events
• Digital marketing spend (including advertising dollars)
• Cost of printed recruiting materials
• On-staff resources for enrollment-focused activities, services, and initiatives

When you total these costs and divide by the number of students you actually enroll, you should have a better idea of how much it takes to attract and enroll new students.

Remember—there should be a healthy balance here. Even though you can expect to spend some money to get students in the door, you shouldn’t overspend to the point where your recruiting processes are no longer sustainable. 

Digital Advertising Costs for Your Flight Academy

Creating and leveraging digital or paid ads is a great way to expand your school’s reach, but make no mistake—digital ad costs can get out of control relatively quickly. It’s expensive to “pay to play,” and you should be prepared to shoulder those expenses if you want to make this a key part of your marketing strategy.

Online marketing spend also goes to experimentation, testing, and promotions. This research helps you figure out what works to convert new students and what doesn’t. Throughout the process, you’ll be paying each platform to test out copy, creative, and messaging ideas.

If your flight training school isn’t at a place where these marketing risks are affordable, then you might need to plan for small batch advertising or reserve this strategy for a later time.

Internal Budget Management

Before you set a marketing budget, think about the amount of internal resources you have for spending oversight. Is a dedicated marketer able to keep tabs on which paid strategies are directly correlated to your school’s success?

Being proactive is especially important if you’re hoping to leverage paid digital advertising. If your school is still growing its internal resources and marketing team, it may be best to outsource some of these responsibilities to gain more leads. 

Taking advantage of expert help ensures that your available financial commitments are going to the right places instead of getting lost in unhelpful channels.

Low-Cost Marketing Strategies for Flight Training Institutions 

Being budget-savvy in your student marketing doesn’t mean skimping on great messaging. Rather, a low-cost approach to enrollment marketing simply means being resourceful, creative, and attentive as you reach your audience.

We’ve rounded up several low-cost ways to ace your marketing efforts and to enroll future students at your flight school this year. These methods are easy to implement right away, either one at a time or simultaneously. 

Get Personalization Right

Student personalization means that marketing campaigns are sent at the right time; they also offer relevance to a particular student’s search for aviation schools. Instead of trying to get as much marketing material out into the world as possible, the focus should shift to customizable relevance.

Many schools achieve personalization through the use of one-on-one videos, student messaging, and improved customer service during the enrollment process. As you might imagine, personalization treats every student as an individual learner with unique academic needs, goals and challenges.

Personalization is in contrast to mass-market messaging which tries to reach as many students as possible, regardless of their specific needs.

At Element451, we believe that personalization is the cornerstone of any productive marketing plan for potential students. As a trade or flight school, one-on–one attention makes all the difference in designing marketing programs that hit the mark.

Understand Your School’s Marketing Personas

An ideal student persona allows marketing teams and admission staff to create content centered on students most likely to enroll. In a flight school context, this could mean capturing the interest of prospective pilots who are interested in particular skills, training opportunities, internships, flight regions, or career paths (such as flight instructor or aircraft mechanic).

Marketing to the right target audience ensures that any sized budget (whether large or small) goes to the most suitable places. Matching your marketing to user intent allows you to save time, funding, and resources.

Offer Real Value in Your Content

As you publish consistent content (whether that’s through your school's blog, website, or on social media channels), offering value is one way to gain quick wins. If you’re not making your content work for your enrollment goals, you could be missing potential students.

By producing flight school marketing content that matches what prospective students most want to know about your aviation program, you’re delivering value in ways that are both attractive and compelling. You can accomplish this by—

• Answering commonly asked questions from future students
• Explaining your school’s mission, vision, and purpose in clear ways
• Incorporating user-generated content to provide an honest student perspective
• Showcasing post-graduation results and career opportunities 

As you offer additional value, future students can look to your school as the source for truth in all things related to becoming a future pilot. This is excellent positioning for future campus growth and enrollment expansion.

Reframe Resources to Make them Conversion-Focused

One low-cost way to establish your marketing presence is to improve or repurpose the outlets that you already have in use. For instance, if you have several website landing pages that are built for prospective students, reframe them to encourage lead generation.

Likewise, incorporating calls to action (CTAs) throughout your blog posts, social media posts, and email marketing messages is a fast way to improve these content pieces for greater impact. If the goal is to enroll additional students without increasing ad spend, then optimizing the tools already at your disposal is a powerful way to quickly improve your efforts.

Expand Your Flight School Marketing Success this Year

At Element451, we recognize how important it is to grow with marketing that really works. To ensure that your resources (financial and otherwise) are devoted to the right things, you need a trusted partner along the path to better brand awareness.

Start to market with student-centric strategies that improve recruitment and enrollment. In doing so, you’ll enjoy a significant return on investment—a “must have” when every marketing dollar matters.

Let’s build a flight school marketing plan that gets you to your goals fast, while helping more potential student pilots in the process.

>> Schedule an Element451 demo today. <<