3 Flight School Marketing Mistakes In Your Student Recruitment Process

Your flight school marketing recruitment process is one of the biggest drivers in growing or scaling your flight school. It is an active process of going out meeting students in career fairs or create events to attract potential pilots and explore a career in the aviation industry. However, it takes a lot of time and at some point you realize it is a good idea to look for help.

Depend on student recruiters

It may sound as a good idea and they could help you to bring more pilots into your sales funnel. However, depending mostly on them will put your flight school in danger. If your recruiters have more than 30% of your student enrollments is a red flag. What would happen if one of those recruiters left your company? You student enrollment flow will decrease significantly putting your school at risk.

Most recruiters work on commission base or require a marketing budget to generate results. If you want them to work hard and bring more pilots you will need to increase their commision but that will not guarantee you will get more student pilots. However, increasing the marketing budget will make even harder to measure the ROI for their activities. As a result, relying heavily on your recruiters is not a good way to scale your flight school in the long run.

Learn: How Critical is the Pilot Recruiting Process in Flight School Business

Fail to measure your progress (benchmarks)

This is the most common mistake among flight schools. Not having a system in place to measure your success is detrimental to grow your business. It is not enough to look out of your window and see all students leaving your ramp. You should have systems in place that will help you see what are the most profitable marketing channels in your recruitment process. You probably are investing time and money in marketing channels like social media, email marketing, website, career fairs or international student recruiters but, are those channels generating more opportunities during the latest 3 months?

Understanding your marketing key metrics

Admissions (sales) is a game of numbers and it looks like a sales funnel. You don’t close all people who visit your website, walk to your office or call your front desk. The first step is to measure your visit-to-lead conversion rate. This will help you understand how many people convert into contact (lead) after having an interaction in your office, website, social media or any other channel. Once you establish and measure the visit-to-lead conversion rate you should focus on estimating the number of contacts that become a student of your school and we call this a contact-to-customer conversion rate. I recommend you to measure this key metrics every month and create a document where you track the progress.

Create your own recruitment framework

Now that you understand your key marketing performance metrics is time to have control of your recruitment process, which should be the number one priority for your organization. This framework should consist of 4 stages: attract, convert, close and delight. Your flight school should concentrate in the stage that requires the most attention and helps those potential students advance to the next stage.

Attraction: This stage attract strangers into your organization. Typically they are visitors to your website, conference, office, or people who get an inbound call.

Covert: This stage will focus on converting those strangers into contacts. This will set a way to communicate and send them valuable content.

Close: In this stage you want to convince your potential student that your school is the best option.

Delight: In this stage you will make your actual customer ambassadors of your brand and that would work as a good referral engine.

Related Article: 3 Marketing Stages to Persuade Ideal Students to Select Your Flight School

By setting the right goals and having a solid recruitment framework your flight school will be ready to scale and become one of the best brands in the flight training industry.