Using Instagram to Sell Your Flight School to a Millennial Audience

The best opportunity for increasing the enrollment to your flight school is to target millennials, but most flight school marketing plans aren't doing enough, or are not doing the right things to appeal to this audience. For example, many flight schools aren’t doing enough on social media. Capturing and keeping the attention and interest of your audience on social media sites like Instagram is a big key to connecting with millennials. Here are some strategies to help sell your flight school using Instagram.

1. Sell the Lifestyle

Instagram is a visual medium. To catch the attention of your audience, you really must sell the lifestyle of being a future pilot. You want to give the audience a glimpse into what it's like to be a professional airline pilot. Sell the finer points of being a pilot like having a one of a kind view, being able to travel the world, and having a unique lifestyle-oriented job. Your flight school social media strategy should start by trying to engage millennials and then developing a relationship with them over time.

2. Move the Lead Forward

In the beginning, your aim should be to build a following of people interested in flying professionally; but eventually, you'll want to convert followers into actual leads. You must take steps to increase the engagement of your Instagram followers by encouraging them to like or comment on your post. It’s also important to interact back with them by responding to comments and inviting them to learn more. It also helps to offer something of value for free in your Instagram posts. This can be something like a guide on the steps that they'll need to take to become an actual airplane pilot or what to expect from enrolling to a flight school.

3. Use Instagram Retargeting Ad Campaigns

A great way to get more of your followers to take action is to remind them through Instagram ads, however displaying an ad once simply isn't enough. It can take as much as five to seven reminders for a qualified prospect to motivate this action. Fortunately, Instagram allows you to retarget the same audience with multiple ads if they've landed on your site before. This can be a very cost-effective flight school marketing strategy as many Instagram and Facebook advertisers that use retargeting report very high ROI figures.

Note: Make sure to use geographical targeting if appropriate for the best results.

4. Provide Informational Content

As mentioned earlier, part of your flight school social media strategy is on selling the lifestyle since Instagram is a visual platform. But you want to eventually develop a relationship with millennials by providing valuable content. Using tools like BuzzSumo, you can figure out what content topics are popular for flight schools. This will allow you to post content that is relevant to your target audience. Make sure you use a combination of photos, slideshows and videos to keep your followers engaged.

There is no magic bullet to targeting millennials, and each person uses Instagram differently. However, these are just a few of the many ways you can use Instagram to target millennials and enroll more students with proper Instagram marketing. There are many more creative ways to approach your marketing from using Instagram stories, contests, marketing infographics, to capitalizing on trending topics. Make sure you experiment and analyze the results of your flight school marketing for the best results.