Marketing Your Commercial Drone Business Now that the Trade Shows are Canceled: We Ask Readers

Here at DRONELIFE, we make a living providing marketing opportunities and brand awareness for drone companies – so marketing plans are top of mind.  As the COVID-19 crisis continues, in-person trade shows and marketing opportunities fall to the wayside.  In this DRONELIFE Minute Survey, we asked what drone companies are doing instead to keep their brands in view.

There are a lot of very significant drone business surveys, and a lot of very official forecasts for the drone industry.  The DRONELIFE Minute Survey makes no claim to be either – it’s a way for DRONELIFE to share some of the prevailing buzz that comes our way from readers on a variety of subjects, and for us to track changes over time on topics that we feel would be of interest to our readers and the industry. Recent surveys included pricing in the commercial drone space and the effect of the coronavirus on business at a point in time.

We polled our readers with the following question:

Has the coronavirus and the limits on face to face events changed the way that you are doing marketing of your commercial drone product or service?   

We gave the following four options, and let people know that answers were anonymous:

• No, we are word of mouth.
• Status quo for now.
• Yes, shift to digital.
• Not sure what we will do.

We ran the survey several times of the past two weeks and consolidated the responses.

Here is what our readers told us:

No, we are word of mouth.  14%
Status quo for now.  14%
Yes, shift to digital.  43%
Not sure what we will do.  29%

In looking at the number the following things become clear:

• Almost 3 in 10 respondents felt that because they either did little advertising / promotion to start with or were happy with what they were doing, they will not make any changes to their marketing mix;
• Better than 4 in 10 responses felt that they needed to or already had made a change: and that they would shift to digital marketing from other forms of advertising or promotions;
• Almost 3 in 10 told us that they were unsure about what they should do.

Marketing is unique to every business, but a shift in approach has been recently documented in pieces like this one, by Forbes titled, “Why Companies Turn To Digital Marketing To Survive COVID-19″.  Most marketing experts suggest 7% to 8% of your gross revenue should be spent on marketing and 50% or more of that marketing budget should be dedicated to digital marketing.