SKY Helicopters is a Vancouver-based tour company that offers unique experiences beyond the usual "helicopter ride."

To differentiate them from the competition and grow their international customer base, I led a social and paid media team to build and execute a comprehensive digital strategy that leveraged customer-captured photos, videos, influencers, live events, community, and social and paid media plans to raise brand awareness and directly influence sales.

Strategy

Grow SKY Helicopters's online audience and build the brand's reputation.
Increase online inquiries and seat sales.

In January 2016, I lead the devlopment of a multi-channel marketing strategy targeting customers in local and international markets, following industry-standard best practices from Destination BC for tourism vendors. We distilled SKY Helicopters's unique selling points for Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) in select markets by incorporating video, photo, and on-brand designs to convey different aspects of the experience to guide customers from awareness to consideration, and finally, conversion.

Tactics

Advertising Becoming the company's agency of record, my team also developed and implemented a paid advertising strategy that included Google, Bing, and programmatic. High-volume, low-cost keywords, including competitor considerations, drove interested searchers to tour landing pages, which saw an 82% increase in sessions and 42% increase in pages per session.

On social media, we focused on building SKY's strongest platforms: Instagram and Facebook. By amplifying high-performing social posts, we were able to build a rapport with outdoor enthusiasts around North America and retarget the most engaged content to website visitors who had arrived via organic search and paid search ads.

Social Media I oversaw the work of the marketing team to craft a brand voice, map out a content and paid advertising strategy .

We also partnered with key influencers to raise SKY's brand reputation with its target audience. For example, @beautifuldestinations shared the experience with their 9.5m followers through engaging content that built hype - and unprecedented numbers of post engagements.

Within 12 months, my team grew SKY's Instagram account by 600% (2.1k to 14.8k) and increased engagement from an average of 80 likes per photo to 630 likes. The branded hashtag #flywithsky also saw 760% growth in engagement as more customers used it to show off their once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Photo credit: @beautifuldestinations

Results