Leading Edge Aviation Services is the largest private aircraft painting company in North America. Painting the planes of the premier commercial airlines, Leading Edge developed a brand through traditional non-digital means. Wanting to jump-start a transition to a market leader on the internet with a new website and digital marketing campaign, Leading Edge turned to Digital Eye Media to spearhead the new strategic and creative plan.
With the executive team decision makers of their aviation clientele being primarily male baby boomers, we could not ignore the need to create both engaging digital and print marketing collateral to target their current reading behaviors. The industry has many in person, live events such as trade shows and aviation shows so the client would need a compelling presence that would make them creatively stand out in a crowded space. There would also be a need for high authoritative news and media coverage to increase the brand awareness throughout the industry. Working with global brands and having local painting facilities throughout the country there would need to be successful campaigns put together to achieve both national and local media coverage.
Reaching the baby boomer customer base would be initiated with new print collateral creative design. We created more compelling print collateral design for live events that was handed out at trade show booths. We also created a new company Newsletter that was sent to their entire customer and prospect list which showed company and industry updates. This Newsletter was distributed in both print and digital format so it increased engagement and awareness of the latest news stories within the Leading Edge brand.
We leveraged all news related press such as being awarded large airline contracts as media coverage to conduct outreach to authoritative national and local press destinations. For example, when Leading Edge was awarded the new American Airlines contract, we worked with them to reach out to the Wall Street Journal who ended up picking up the story and doing a feature about Leading Edge winning the new American Airlines contract. An example on the local news destination side would be when the company painting hangar facility in Victorville, CA underwent new renovations it lead to an increase in job growth for the city so we pitched the local news destinations on the story and they subsequently picked it up for a feature. Also, Founder Mike Manclark was featured in the Orange County Business Journal for winning the Excellence in Entrepreneurship Award for Entrepreneur of the Year in 2012.
During live events such as trade shows, the client saw a significant increase in foot traffic and prospects wanting to schedule meetings with the client executives at the trade show booth and social media engagement with company channels during these events. The effectiveness of the creative elements put together for these live events through content sent to the customers before, during and after the event allowed Leading Edge to deepen business relationships and win new contracts from meetings originated at the live events.
Being featured in the Wall Street Journal and Bank of the West T.V. commercial resulted in over a 220% increase in website traffic once both were published. This media coverage allowed Leading Edge to gain a series of new contacts in the medium sized airline space as well as enter into the private charter aviation space which awarded their company a great deal of new business relationships that would prove to be very sizable contracts.
