Charter College Aviation, an education company with no campuses or brand identity in the state of Nevada or the San Luis Obispo area of California, needed to announce new education opportunities they were bringing to these markets. Associate degrees in fixed wing and rotor would be available, with students completing the didactic portions of their education online while conducting flight training at a local flight school. The Charter College Aviation budget wasn’t large, but they needed a big boost in brand awareness in a short time to generate student inquiries.

At the beginning, we focused on SEO. This work generated an average of 500 web visitors per day, a huge increase for the Charter College Aviation website, as it had virtually no traffic before the SEO work.

 Then, we started television and digital display campaigns. After a month, the website traffic more than doubled, from an average of 475 visitors to 1,250 per day. The television campaign was so successful, it was stopped after one month because the admissions team at Charter Aviation was overwhelmed with the inquiries they were receiving.

With the cessation of the TV campaign, the digital display campaign continued, generating about 300 visitors a day to the website. Once the display campaign was discontinued, site visitors dropped to an average of fewer than 25. This further demonstrates that the ideal mix was SEO, TV and digital, and that digital on its own could not sustain web traffic — it required an integrated approach. Once television and digital display were discontinued, the web sessions declined by 87.01%, and the new user traffic declined by 89.95%.

People who were un-exposed to the digital display and television ads converted to inquiries at .001%, while people who were exposed to the targeted television and digital display ad campaigns converted to inquiries at .16%.

Because the local flight schools were fairly small, Charter Aviation was able to exceed inquiry goals at schools in northern and southern Nevada, as well as in San Luis Obispo, with the schools actually reaching their capacity for enrollment. Once goals had been attained, campaigns were discontinued.