Discovering the perfect partnership
Stratajet, a real-time private jet booking application, had spent five years building out a highly-polished service and product, which included a real-time booking capability – a market first.
While they had built a system which allowed customers to have a pleasant and unbroken journey down the conversion funnel, little attention had been dedicated to acquiring new users. This meant they required an agency to help them launch and scale their business within the competitive aviation space.
Similarly, at the time of appointment ROAST were a young, fast-growing business, and the partnership provided the perfect platform for nimble, innovative strategy as both companies grew.
Mapping the route to success
After comprehensive discussions about their business objectives, we broke down our digital marketing strategy into two phases:
Launch (Phase One)
During the first phase of the plan we needed to support the launch of their brand, help them position themselves in the market and also acquire new customers. The clear objectives set out by Stratajet included:
- Help generate awareness of the brand
- Align digital strategy with offline activity
- Test & learn in preparation for phase two
- Drive new leads
The key metric we worked to during this phase was registrations – getting new users to sign up for accounts. This allowed us to build up an audience of users which were interested in the brand, generating an engaged user-base for future activity and providing insights on the type of people to target for more efficient prospecting.
Scale (Phase Two)
Once we had built a significant audience base and the Stratajet team were happy with the progress of phase one, we would move to phase two, where the focus would switch to scaling the business. The key objectives during this phase were:
- Drive revenue
- Utilise market intelligence
The key metric then switched to actual bookings, which allowed us to track and optimise towards increasing revenue for the business.
Implementing a campaign that would soar
Phase one
Phase one kicked off January 2016, and we set about creating an integrated search strategy (both SEO and PPC) whereby the Stratajet brand’s offline look and feel flowed through their online presence.
Working closely with Stratajet’s PR team, we shared information on brand positioning and messaging allowing us to align messaging with offline channels and share insights. For example, we measured the impact of PR pieces on PPC brand performance, which helped inform Stratajet on which publications were proving the most valuable for brand uplift. We also shared results from our ad copy testing to provide a guide to what messaging the elicited the best engagement from the audience.
Testing and learning was crucial in the early stages to ensure we were gaining both volume and efficiency within the account, and for Stratajet to feed these insights to back into their wider approach. Through our analysis and testing, we were able to advise Stratajet on their most important days of week, hours of day and also the importance of mobile; data which they then used to help plan marketing releases and time spent dedicated to their mobile website and app.
The impact
The volume of registrations increased significantly, 22,567%, from January 2016 to January 2017, and Stratajet felt the consistent improved performance warranted shifting to phase two earlier than expected.
Phase two
Phase two was initiated in February 2017, with the aim of using the audience insights gained in phase one, converting the acquired registrations into bookings, and ultimately driving revenue for the business. Now the conversion point was moving down the funnel, we recognised the importance in analysing the customer journey, looking at attribution and how all our activity was working together. By looking beyond a last click attribution model, we established that while some campaigns were not directly responsible for driving bookings, they were assisting earlier on in the consumer journey. Using these insights we refreshed our messaging, focusing on CTAs such as ‘book today’ for campaigns that performed well towards the bottom of the funnel, and introductory messaging such as ‘search flights today’ for those that performed better further up. This also helped us allocate budget much more effectively.
When analysing the onsite consumer journey and UX, we also noticed a drop off between people registering and then going on to book. We recommended they move the registration form further down the booking journey to after payment had been made, after which we saw a notable increase in bookings.
We also identified areas of their offering that Stratajet could dominate in, for example the lack of competitor traffic for ‘adaptive empty legs’ meant that it was a cost-effective way of capturing non-brand traffic through PPC. Not only this but by working alongside Stratajet’s PR team we were able to create a direct link in Google’s brand entity associations between Stratajet and ‘empty leg’, through online co-citations, which in turn meant Stratajet would rank highly when the term was searched.
The impact
After just one month of phase two we saw a 34% uplift in bookings, the highest number of bookings for a single month from any given channel.
With continued improvements in performance and rapid growth, we have helped Stratajet become a huge player in the market. Our enthusiasm for the project is on-going and we’re excited about where our partnership will lead us in the future.
“Stratajet has a very specific target market, and therefore has to be intelligent about getting the offering in front of potential customers. We partnered with ROAST due to the way they utilise market intelligence blended with their technical ability to target the correct consumers, at the right time and place.
I have worked with the team at ROAST for many years, and their continued commitment to generating results is un-paralleled.”
Ricardo Gato, Stratajet Head of Marketing
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