Lake Shasta Helicopter Tours website offers a variety of adventure travel flights, and aims these services at both tourist and commercial target customers, predominantly male.
Website Design
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We wanted to create a look and feel for the target customers so that they would both feel safe and at the same time we wish to create the ambiance of fun and adventure. That is to say, we would not want to create the thrill-seeking look of an amusement park like Water World, or a carnival, because that would seem cheap and not safe.
On the other hand, we didn’t want to create a boring site, because the (unconscious) driving force for many customers is the fun and adventure of helicopter flying.
Colors and Textures
Therefore, we sampled colors and textures that convey mechanical security, like the dark blue band at top, and the small 3-D texture stripe of “pressed metal,” along with other secure-feeling, calm, understated blues and grays.
We created a custom wordpress template to accommodate these colors and features. To appeal to the boldness of this mail customer and to express “power” we used slightly over-bold fonts in the custom masthead.
At at the same time, for the photos in the custom masthead we chose three exciting photographs to capture the three primary offerings: mountain tours over Mount Shasta, helicopter tours over Lake Shasta, and commercial flights (real-estate flyovers, property inspections, or pickups in Redding, Mount Shasta City, Ashland/Medford) where pickups or destinations may be city helipads.
In this masthead, by controlling the colors, we are able to bring the eye to the red helicopter rising above the mountain, because the red color stands out against the cool blues and grays of the background.
Red catches the eye, appeals to the male psyche, and conveys both excitement and can convey danger if overused. So we just use red a little bit, and by adding yellow and peach colors we can “warm up” the cool (safe) background, in addition to catching the eye and imparting a feeling of motion.
Longer Sales Cycle
Because a helicopter tour is a “special event” then in many cases, an inquiring web surfer may run across the site, but may only purchase a flight months or years later when traveling in the area.
So as to maintain the communication, and build upon the persuasiveness of the website, we wish to capture the visitor’s email. In order to do so, we’ve provided a free, immediate-download of a helicopter touring guide for visitors.
In this way, we can serve the visitor, and at the same time tout the astounding diversity of the area (mountains, forests, lakes and waterways, hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, biking, scenic towns, remote mountain lakes, rugged terrain, and wilderness adventure touring by helicopter).
Freebie Travel Guide (the ethical bribe)
An effective ebook named “25 Exciting Things to Do Above Siskiyou County” was written and formatted for easy download, and the email-capture form added to the sidebar so that it appears on every page of the site.
In the background, a high-quality commercial mailing list management firm was employed, to ensure that email capturing complies with all Cann-Spam legislation, and this service also makes possible both broadcasting to the list (specials, holiday notices) as well as an automatically-created series of emails to be sent to each new signup.
The email sequence uses soft-sell advertising, primarily to *remind* the visitor about the fun and exciting helicopter flights, and we use the “mountain man” model for creating helpful information for the visitors, in the spirit of providing true value.
The site’s founder, Craig Foster, has over 4000 flying hours and a lifetime of experience in this area, and so it becomes quite easy to formulate helpful emails in the spirit of being a “mountain man” guide who points out the opportunities, and the dangers to avoid.
WordPress Platform Provides Built-In Efficiency
The wordpress platform was chosen because it affords rapid deployment of internal search-engine optimization within the website, and a number of features that Google likes to see.
A secondary and very important benefit of this platform is that, after it’s been set up properly, the wordpress platform enables a site owner to easily make minor changes to the website. That is, the owner is no longer tied with golden chains to the web-developer.
The site can be easily backed up completely to the owner’s computer. (And our own servers make three kinds of backups: one to an independent drive on the server itself, a second to our backups server located halfway across the country, and a third to our office computers.)
Traffic Generation
In addition to extensive internal seo, so that Google can clearly determine what the site is about, and recognize that it’s a full-sized site that changes over time (and Google is automatically notified each time a new article is posted, for example), we wished the site to show up well in the searches that people might make.
Research determined that there are only a moderate number of searches for these types of services, and so we wished to appear well in *many* different searches that our special research tools uncovered. Articles addressing these specialty interests are created, and placed both on the site, and also upon external, high-authority sites elsewhere on the internet.
In some cases a “cascade” of articles containing information Google understands as related are created, and this sequence of articles then leads Google to the website. This simply lets Google know that the site is important.
Leveraging Tourism
Because this region is heavily traveled by tourists in all four seasons, it made sense to employ a variety of offline traffic-generation methods. (Many web developers and website owners realize that capturing existing online traffic is valuable, but these same developers and owners often overlook the simple power of *sending* prospects to the website.)
Some effective ways to do this include: stationery and business cards, store windows, newspaper and yellow page ads, listings in tourist publications, roadside signs, radio, television, etc.
By using signage, writing radio spots and television voiceover advertisements, and other local advertising, we can promote the helpful helicopter touring guide, and thus further leverage our ability to continue to communicate with interested prospects with downstream email.
Eye-Catching Graphics
Toward this end, we created broadcast scripts, and eye-catching graphics for a variety of affordable advertising methods targeted to the local area, including some specifically targeted to tourists and people traveling through the area.
CopyDragon’s 40 years of experience with *NON*-internet marketing methods, including engaging copy, persuasive spoken words, and specific layout skills enabled us to quickly generate powerful, ear-catching and eye-catching collateral materials to widen the sales funnel.
Enhancing Long-Term Word of Mouth
A tertiary benefit is that these local-area advertisements, maintained over time, become better and better known to the local population, and enable greater word-of-mouth referral over the years. In other words, a local who might never be a prospect could easily tell a tourist or a visiting friend about these services, because the local has seen the advertisements (and heard those on broadcast media) for months and/or years.
Unconscious Drivers
Many specialists believe that our decisions are nowhere as logical or rational as we might believe. Our chief copywriter, Arthur Cronos, is a practicing hypnotherapist with many years of experience in helping clients deal with the beliefs, influences, and emotions that are part and parcel of any human’s “unconscious” behaviors.
Such skill with hypnotic language patterns provides our agency with enriched understanding of best presentation methods to communicate simultaneously with the rational-mind which needs to know, and with the unconscious mind which wants to feel and react and enjoy.
This makes writing effective radio/tv scripts and brochure materials easy, as well as enhancing the creation of creating articles, webcontent, and entertaining emails for goodwill and marketing purposes.
Opening Many Doors
Because the service being offered is specialized, we wish to open a wide net, to open many doorways, to make it possible for prospective clients to find us easily in a large number of ways, both online and offline.
This was a very exciting project, and the CopyDragon webwriters are proud to have been instrumental in the creation of this marketing system.
To visit the working helicopter tours website, just click here:
Lake Shasta / Mount Shasta Helicopter Tours
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Services offered, and locations served by the company website described in this case study:
Mount Shasta helicopter tour, Lake Shasta, helicopter flight, helicopter wedding packages, commercial helicopter tours, real-estate fly-overs, aerial photography tour, Northern California, Siskiyou County, Redding, Mt. Shasta, Yreka, Ashland, Medford.
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