American Avalanche Institute: Promoting Snow Safety Education
The American Avalanche Institute provides snow safety education, recreational, and professional-level avalanche courses across North America, with a primary geographic focus on Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana.
How to Increase Snow Safety Education and Course Enrollment
We work with Top Rope Media to help create our marketing strategy for the promotion of our snow safety education courses and to grow brand awareness. Top Rope Media has been an incredible partner – helping to focus our media efforts and brainstorm new and different ways to grow brand awareness and to better serve our students. Tyler and Meredith have provided critical digital marketing services that have allowed us to grow the business and stay focused on avalanche education. Thanks, guys!
Senior Instructor at the American Avalanche Institute
Project Highlights
In 2019, Sarah Carpenter read our monthly marketing newsletter and decided it was time to take action to market her in-person and online snow safety education and avalanche courses. Sarah was seeing new avalanche education courses pop up that directly competed with the American Avalanche Institute (AAI), and right in her hometown near Jackson, Wyoming! In addition, with backcountry equipment sales up, and more people skiing out-of-bounds at their local resort, she knew there had to be better ways to reach more people and provide the snow safety education they needed to travel safely in avalanche terrain.
AAI offers avalanche education courses for industry professionals which include mountain guides, ski patrol, avalanche forecasters, and search and rescue teams. In addition, they also offer snow safety education courses for recreational users such as skiers, snowboarders, snowmobilers, hikers, and anyone who spends time in the backcountry.
Therefore, we worked with the American Avalanche Institute to establish the following key areas we would target for growth:
- In-Person Course Bookings
- Online Class Bookings
- Newsletter Sign Ups
- Website Traffic
- Social Media Growth on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
Goals
Participation in backcountry snow sports has increased dramatically, over 400%, in the past 5 years. This is due to technological improvements in skis, snowboards, and snowmobiles. Couple this with low snowfall, and jam-packed resorts, and it results in more people heading into the backcountry and side-country in greater numbers every year. This has created an influx of individuals who have little to no experience in how to recognize and travel safely in avalanche terrain.
Therefore, while basic avalanche knowledge is still low, the demand is increasing for snow safety and avalanche education courses. This demand is coming from professionals, like ski patrollers, mountain guides, and emergency first responders, as well as from recreational skiers and snowboarders.
In addition, over the past 5 years, the American Avalanche Institute has seen the competitive landscape shift. More avalanche and snow safety education course providers are entering the marketplace. Therefore, each year of marketing education courses for the American Avalanche Institute brings new challenges.
Our goals reached with AAI:
- Increased the number of in-person class sign-ups, selling out all classes in 2021!
- Launch and grow the number of online avalanche class bookings, with new signups every week
- Streamline content production- creating Content Calendars and using Hootsuite to schedule posts across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
- Produce successful advertising campaigns across Google, Facebook, and Instagram
- Host weekly Live events and create How-To YouTube Videos
- Grow organic followers on Instagram from 6K to 11.5K+ without paying for followers!
- 2x per month email newsletters to highlight courses and instructors
- Increased brand awareness and brand partnerships
We also added Public Relations to our Scope of Work, and our first press release for AAI was published on Outdoor Sportwire and SNEWS!