In my own business I’ve always had good success with PPC advertising. In this instance, I also think that display marketing would be a good way to reach potential customers and spread brand awareness. Between the two, I would likely put Display Marketing first, and follow it with PPC.

SEO is always nice, but it doesn’t do much of anything on it’s own. In reality, when your website it otherwise unknown, untested, and unvisited, no search engine is going to show you on their front page in search results no matter how good your SEO is. While strong backlinks can have some effect in boosting results, the best way to get the most bang for your buck is, first, driving traffic to your website through paid advertisements and working social media for traffic.

I would assume the AOPA has an active social media presence, and it might be the cheapest way to drum up new customers, spread brand awareness, and engage with your audience. Direct engagement through a strong social media campaign will reinforce brand awareness and may even initiate spinoff viral marketing if your product or brand has that kind of impact or potential. Depending on the keywords you’re fighting over, PPC advertising on social media platforms can often be cheaper than search engine PPC advertising.

Mobile marketing is still quite new to me but my understanding of it is that it can be quite expensive. The scope of the mobile marketing is often quite wide and for that reason it can take a lot of driving force to run a successful mobile marketing campaign.

With all that said, this would be my proposed marketing strategy from top to bottom:

1. Social Media Marketing

Leverage your existing AOPA audience on social media to hype up your app. Keep members informed with updates and teasers. Make a big deal about it at release and keep people engaged with updates. For the most part, this stage has the added benefit of being essentially free.

Beyond your existing audience on social media, start building an additional audience outside the existing AOPA members. Use paid social media ads to bring in new followers, engage with them, and spread your brand awareness for the new app/product in relevant target markets.

2. SEO

This step is indented to be a quick first-pass. Obviously you’ll need a good website sooner or later. Spend the time to put in a decent level of detail and though with regard to good SEO, but don’t make it perfect.
… yet.

3. Display Marketing

Start reaching new audiences using targeted display marketing. You’re aiming to show up on related aeronautical websites where potential customers might frequent. I would start this campaign either just before or after the launch and I would suggest trying to keep on top of this campaign on a regular basis.

4. PPC

I’m a big fan of PPC advertising and I’ve seen it work well for my business. There are good and bad ways to run a PPC ad campaign and it requires a lot of active analysis throughout. Really dig into your analytics at this stage and understand who your customers are turning out to be. Who’s buying and who isn’t.

5. SEO

Yes, SEO again. At this stage you should have deeper insight into what your customers are looking for. You’ll be able to re-evaluate your keywords and page structure. You’ll have a whole heap of useful data to dig through and utilize. Really dial in your website. You’re getting lots of traffic and hopefully you’re watching your bounce rate. Make sure that people finding your page, especially through paid advertising, are really there looking to buy and spending time on your site. This builds your websites ranking and now is a great time to focus on that metric.

6. Mobile Marketing

By now we should have several streams of traffic finding our website and our product. People should be talking about us. We should have some brand awareness. It’s a good time to level up and go all-out on a big mobile marketing campaign.