Aerospace Technology Institute

An independent, not-for-profit organisation, The Aerospace Technology Institute (ATI) develops the UK aerospace technology strategy, responding to challenges faced by the UK civil aerospace sector. Its innovation roadmap is designed to ensure that the UK remain competitive in the global market. Their work complements the Aerospace Growth Partnerships sector strategy. 

The ATI operates a £3.9bn joint government-industry programme to promote transformative air transport technology and fund world class research and development. The ATI leverages government funding (secured to 2031) alongside industry funding to create an annual fund of £400-500 million. Their projects align with the ambitious Destination Zero sustainable technology strategy which is designed to support carbon neutral flying by 2050. The ATI are also tasked with securing jobs, maintaining skills and delivering economic benefits across the UK.

The Aerospace Technology Institute fulfils a unique role in the industry as a government and industry funded independent not-for-profit. Whilst their funding is secured to 2031, the organisations goals are set to be achieved by 2050 meaning that they will need to bid again for the renewal of their government contract. The ATI team incorporates sector experts, many with engineering backgrounds, some from corporate finance and others sustainability.

As a government and industry funded organisation the ATI have a number of stakeholders they are answerable to, some of which sit on their Board. This includes representatives from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), major UK aerospace manufacturers, SME’s within the UK supply chain and those in academia and research.

Whilst technically the ATI doesn’t have competitors, they will have to bid to renew their government contract in 2031. Organisations in a similar situation include the closely related Aerospace Growth Partnership (AGP) who also represent the strategic partnership between government and industry. Whilst their role focuses on the growth of the UK aerospace industry they also have a responsibility to drive innovation and generate R&D funding. Other comparators could include institutes that receive government funding for R&D.

The Aerospace Technology Institute were looking to improve awareness of their brand, highlighting their organisation’s purpose and value. They had identified a number of areas in which a partner could bring fresh ideas and perspective, supporting them through transformation and setting strategic direction. These included input into their marcomms strategy,  consistent design support, technical and accessibility improvements to optimise their website for future users and realising opportunities to engage with their significant social media following. 

Understanding the business, audience, customer and category are fundamental to constructing appropriate marketing tactics. Therefore, the ATI’s marketing strategy was developed during the initial 8 weeks, following an initial discovery phase and some detailed market research.

We conducted a thorough audit of their website and infrastructure, using tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and HotJar to aid analysis. This audit informed a 12-month development roadmap to guide future enhancements and enabled us to migrate the site to a more sustainable provider (in line with ATI’s Race to Zero and Net Zero commitments). This involved meticulous pre-migration planning, thorough testing and QA before the switch when further analysis was undertaken including SEO checks. Following this we continued to provide design and development support.

A social media opportunity audit was undertaken to define the landscape, audience, content and appropriate channels. This insight fed into the development of the social media strategy, including community and campaign planning ahead of its implementation.

Investment was made in mapping ATI’s customer personas and journey from brand awareness and discovery through to advocacy. This investigation alongside a Mailchimp data audit (for structure and compliance) formed the perfect foundation for devising the email strategy. Email templates and sign up performance were also assessed, all to ensure that automated communications were constructed to be appropriate to each audience member at each stage of their engagement journey. 

Following these tasks we built a Looker Studio Marketing Attribution report to consolidate data into a cohesive automated report to evaluate channel performance and inform adjustments to optimise ROI. Ongoingly we provided quarterly benchmarking reports on retained services such as technical SEO, UX reviews with opportunity reports, monthly design resources, website support and enhancement, content and asset generation, social media engagement and community management, email development and execution.

Our design work encompassed the redesign of various website elements, assets for the Farnborough Air Show and ATI awards, templates, event branding and team training. We’ve implemented mobile navigation changes, added new components and created a popup builder within the website theme. 

We also delivered a number of media assets shot at the Farnborough Airshow including imagery and video to showcase ATI’s expertise and industry collaboration, talking heads with ATI beneficiaries and a wrap-up highlight reel of the event.

• Embracing national awareness days into the social media schedule.
• Website performance improvements (including Core Web Vitals), plugin stack and image optimisation.
• Brand and media enhancements.

Planning a schedule of events for the ATI to attend and generate social posts from, some with StrategiQ in-person support to create social-first content, behind the scenes footage and capturing thoughts and reactions to meeting clients and partners.

Within the first few months we identified new opportunities for the ATI such as:

• Engaging with graduates seeking employment in the aerospace industry and ongoing aviation education on Reddit and at university events.
• Featuring case studies from companies whose projects ATI have funded historically and recently, sharing them on social media.
• Creating content on ATI members to highlight career paths into the aerospace industry.
• Bringing the separate ATI Hub into the main site to reduce duplication of efforts and improve efficiencies.

Within the first few months the website achieved an uplift in sessions of 29% YoY (far exceeding the targeted 6%). LinkedIn impressions and engagement has surpassed target and the email database had grown by more than 30%.

Whilst the results of our initial work have been good, there have been technical issues hampering progress that require bigger programmes of work. These are proposed as being addressed through realigning brand guidelines and  rebuilding the website to incorporate the existing multiple sites into a single entity. All of these future projects are designed to improve consistency and efficiency.