Watch Now: 2022 – 2023 Season Digital Marketing Playbook for Marine Businesses

Webinar Transcript - 2022 - 2023 Season Digital Marketing Playbook for Marine Businesses

Speaker: Harry Casimir

Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining me on the 23 season digital marketing playbook for marine businesses. This, we’ll basically we will cover every segment in the marine business space. So whether you’re a boat dealer, club, boat rental, marine construction, whether you are a charter business or a repair shop, wherever you feel in between all of these, this is for you getting ready for the season, especially if you do a lot of booking reservations in that space, this is for you. So let’s just get started.

So here are the things that we’re going to cover in this webinar today. We’re going to cover digital marketing overview. So this is the boss word of the century. What is digital marketing? You probably heard a lot of people talk about it.

What is it? So we’re going to unpack this for you. Going to talk about how to capture a local audience and make sure you are right in front of them at the right time. When that time comes, when they search for services or product like yours, we’re going to talk about how to embrace social media. Some of us have certain relationship with social media.

Whether we like it or not, they here to stay. So we have to figure out how to live with social media. So we’re going to talk about that and we’re going to go over how to leverage pay per click, also known as PPC, you may have heard of that. And also we will provide you three things that you can do before season starts to get started. And obviously with season, depending on where you are in the country, especially in the US.

Season is different for each of us. If you’re in the northeast or middle of the country, season is a little bit different than if you are in the west coast, south and the southeast. Here where we are located in Florida. So season is a little bit different. But this is something that can cover no matter where you are and no matter where you are in the country and where you are in season.

And then also we will talk about a website checklist, how to actually download this checklist, use it to do a complete audit on your website without any technical background at all. And at the end we will answer any questions that could not be answered throughout the webinar. So if you have any questions, please send them over. So let’s get right into who I am. My name is Harry Kasmi.

I am the owner of Otilis digital marketing agency here in southwest Florida and we have assisted company boot marketing pools. We are specifically work with marine businesses across the board. I have been in the digital marketing space for over 15 years. I am a US vet, navy vet to be exact. And that’s how I end up in the marine space.

And I own my computer information system degree from Florida golf course university here and my Master in Project Management from Norwich University, one of the oldest military school in the US. We are as a company and myself members of the MRA. Marine Retail Association of America’s and I’m part of most of the association, actually local association in Florida for marine space. I am also the host for the Marine Marketing podcast as well as I am a publisher within the trade only marine industry magazine as well as the Boat Marketing Mastermind Group and Facebook. If you haven’t had the chance to join that group, we would love to have you.

I’m also author of two books the ultimate guide for both Dealer Marketing and the newest one is Marine Marketing Made Easy. So if you haven’t had a copy and I would love if you want this webinar and you would like to get a copy, feel free to reach out to us at harry@abortmarkinports.com and we will make an arrangement to get you one copy.

We’re going to dive right into before actually before I dive into this very quick couple of rules that I want to mention. So if you have questions as I’m going through this, please feel free to send your questions over. Just type them inside the question box and write on zoom. Or you can simply wait, but don’t wait until the last minute. I will answer questions as we go and the one that I cannot get to, I will answer them at the end.

And some questions, sometimes it’s easier to answer them at the end. So we’re just going to dive right into this.

So let’s get right into digital marketing. What is digital marketing? Digital marketing basically is not one thing that you are online, you do digital or you do one thing is digital is it is a combination of things that you do very well and that create what we call an omnipresence for you and your company that puts you right on what we call a true digital marketing sphere. So what that’s made of is typically you will find a website, your composition of your local SEO as well as the organic SEO that you are part of what your social media is made of. Pay per click, which is sometimes can be part of display ads that you may even see sometimes on big social website network.

So whether you visit a website like any of the website that you might visit big one such as Fox network, MSNBC network or even sometimes New York Times website, you might find an ads displayed there. Those are kind of still pay per click and that’s what encompasses pay per click and also reviews. I don’t know how many of you how much you think of review most of the time, but it’s probably one of the most critical rated tools that you have at your hands. Newsletter. To me, newsletter is still considered probably one of the best marketing piece you can have on your arsenal.

And I have seen a lot in lots of businesses not taking advantage of that. So we’re going to talk about ad compliance a little bit and what it means to your business as well as lead conversion, how do you bring leads in and how do you manage those leads, the lifecycle of the customers that’s part of your digital marketing arsenal. And really what this result looks like. You have a website, you rank really high or not ranking very high somewhere. You want SEO, you’re doing SEO, you’re doing PPC, you’re doing social media, you’re doing all this.

What’s the result look like? And digital marketing overview should really have one dashboard that tells you exactly what you’re looking at. What’s working, what’s not working? Is your newsletter working for you, is your local SEO working, is your website actually working? And probably one of the, if I can say that one of the hardest working employee you can have at your company is your website, if you can think of it that way, working 24/7 never ask you for much.

As long as you take care of it, it will bring results. Then just follow some of the basic rules of engagement from a digital marketing perspective, meaning that you meet the basic guideline and your website is going to perform marvelous for you. But you also want to make sure you manage, take care of this website of yours that’s going to be resolved. So once you bring that up so this is kind of a quick overview of digital marketing. It encompasses all those different elements and depending on where you are, digital marketing, how you jump in, how you execute your digital marketing piece can be different from everybody else.

Because if you have a website or a digital marketing component, a campaign that’s already working very well, there are things that you’re not going to bring to that element or you’re going to try to enhance what’s working extremely well. So it all depends where you are. So that is why it’s so critical. Before you get started on your digital marketing journey, it’s best to engage your team, yourself, possibly even a marketing company, to help you have a better idea where you are. An assessment that kind of gives you where you stand.

And based on where you stand now, knowing where you want to go, how can you get there? By looking at this wheels of engine, we’re looking at what are the pieces that we need to accomplish our goal. So that’s what digital marketing is made of. Really help you capture this. So the next piece on all this is capturing your local audience.

We talk about how do you capture a local audience? That really just so much throwing at them nowadays. So let me start with this. So back when Google first started, and you will hear me talk about Google elaborate, because Google is the biggest search engine in the world. There is no way around it.

When Google first started, basically everyone just type whatever they want and Google gives you a bunch of results. As Google search engines become more sophisticated and also digital marketers become extremely sophisticated as well. Tried to either cheat the system, do better. So it becomes very hard for Google to give the end user some of the best result that they needed at some point. So Google starts creating and adjust their algorithm to ensure that whatever the information they have, the user will be super satisfied and also for them to make money eventually.

And that’s how Google eventually break their search results. So when you’re looking at this page and this is more of a for illustration purposes and we’re going to go into an actual page to show you what this looks like. But this page we’re looking at right now is what we call a search engine result page. When you search for a keyword and you press Enter, the result you see is what we call SERPs S-E-R-P search Engine Result page. That section here is basically what Google presents to you depending on the keyword you search and also what your intent is.

So intent is very important and as of really the last five years, google changed the way the user look at information. They put a lot of emphasis on local audience. And what does that mean to you as a brick and mortar business? It means that Google looks at the proximity relevancy and where your location, where you are and what you’re looking for as well. So we’re going to go into this in a second, but if you were to search, for example, if you are in Fort Lauderdale and you search for, I don’t know, a charter company or a boat repair shop in Fort Lauderdale, there’s a good chance, depending on where you are in Florida, are you in north Fort Lauderdale, south, west, east?

And depending on where you are and what you’re looking for, google is going to give you the result that is closest to you. And this is why local proximity is so important and why it’s so important for you to ensure that your local presence is properly set up. And I will show you how to do that. And again, this is more of a workshop, kind of a breakdown in different elements. And what I’m going to bring to you right now is basically let’s search for something.

So we’re going to search for a good example is really wide boat.

This is live, right? Really white board in Fort Myers, because I’m in Fort Myers and I need to know how to spell it.

So here you’re looking at a few different result in here and that’s going to have to all right, there you go. That’s better. So the reason I did that is because when you search for Google and you use Google so often, they really remember who you are to some degree. And also there are things that they don’t show you because one, you most likely visit this before and two, that information is irrelevant to you. So what I want to show you on this one in particular is this is kind of a quick example.

So you’re looking at two different packs here. So the first one is this is the ads which we’re going to talk about in a second. And the rest of the information here is what they call when you heard someone say what your SEO look like, meaning your search engine optimization which is the organic SEO and what that key would bring based on the keyword you search what’s that result look like and you can see fish tailboats in Fort Mars is probably the most well optimized website for that specific keyword. Hence why you see them right up there. And there is also what they call the local residents we talked about.

And I’m going to show you in a second on a different search result here. When someone searched for that keyword, according to Google right now almost close to 60% of people don’t even look any further. The first result they looked at and that’s on the map, they just go right in there. This is why it’s so critical for you to ensure that you have your presence on the local map. So we’re going to look for for example, both rental and Fort Lauderdale.

Let’s use that keyword. So in this, this is where you see the different results we pull out depending on the market that you are in. So this is what we call the threepad. So the first group up here is the people that pay. You can see clearly say ads in front of it.

The second piece is the local maps and this is what I was referring to, what your audience is looking at. And the third piece is what we call the organic SEO. Now depending on who you’re talking to, some people would call this the local SEO and that’s part of the local SEO. Some people call it the Maps and some people call it the Google Maps. We call it local SEO here because when we do this local SEO we cover both Google and bank and the other local directories that need to be added.

But in this case, those are the three pack you see up here. So there is the ads, there is the local search that people search for. You get up here in a few different ways. One depending on your set up with Google my Business used to call Google My Business. It’s now.

Google business profile. They change their name so often, sometimes it’s confusing. So it’s Google business profile. So if you have not claim your business so make sure you do that on Google Business Profile. That would be the first step.

The next step obviously is to ensure you set up your business properly, the category, that type of business you do. As you can see, for example, both rental services, both rental services, both rental services. This is clearly what those people do and they tell Google what they do and they add pictures to this. And also when someone searched for that specific keyword, those people would be showing. And according to Google, almost 60% of people that pass, if they don’t click the ads, the 60% of people click here.

And this is why it’s so critical as a business to ensure that you have your Google business profile set up as well as not just getting it set up, but also make sure that it’s set up properly to have your information showing at all times. The other thing that you will notice is the ads. Again we’re coming back to your local audience. So the ads that you run, it target to the local audience. So when someone search for that specific local keyword and sometimes the location is a giveaway for that specific location, google serves the ads that’s most relevant if you are competing for that specific keyword.

But this is where you don’t really pay much. Now, if it is a marketing agency that does this for you, obviously you pay them, but you pay them the management fee and to maintain this for you. But if you do this yourself, you don’t pay Google directly.

You don’t pay Google directly for this. You either spend time to learn how to do this yourself and maintain it or you pay someone to maintain this for you. The next piece below it is the organic piece. So if you’re looking at this up here, these are the companies that spend a lot of money to create a large content that optimize their website, really make sure they are ranking very high for that specific keyword right below that. This is what Google calls the knowledge graph.

And you guys probably seen this all the time and this is probably one of the most underutilized and many people don’t know this. So here intent of the user is important obviously, because if I’m looking for both rental in Fort Lauderdale, well, my intention is somehow I’m thinking of Fort Lauderdale and I’m thinking of getting a book. When I’m there or I’m looking for someone, I’m looking to book something. So here’s all the things that Google picked up and it dumped here. And you can see, you’ve probably seen this where anything you type, it shows a list of questions that are being answered and these are not answered by Google.

Actually Google index other people’s website that Google thinks these questions were asked and the answer to them is very very relevant and it makes sense to your query that you just paused. So I again I search for both rental and Fort Lauderdale. Therefore, I’m looking for both rental in Fort Lauderdale. What else could I be looking for or need to know if I’m trying to get both in Fort Lauderdale, well, I need to know the cost somehow, how much it cost, and even Yachts, how much yard rent in Fort Lauderdale, how much do you go for? So these are questions that come in from different websites and this is why it’s so critical for you to set up your website in a way to create additional resources and content so that Google can index your website as well.

And this is how you embrace creating those content to ensure that when someone’s first search for your, for your keyword, for your products or services, you are the one that’s showing up there. So how do you get to let me come back to this. I hope this answer your question. Feel free to ask any question you have guys on the chat, just open up the chat and type your questions and let me know if I can answer any of this for you as we go through this. So coming back, this is how you get to the Google Maps.

Again, you make sure you to ensure that you have the basic information as well as while you’re trying to get to Google Maps. The other thing that you will notice is also is the total reviews. Do you see how many reviews each of these guys have? So review is extremely important. After you set up or update your Google business profile, make sure you have your business name, your phone number and address where you are.

And if you don’t have address for your business, you can use a general location and Google even allow now since Covet, they used to crack down on this, but now they’re very relaxed so that if you say your business serves, I don’t know, they’re downtown Orlando, they would understand that and they don’t mind even though you don’t want to show your address. They used to be very hard at this, but now they’re okay. So even if you don’t want to show your address, let’s say you operate from home, you don’t have a physical address, that can get a little bit tricky for the end customer, but Google doesn’t penalize you as much anymore for this. If you have a physical address though, do put that address on not only your website, but also put it on your Google business profile. So you want your business name, the proper name and the proper address and the proper phone number to that as well as the category your business fall on there.

So you can leave your business in a few different categories. That the beauty of that as well. But there is one main category you do not want to miss that because the higher business is going to be known on Google profile for. So if you are a bolt rental service and you also a marina, you almost have to pick which one you are to be ranked for the first because when someone searches for that specific keyword. Now there are ways you can walk around it, create a little bit profile, a sub profile, and you can work around that.

But make sure the primary business you want to be known for, for that specific location, make sure you have that primary category for your business. The other thing again for business, for Google profile is your review. Your review is probably one of the most underrated things and people don’t realize how important it is. Well, some of us do. When you think about it, when someone search for your business, service or product that you are selling, there’s a lot of reviews that show up.

When someone review your business. Let’s say this is how people see most of the reviews. They come here, they see for example, let’s go to any of these guys. So you see these reviews. So people actually review this and read them.

But it’s not just for the consumer you’re doing this. It’s also what Google actually determines where you are. So these guys like him, he has a 4.9 out of 73 reviews. Google gives it a very high priority because they have a lot of reviews, a lot of positive reviews, and also a lot of positive reviews. So Google put them up there and most likely they have a good profile.

A lot of bigger boat rental that I have seen in the marine space, most big boat rental business that have at least five, six boats they run and running up to 30 50 boats, they usually have their Google business profile locked down because it’s important to have that. You may not even like it, but it is what it is. And consumer going to continue to search to Google to find information. So you either be there or be square. So that is why it’s so important and reviews is equally important.

And people come directly to Google to add reviews for your business. So therefore you should make sure you have your presence there and also tie those reviews too, so that you can rank very high on the map. The other thing that you want to also do is those reviews. When people review your business here, it’s important to actually comment back on those reviews, especially if they are negative. And don’t be honest.

Actually I did a full segment on my last webinar just about reviews. Don’t be fighting with people that are negative and sometimes even they are on the wrong. It’s not your fault they didn’t show up on time. But that’s part of business. Some people, they just are going to blame someone.

What you do want to do. One of us got to be the growing up in that conversation. So as a business, I highly, highly recommend that you are growing up. Even you don’t have to be just so that customers can see that you are taking care of their interests as well. So it’s not just about purely business.

Remember, you do business, business, do business with people. Do business with people, not just the business. So therefore, when someone gives you a negative review, take it comment hey, so you could not meet your expectations. What can we do to help? Or reach back out to them.

And you never know. People can become your best customer down the road. So make sure you take care of it. Don’t let it be, don’t let negative review stay there without addressing. Also, again, not all negative reviews are bad.

One, you can turn it around. Two, Google doesn’t really penalize you to bad reviews. Now, if you have 100 reviews and you have 95 negative, obviously there’s something going on that’s more of your operation side of the business. You have to look at it. But you can see I spend time on this because your local presence is so important to how you get there.

Now, I got a quick question that said, how can I find out which keywords are right for me? So here we have a checklist at least for almost every segment and the marine space, some of the top ten keywords that you should be ranking for. So if you’d like to have a copy of that, email me at harry at bookmarketingpause and one of my team members will get you a copy of that. But yes, so that’s a very good question. What are some of the key words to look for?

Again, depending on what business you are in, and some of you guys are in two, three different business. So you might be a dealer marina and rental, you might be a good club and rental, you might be a charter business rental. So there is a lot of combination. Just let us know what business you are in and send us an email at harriet at bookmarketingpours and I will get you one of my team members will get you a copy. Okay?

So going now to social media. If you do not have a social media account yet, the first thing I want you to do after this conversation, as your note, create a social media account for your business. I’m not saying for your personal account, most of us do, even we don’t like it anymore. But for your business, your business needs its own social media profile. Here’s my take on social media.

I know many people do not like social media. I’m not the biggest fan neither. But it is one of those necessary evil and it’s one of those things that is free. If all of us could go back in the 1701, 800 in the United States where we all could figure out how to get some free land, or some people would give us free land, we would just take it if we know if we were there at that time, giving the value of land and property nowadays, how expensive it is to get some. So you would have gotten it anyways.

Just so you can save it for your grandkids or for future generation or for future business venture. The same thing for social media. That’s how I look at it. Claim your profile on every social media that you can and you don’t really have to maintain it or sometimes you don’t even have to link it to your website if you don’t want to. Although I don’t know what would be the purpose though.

But I would just create claim that profile for your business and then link it to your website. And again, this is one of those things I would highly recommend you figure out how to manage your social media. Meaning that how often should I post on that social media? What are the things that I do? The first thing you want to do, let’s take it one step at a time.

Claim your business profile, put the basic information in there for the description for your business. We are company ABC. We do XY and Z. We help our client do this, we manage that. So that way when people bump into your profile online, they see what you do.

The next thing you want to do is obviously connect into your website. The third thing is create a basic calendar for your social media that could be part of your strategy, part of your business plan. I know some clients, actually not just clients, I know a lot of businesses that just rely exclusively on social media to grow their business and you’ll be surprised how much you can grow your business on social media if you do it right. Also depending on your audience, obviously. So it is important and just take advantage of it.

Create your profile, put the basic information, make sure the address on your social media, whatever information you have on your social media is match with the information you have for your website. So for example, the address that is the business name that is on your website, that is on your Google business profile and that is on your bank Business Places which is Microsoft. It should be the same address that actually part of your social media as well. The description you put anywhere, the basic description that your business do X, Y and Z and we service this or we offer this product is the same information that you would need to also add to your social media. So that way all the information is always match up, if that makes sense.

So the next thing that you want to do once you have your social media information ready is have all of your channel map out when you’re going to post on them. My suggestion, if you’re not a big fan, you don’t believe in it, at least make the effort to post at least once a month so it shows that your business is active and sometimes, especially if your website is not well optimized. Many people. Are going to find your business through social media anyways. So then you might as well have the social media presence light up a little bit, at least have a few things in it.

If nothing, they can find your website, they can find your basic information and at least contact you for your services. So that’s what I will do for social media and this is very important. Now what’s next on this is the leverage pay per click. Again, this is what we’re doing for the upcoming season. We are getting ready, we’re gearing up and we’re about to really make money or bring more leads, bring more sales pump of our revenue.

How do we do that? What are some of the things that we can do? PPC is probably one of the most effective marketing piece that you can deploy basically within a week or two or less and see instant results. PPC stands for Pay per click and you can use this basically you pay for only when someone click on your ads. Now there are a lot of different ways you can deploy PPC.

You can deploy it yourself actually or you can hire a marketing agency. I would highly recommend that if you don’t do this for a living, I recommend that you find someone that actually know what they’re doing because if you do this yourself, I can almost guarantee you 99% of the time you’re going to overspend on this yourself. Even there is guide, Google provide guides to get your PPC set up yourself. But there’s a good chance you’re going to start some keywords in there that’s going to really be expensive and cost you more than you would like to pay. Where if you have someone that have a lot of knowledge that know how to create negative keywords and we move them and we move what keywords from your campaign, that person can save you a ton of money and the money you’re going to pay them might be less than what you would even save.

So just so you know and just to give you an idea, so according to the National Marine Manufacturer Association, the NMA and the recent survey, they said that was the for 2021 I believe. So there was a shop increase on both sales alone, 59% compared to the previous year. Let me just give you an idea how much activities that are in the booting space. So what that really means for you as a business, no matter what sector you are in, that gives you a very good advantage to not only have used PPC to bring more clients, but use PPC to enhance your brain to be up there and get customer an example of what they can get with you. So again, it is one of the most common, most used form of marketing and here’s a quick example of what this looks like, what PPC really looks like.

So these are people that actually pay for when someone click on this, you bid on these keywords. So those guys bid on this keyword, both rental and Fort Lauderdale. So you can see Bootstrader, the yoga club, and three guys actually bid on those keywords. And each of them, if I click on any of these here, google would charge them a fee. And that fee depending on what debating rating.

I don’t have tools open here, I cannot tell you. But typically, Fort Lauderdale is very competitive. Summertime, we’re still off season. And for Fort Lauderdale, because of hurricane and how people travel in Fort Lauderdale, the market right now is not super hot in terms of people that’s coming to Fort Lauderdale. So the bidding for keywords like this is probably maybe anywhere from two dollars, fifty cents to four dollars.

And you don’t pay until someone actually click on this and go to your website. So here you have it. So let’s say, for example, 100 people search for these keywords. Of that 100, let’s bring 25 of them go to your website. Of that 25, ten of them book.

So if you were to be paying, let’s give or take two for round numbers, $5 per click. So you went 50 people, 25 people to your website. Five times 25 is 125, $125. And of that 25 people that come to your website, you get ten of them to book. That’s $500 each.

So ten times $500. So you have $5,000 in reservation revenue. And then all you did spend on this from the ad perspective is $100, $150, $200. It’s probably one of the most effective. And this is a quick number, I just ran my head here.

This is not the exact number, but just to give you an example, what PPC does for you, it gets you in front of the clients right away. And many times, if you don’t have a website that is super effective, at least for us here, we usually don’t send clients ads to your main website if the website is not really for it because the intent of the customer. Remember, I talked about intent earlier when someone searched for a specific keyword, both rental and Fort Lauderdale. I’m looking for both rental and Fort Lauderdale. The page that I get into is it needs to tell me, hey, thank you for coming.

We really need to take you for both methods in Fort Lauderdale. Here’s how you reserve a lot of time. You search for something. And Google algorithm has become so smart at this. They know your intent based on what you’re searching.

So when I get there, you give me a 300 pages page for me to review, to read a bunch of image, this organization, I’m going to close this and move on and search for a different thing. Here you are. You just spend $5, $10 and you lose it. And when you multiply that by ten, 2100 people that do this to you, you’re losing a lot of money. This is why it’s so important to optimize your website, not just for searching for SEO, but also for PPC as well.

And if you are running PPC and your website is not well optimized, it is important to create what we call landing pages. And those are landing pages that’s very specific to that specific keyword or campaign you are running. So that when someone comes to your website or to that page, they only get the information about the things that they were looking for and then you guide them to a clinical to action that is very, very critical. And you should definitely make sure you have landing pages for that type of activity. And you can run this for again, I use this as both rental as an example, but this can happen for almost every single business type.

So whether you’re selling yachts or you just doing corporate tours, sunset tours, all of that can be applied to the same format. And your conversion rate is really very important. So for example, if you are a boat rental, obviously your conversion rate will be a little bit different, will be different than a boot dealer, than a boot club. Then I don’t know, if you have a yacht charter company and you are charging 20 plus thousand dollars for weekly, your campaign is a little bit more sophisticated than a boat charter, that fishing charter and the golf course of Mexico. So it’s a little bit different.

You have to know your audience and also this type of service level you’re providing and that will determine what this looks like. Now a question that came over is how much what the budget should be like for PPC campaign at peak season. Now, peak season is a little bit interesting for the both rental industry, depending on where you are in the country, to be honest. I take Florida, for example. In Florida, a lot of people come down in season.

Grandpa grandma went to hang out with the kids last time they hit the water. Not just that, but even younger people that want to leave the northeast middle of the country for cold season, they just come down to Florida to chill a little bit and they always want to take the boat. PPC in the season is competitive, but not super competitive because of some boat rental businesses. If they’re doing very well from an SEO perspective, they don’t push BPC too much in season because they’re going to be booked no matter what. And some of them, they just want to get better, return sometime the IP, PPC to the good SEO on top of the SEO, which means they’re always on the first page no matter what, whether it’s for PPC or for SEO, but depending on your operation.

But give or take. If I give you an example. If you are running a boat rental company and you run PPC. Your budget. Your advertising budget for PPC in season should be roughly at least $750 a month so that you can see some good results and again depending on the size of your operation so if you have between five to ten votes I think $750 just in advertising that does not include management fee so give or take you’re looking at spending about fifteen hundred dollars a month on PPC that includes management at the minimum again you can increase this however you want depending on how big you want to grow.

How aggressive you want to go you can do that and beauty of PPC. There is no limit on how much you want to spend actually you can test the water run if you can paint here and that see how it works and unleash it or just reduce what you spend or you can spend more money when the season is about to start or when the season is about to die down and then reduce your spend end season because you don’t really need to spend a ton of money but also if you’re not spending a lot of money on PPC your SEO should be top notch because your competitors down the street they’re doing something to bring more people in and they probably doing social media ads which is very hot right now especially when it comes to rental again I’m using rental as an example but if you are a boot repair shop repair shop you have a little bit different audience that you cater to if you are a boat dealer you have a different audience and depending on what type of boat if you run in the high end boat you’re selling the high end boat or the medium so it’s all depending on what your audience will expect from you so I know we went over a lot of different things here we talk about how do you leverage your local presence and make sure you have that and we talk about social media.

Why you need social media. Why it’s important to ensure you have your social media presence and how do you use PPC to make sure you’re in front of the customer for the upcoming season but here are the three things that you can do right now to ensure you are ready to basically take over the season the first thing I would suggest that you do is claim your business google business profile if you don’t have that. If you already have it put this in your notes and go to put this on your note as what to do search for your business or services wherever you are and if you don’t if you are not the one that can log into that profile yourself you should make sure you be able to and even if the agency own manage this for you you the business owner.

You’re the marketing director or the general manager of that business you should have access to google my business profile what I have seen over and over is clients come to us and they have no access to this and sometimes they have a fit with the agency they used to work with or the guy that used to do this for them and they don’t want to give that profile back. You can get it back, but it’s a big mess if you can avoid it. The best way to avoid it, make sure you have access to your own business profile yourself. And then give the marketing, the freelancer, whoever you give access to it, give it access to it after you are the owner of it, that’s number one. Once you have that profile set up, make sure you get your business name right, your categories and the time you open.

That’s very important on Google. So that’s the first thing you can do right now and you can almost see the difference. If you don’t know how to do that. We’re not going to go into the detail how to do an audit in local audit for your maps. For your local SEO.

But that’s going to be very critical and I can almost guarantee you if you were to optimize. Update your Google business profile today. Give it a week or two. You will see how you start ranking up there and part of that is making sure you try to get reviews from your customer. The next thing that you want to do, sorry again, we got the business profile, we get it set up.

Once you have it set up, keep in mind again you put your business information in there, tell them what is it that you do. Make sure you put the time in there and there are hours of operation, make sure phone numbers and all of that information. And best way to do that is to basically go to Google and search for your business. And then if you cannot find it, add your business to Google. The next thing you want to do is optimize your social media.

I think right now that’s very hard for, for most businesses. You also show me your Facebook and Instagram. So both of them owned by Mela. So you basically can have a one platform for this and it’s really up to you if you want to spend money on that, on ads, but at least get your business profile set up. So make sure you get your business profile, make sure you get your description for your business and make sure you have the URL for your business on each one of them.

So different, obviously each of the profiles, each of those social media platform set up, profile just a little bit different, not so different, but make sure you have the basic information, the name of your business, what category your business is, fall under a quick description of what your business does and also the domain name where people can find you. It’s very critical and just do that, optimize it and put as much detail as you can and make sure you keep that content update and put the promise to at least especially season is about to start. If I were you, I would get started even for the first month, I would just put a commitment to post at least twice a week. So by the time mid September 8, when season really kick into high gear, depending on if you are in Florida, then you’re already having a lot of at least 20 pieces of content on your social media post. So that way it doesn’t look so empty or look like someone that just put this together yesterday.

So that would be my suggestion for your social media. How do you get this optimized? Make sure you get that information up there. Obviously Facebook, you do have to have a nice cover. I always encourage you to have a very nice cover for your Facebook and try to get that cover that related to what is it that you do if you’re a mechanic shop, a repair shop for your boat, maybe one of your guys standing next to an engine repairing it.

If you bought rental space, maybe people getting on your boat, right? If you were a charter, maybe a charter with high class, maybe a family getting on board, on your board, something like that. If you’re a construction, marine construction, maybe you’re building a sea wall or somewhat one of your big machines about to dig underwater. So little bit different illustration will help guide the user. As soon as they get to your profile, they know exactly what you do, what you are about.

Next thing on this is your PPC pay per click advertising. So this is very important. As you can see what I just showed you a moment ago, how it is so important to ensure that when you run your ads it’s actually target the people that you are looking for. So we will optimize a well organized PPC campaign that’s very well targeted for your audience. And this is very critical.

I know we talked about PPC here, we did not talk about lots of SEO, organic SEO, but that also equally important. That’s different topics because SEO itself is very broad. There’s a lot of different little categories in SEO and I know we will have a session on SEO itself, but this is very critical to have a very well optimized PPC campaign set up for your business. Really highly recommend that. Again, continue the questions to come in.

So one question I was asked is what social media channels will be right for a boat service business? I’m assuming both service business. You mean both repair shop, both parts. Well, that itself, the two social media you do have to have. For instance on LinkedIn, because again, a lot of business people liked and is business, but who do you deal with is a human being and a lot of people that have bought and have those things who have fun are usually people that working professional.

They have the money and they most likely have a business profile unlike and you want to show that right in there with them. So the next thing, the next social media you want to do is Facebook and Instagram. You want to showcase your talent, your presence, show your shop, show what you do right on those pictures, nice pictures on each of those profile. I think that would be help. So if you are running service business.

Those are the three main social media I would go after and then after that you could obviously create a profile on your Twitter if you want as well as really tic TAC is coming up and that’s something that we will have a master class and Tic TAC on how to make sure you set it up because depending on the business that you are in. That could be very beneficial as well.

So coming back we looked at those three elements. The three things that you can do right now to get your yourself really update your business profile, google business profile, optimize your, create or optimize your Facebook and Instagram social media profiles and launch your PPC campaign. Those are the three things you can do right now to get you really for the 2022, 2023 season. And as I mentioned, if you have any questions, if you would like us to do an assessment and audit for your current digital presence including your social media and PPC, we’d be more than happy to just reach out to us and my team and I will be more than happy to take a look at that for you.

Here the thing that we have for you as well. So one of the other things that for the PPC very quick is if you do it as yourself, as I mentioned earlier, if you run PPC yourself, be careful and then it’s very easy for you to get into the trap of you can do it yourself. Even if you don’t have any technical knowledge of this. Yes you can. Except that I have the suspicion that you will be spending more money than you should on ads.

So that is why it’s important to find someone that do this day in, day out to help you with it. Okay? So check website checklist. So you can download this from our website. The URL is not here.

The URL you can go to is bookmarketimpose.com checklist. I would double checking this checklist for you. The URL is a little bit long I have here for you. But you can download that checklist to make a full audit of your website, what it does for you, it really helps you. You don’t have to be technical but have this checklist print out and as you’re looking at your website, you can answer yes or no if these things are there and are working for you.

So it is free, just enter your name and email address and we will get this over to you. And if you don’t find it on my website right now, just send me a quick email harry at Boot Marketingports and we get that to you. But if you go to Bootmarketingpource.com Website checklist, you should be able to get that. And if that URL is not set up right now, we’ll get back to you right away. Okay, I will put the list of some of you guys that’s in the audience.

I’ll make sure you get this URL. So the next thing this checklist is very comprehensive. You can see we break it down for you. So you can easily see your website, your online advertising, social media content, SEO, local SEO, email marketing, and reporting, what each of these elements looks like. I know we have gone through so much today, right?

We break down into different pieces of some of the things that you have to look at for your 2020 season. Making sure your basic Google business profile is set up, making sure you have your social media presence is ready. Make sure you have your PPC, a well optimized PPC ready to go. We don’t we did not go into detail onto website, but website is equally important because it is basically one of the first thing people have the impression of you. No matter where they’re coming from, whether they’re coming from social media, they come in from anywhere.

When someone tells them about your business or you tell them about your business, you’re going to send them to your website. So you want your website to be a portrait of what you want people to perceive of you. So therefore, it is very critical for your website to be as nice and top shape as possible. So we’re not going to go into that detail of website today, but we’re going to finish on this note, I would love to answer any additional questions that you have. I would love to hear your comments, anything that I can touch on for you guys.

And again, thank you so much for staying on for 1 hour with me and cannot believe the time flies so fast. I guess when you’re having fun, time flying, right? So just about a few minutes past the hours, do you guys have any additional questions? I know I answered some of the questions that I was going as I was going through, but I can quickly filter to them. There’s not that many of them, so let me do that very quickly while I’m waiting on any other additional questions.

And if you would like to speak, ask a question instead of typing it, feel free to raise your hand and I will bring you in. Or you can ask me the question directly on the chat and I will bring you online. I guess one of the first questions that was asked as I was going through the motion and I did answer that question but search how can I find which keyword does arrive for me? As I mentioned we have basically every segment in the marine industry we have keywords for them. Depending on the segment that you are in both repair shop will have completely different keywords for a boat charter company or a charter company.

Sunset Company versus a boot dealer that only sell boston Whaler versus one that sell, I don’t know, a sportsman. So there are different type different keywords group. So we will have to know which keyword you’re looking for but I’ll be more than happy to get my team to send you that list of keywords, the top ten keywords for your segment. Just shoot me an email Kerry at both marketing course I’ll be more than happy to get that to you. The other question is how much budget should I keep for PPC for peak season?

As I mentioned really depending on this specific segment you are in but I would say at least the minimum you should at least spend about $750 on PPC then on top of management fees. So I’ll give or take at least one $500 a month, that’s probably what you’re looking at and then from there you can increase or decrease depending on what you have. And the beauty of PPC is that there is no minimum fee to minimum spend so you can actually spend as little as you want. The only thing is obviously if you spend 1 hour a day sometimes you might even your ad probably will never show because if that’s what you have so it is very important to have a budget that can bring people in. The other question I want to answer is social media channel which one is right for a boat service business?

As I mentioned thank you for the very straightforward question for a boot service repair shop business social media that I know that perform extremely well LinkedIn believe it or not because you have most of people that’s in LinkedIn business people. So a lot of times business people have their boats, that’s how they have fun on the weekend so you and there and they will see you. But Facebook and Instagram are very critical to have.

So if I could leave you with one thing, one of the questions is what would be my one advice for you guys before the season just kicked to high gear or when the season is at its peak? I think one of the things that I have seen over and over, especially in the marine space, I’ve been in the digital space for a very long time and I work with clients almost every industry you can think of. So I have seen it all. One other thing I see in the marine industry is most businesses don’t have really decentralized hub if you may of how they get the information about the customers. They don’t really mind that information and most marine business sit on the goldmine of information.

And let me give you what I mean by that. Let’s say you run a boat rental business for the last 510, 15 years. From that time you can imagine if you, if even if you have a modest operation, you have to have thousands and thousands of people coming through each of those people or people that have good interest either on boarding or someone dragged them along. If you have the information of every one of these people, there’s a good chance they will come back to you. Depending if you treat them well, they will come back anyway.

But even if you did not treat them well, those are information that’s like you sit on a goal of mine. What you can do with that information is utilizing it to do outreach. And that outreach what we call a reactivation campaign. That’s something that we can set for you, that we can bring more people back to your business so that when you need them to either sign up, you can bring them to either providing them with information in terms of incentive coupons and bring them back. And when you bring them back once and you treat them well, they will always come back.

So that’s one of my advice to you. Mind the business information that you get, the customer contact you, they reach out to you, get that information, create your database of people that you can reach out to later on. We did not go into the detail of newsletter, email newsletter, but this is why I take emails. Newsletter is probably one of the most effective marketing piece most business ignore. It’s easier to keep the customer that you have then finding a new one.

And it is true in almost every business, especially business that will require customers to come back to you anyways. As I mentioned, someone that tried to put today, there’s a good chance they’re going to try to put some time again, someone that buyable today will buy, but someone that buy a yacht today will buy another yacht or have friends that buy yards. If you stay in front of them now, you become their best friend, the people that they go to refer to. That is why you want to find the data that you have from your customer. So that’s one tip I would leave for you.

And again, just do a hub of information where the data set and really you can use it over and over to bring more customer in. One of the last questions I have and we’re going to wrap it up. I know I want to be respectful of your guys’times. Should I respond to buy with you or do you prefer to hide them? That’s a very good question.

I had this question before when I did a session on reviews. I would not have bad reviews depending on how bad it is. What I said earlier. I will stand by it. In terms of when a customer gives you a bad review, you don’t have to fight with that customer.

You do not have to just address it head on. So I’m sorry we did not meet your expectation. X, Y and Z. Sometimes you don’t even have to that we did not meet your expectation. Here’s what I would like to do for you, or here’s what we can do for you, or here’s all the things that I would suggest that we do.

That way you address your heads on and so that when your next potential customer comes and reviewing those reviews, reading them, they can see you are level headed. You are a person that’s actually take time to actually read those reviews and answering them. And sometimes, depending on who you have on your team, who’s in charge. And for reviews, I highly recommend that you have someone dedicated at your company to answer reviews or have a process in place for the person that reviews for you. At our company, here at Book Marketing Post, we reviews for our clients depending on what we work on with them and those reviews, actually we answer those questions for them on their behalf, which also even gives us a better view, because a lot of times the client will be too close to the interaction.

Sometimes they get heated. But for us, we cannot detach with one degree detachment. We may not be able to answer the exact way the customer would answer, but it gives us the separation. So it’s not a feeling that hurts is more of an answering the question. The other thing that we also do is when the question is very deep or it’s so negative, we reach out to whoever’s in charge of the account at the customer’s business to tell them, here’s the review, that person left, and here’s what we intend to do.

How we’re gonna answer it, please. We need approval and we have a clear process for that. Whenever we bring a client on board and we are managing the reviews, I hope this answer your question again, there is no battery. To be honest, for me, I think there is no battery views. And actually, sometimes when I see a business that has 150 reviews and all of them five star, I’m sometimes trying to scratch my head.

There is no way a business can go that long to have at least one person don’t give you a full point or something. So I like business that have 4.5 as long as they have enough reviews. If you have 50 plus reviews and you have a couple of them, that’s not good, that’s fine. I think you would be good, but make sure you address them.

We went over a lot and we went over the time. Thank you so much for staying with me. If you have additional questions, really, you can just shoot them here. Also, just feel free to reach out to me, Harry@bookmarketingpours.com, and I’ll be more than happy to answer any additional questions that you have.

You can find us@bootmarkingpost.com and if you would like to for me or my team to to do an assessment of your current online presence, whether it’s your social media or even your website, feel free to just reach out. You can schedule a time to chat with me or one of my team members here at Bot Marketing Post. We’d be more than happy to take a look at what you have and there’s no obligation. It’s free. We will take a look at your online presence, show you the current where you at and present something to you.

If you are interested in working with us and you don’t have to work with us, you can take that assessment and use it as you see fit. I hope this has been useful to you guys. I hope you had fun as much as I did. Again, thank you for attending. If you have any additional questions, send them to me at harry at bookmarketingpours.

I appreciate your time. Thank you. And for those who attend, I will be sending this webinar link to you as well. If you would like to watch it again, thank you guys. Have a good afternoon.

Bye bye.