The Review Game: Building Your Marine Business Reputation

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Hey, what’s up everybody? Welcome to the Marine Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Harry Casimir. This podcast is all about marketing your marine business, whether you are a boat dealer, boat builder, boat club, all in between. If you want to get more leads, more sales, and marketing that actually works you are in the right place.

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And every episode we break down what’s working right now in the marine marketing space. There is no fluff, no generic advice, just real tactics you can take home and grow your business. This podcast is brought to you by Boat Marketing Pros, where we help marine businesses grow through digital marketing. Learn more at boatmarketingpros.com. All right, let’s get into it.

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The review game: building your marine business reputation. Research shows 95% of consumers read reviews before visiting a business, trust the reviews that they have seen or read online about the business, and they put as much value on reviews online as much as they put on a personal recommendation. So on this episode, we cover exactly how to generate more positive reviews and how to handle the negative ones professionally and increase your business visibility. So let’s get started. We gonna go over and cover on this episode the numbers that should wake you up.

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We will talk about why marine businesses struggle with reviews and how to get more positive reviews. Handling negative reviews and behind Google. Those are the 5 key points we will cover. Let’s get started. So the numbers that should wake you up.

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Let me share some statistics. Research shows 95% of buyers use digital sources, including reviews, to determine who they will do business with and what they will buy from the businesses. And of that, 88% of the potential customers said that they use business that actually reply to reviews. So meaning that if there is a review about a business online, 98% of people say they will buy from a business that actually take time to answer reply to reviews. Very interesting, about half of that number, about 47% of people say they would not do business, they would do business with people that do not respond, which means you lose half of that consumer base that would do business for you.

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All of that, 93% of consumer base buying decision on online reviews And more importantly, of the same number, they even put more weight on reviews or equal weight on online review as if they would get a personal recommendation from their friends. So this is why reviews matters and this is why those numbers should wake you up. So why marine businesses struggle with reviews? Long sales cycles mean the purchase feels distant when asking. It feels like, man, I’ve been going through back and forth with you for the last 4 or 5 months.

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It’s a drag on me. I don’t even like you anymore because I just got too many texts and emails from you. So you want to make sure you check in and keeping a consistent messaging for the customer, but don’t be super pushy. Obviously you want the sale, but making sure because of the sales cycle is so long, you are aware of that. You want to make sure to almost gage your engagement to make sure you not overstep your boundaries.

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And service customers, people that buying very, very high ticket items are often frustrated. Out of nowhere, sometimes the frustration has nothing to do with you, but sometimes it’s not the best time to ask questions, to ask for a review. Sometimes you can almost see the writing on the wall. That person may not be mad at you and they probably will give you a good review. The timing is not right.

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So you want to make sure you almost time it on when to ask those reviews. And we’re gonna talk about how to get those reviews anyways in a second. No systematic process for requesting reviews. Again, as I said on many, many episodes, I have personally talked with hundreds, if not thousands of dealers, and most dealers I talked to, I would say close to 80%, this is not the statistic number I have, but I would say close to 80% of them do not have a systematic process in place to request reviews and follow up on review requests. Yes, many dealers do have reviews online and part of it is like, “Oh, can you give us a review?” It’s just random and they really leave it to chance.

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And that review, based on those numbers I shared with you a moment ago, If reviews are that important, why would anyone leave it to chance? The other piece dealers struggle to get reviews is that they fear of negative reviews and then that prevent them asking anyone. Do not fear the negative reviews. This is why sometimes you actually have to train your team and provide a better service. Because a negative review doesn’t mean that you are bad.

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It means that there are a piece that needs some improvement that need to be adjusted. And when people leave and they do not give a review and you did not ask them to give a review, and some people may not even give you a review on Google itself or any other platform. They will just tell you straight up, I really did not like how X, Y, and Z handle this or this happened. I don’t want to give you negative reviews. Therefore, I would not give you that review.

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And interestingly, some of those people would give that feedback to you straight up, like right in there. And that’s some of the best feedback you can get because once it’s not public, and if you really, really think about it from a leadership perspective, you can take that information and share it with your team and make adjustments right in there. So reviews is not always super negative, and we’re gonna talk about how to handle the negative one and how to make sure you get the system in place to ask those for those reviews very, very consistently. Let’s dive in how to get more positive reviews for your business. Number 1, timing.

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There is no way around this. Timing, timing, timing. I cannot say that enough. Ask at the moment of delight, not weeks later. When someone get a key from you, whether you’re a boat rental, they get the key to go for rental or go have fun, or you handing them the key to the brand new boats you just rigged for them, that is a moment that they’re very, very happy.

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As long as obviously you You have to read the room a bit, but most people are very, very happy when they get the key to what they have been waiting for, looking forward to. So don’t wait for weeks later to ask for that review. Right after the successful delivery, just put it in there. And of course, after resolving an issue or service for them, And of course, when they offer satisfaction, show satisfaction for either a service or product that they get from you, or say some of your team members or that team member was awesome or whatever that might be. Timing is so crucial.

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And this is why it’s important. If I can put that in there, it’s so crucial to train your team. The whole company would have to be on board. It should become a culture thing that review is important to the company, to us. Therefore, it’s everybody’s job, not everybody’s job to be asking for review, but it’s everybody’s job to make sure we are getting those reviews.

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Meaning is that when we see a customer is super happy or they’re not happy about specific things, well, let’s address that now and then so that way we can get positive reviews. Okay, so that’s timing in itself, how important it is. This next thing on how to get those positive reviews is make it easy. People don’t have time to go look for your company and figure out how to add a review on Google for you on your behalf. There will be people that do this, but I would say most customers will not go out of their way to do this for you unless you help them, provide them with the information directly.

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And this is why after the service, make sure you do 2 or 3 of those things. Send a direct link to Google review page via text message. Don’t miss that at all. It’s very easy to get your review link on Google. So just go to Google, search for your business, and when it shows up on the right-hand side, you will see there will be a share button.

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Then you can grab the URL from there. And that URL address is what you would share with the buyers so that they can add reviews to your Google Business Profile. Second, create on your service counter, create a QR code. There will be a QR code right up front that says, please review us on Google, and there’s the QR code. Of course, the URL right under the QR code, because some people, believe it or not, don’t want to use their phone to scan those QR codes.

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Give them the options, for example, yourcompanywebsite.com/reviews or something like that. So that way they can go to that URL by themselves if they don’t want to scan the QR code. The QR code would link them directly to that Google review we talk about on the text. The other piece is make sure you train your team members to follow that direction and ask for the reviews. Make sure they know the timing and how to ask it.

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The other piece you will want to do is inside your welcome package when the service is delivered. So whether it’s the key you’re giving to them for their new boats, or you taking the key from them when they just get out of the boat rental space, whatever that might be to you, make sure there is a little brochure or whatever you’re giving them after the completion of the service that has at least one little postcard or a flyer that’s just thank them for stopping by, for being a customer, love to work with them, and then let them know how important it is to you as a business to have a review from them and then give them the URL right inside that code. So you see, you give them all those options. You send a text message to remind them. You have a QR code on your service counter.

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You send an email with one-click link. So when, after the follow-up, so thank you for stopping by, for doing X, Y, and Z, please don’t forget to rate us, to give us a review on Google. And of course you train the team to do this and you also provide a physical postcard with its QR code for that review link. So there’s 5 different ways to do this. But that’s still not enough.

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People receive text, forget about it. They did not even see your QR code on the counter. That email you sent them, delete it. Team members, forget to mention that. The physical piece you gave them, threw it away.

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Well, what are some of the options you have? Well, you want to automate that process. That’s how you get more positive reviews. It’s very straightforward in a sense. You want to follow up, but not become an annoyance to them.

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Most people need a reminder. So your CRM should be able to handle basic follow-up. And when someone posts a review, Then you stop following them. They should automatically get out. This could be inside your CRM.

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When the customer service is all set, we let them know this customer is all set, the service is done, send review request. So in this case, they already had the text message, the all this email, but you have this automatic email that goes out, the email link I mentioned that would be coming from the CRM, let them know you would love to get a review from them. Now, your CRM should be able to track when that person submit a review for us. Until then, the sequence within the CRM automatic review request will continue to send that request every week or every 2 weeks or every month to say, hey, we would still love to have a review from you. We haven’t got one.

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You can set that up and you don’t want to keep it going forever. The longest I have seen a review reminder request goes out is up to 3 months. Sometimes people just forget, right? But what you want to do is make sure you’ve been consistent. So the first email would go out, the second email could go out in a week or two, and then you follow up based on that.

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And then when they give you a review, we remove them from that email sequence. Or when that time frame is over, the email automation stops going out to them as a reminder.

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That’s it. That’s how you set up and how you get more positive reviews for your business. Now How do you handle the negative reviews? Well, here’s how. So negative reviews are sometimes, it’s almost like a punch in the gut, right?

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Sometimes you know your team delivered, you did what was asked of you, you provide great service and you still get a negative review. What you do not want to do is ignore it. Always, always respond to a negative review. If you’re gonna ignore a review, it should not be a negative one. And when you respond, respond publicly and professionally.

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Don’t start a fight with the reviewer because Google doesn’t like that. Google actually wants you to respond but doesn’t want you to start a fight with that person, start talking about personal information that they shouldn’t do X, Y, and Z. Take it as professional as possible. So that way you get a mark, you have a say on that negative review because sometimes it’s not because you did something wrong, just that person had a bad day or that’s who they are. And many people can read between the lines.

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Right? So you want to make sure you respond publicly and professionally without going overboard. And try to respond within the 24-hour period. Don’t let more than 24 hours pass because you want to respond right away so that your response can have maximum effect based on the review they will have given you. And of course, within the review, acknowledge the concern without being defensive.

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You don’t have to be like, we never did this, we never did X, Y, and Z. Just acknowledge X, Y, and Z happened. Maybe you even apologize for it if needed, and then move on and say, here’s what you would like to do for them, or if they were willing to come back, you make this right or something like that. But Never go on, become very defensive without addressing their concern. Of course, you can always take the conversation offline to resolve it.

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Again, you could respond, make sure you respond publicly, but offer them to come to your shop, to your dealer, to the dock, and we will solve that problem. And a lot of it is just, hey, this is what happened, here’s how we solve it. ‘Come over, we take you up.’ And never, ever argue or make excuses publicly because when a potential buyer reads your comment, your reviews, it reflects on you as a business. And you do not want that to come negatively on top of that negative review. You want to show that you are a professional, you take care of your customers, this is a one-off kind of deal.

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One thing that you can do, and many businesses don’t know this, after you resolve an issue with a bad reviewer, he or she can go back and update their review on Google. Only them can do so. Remember, there is no such thing, if someone said they will take your money to fix Google review for you, that’s not true because Google actually doesn’t delete those reviews like 99% of the time. It’s very, very hard-pressed to get Google to delete the review. They can, but it’s not easy.

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So if someone said, well, there’s negative review, don’t worry about them, we’re gonna get them deleted. No, try to resolve the problem with the bad reviewer. Once you solve that problem that was nagging them, ask them if they could please update their review. And sometimes they may not want to, that’s fine, but at least do that. So there is Google where everybody goes now, and almost 80% of reviews all sit on Google at the moment.

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So, which is very, very powerful if you think about where Google is at from a search engine perspective, but there are a lot of things outside Google’s ecosystem. So there is Facebook recommendation, which is very, very important and matters a lot. So you would want to make sure you set up your Facebook page for your business and make sure to get noticed so that people can get you recommendation from there. If that matters to you a lot, you can actually set it up to get recommendation from your Facebook page. Industry-specific site, if applicable.

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So there are businesses that have very specific reviews. So many of the industries such as real estate and even cars, they have different directories and pages that you can get very, very specific reviews from. And you can get your customer to get you those reviews as some of those reviews as well. Some of them aggregate their reviews directly from Google, but some of them get the review directly from the customers. Those are usually more of a testimonial, but those are very powerful as well because those are signals outside your website, outside Google that also tells people that you exist, your business exists on a specific niche or industry.

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This is very important. And then of course there is Yelp. All of us, you guys know of Yelp. It’s not just for basic services, it’s for everybody, including marine businesses as well. It’s not as predominant in the marine space, depending on what services that you offer, but for the most part, you can use Yelp as well.

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Although most people go to Google nowadays, but Yelp is extremely popular and well optimized so that your reviews and Yelp can be showing on Google search results. And that’s how people end up on Yelp to review about you and then head to your site. So it’s crucial if you, depending on where you are, the industry and the location you are in, Yelp could be very important. So for example, if you are a boat rental business, then Yelp will be super crucial for you. Whereas in the order of priority, I would put Google, Yelp, and the rest of them.

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Whereas for a dealer, I would go Google first, industry-specific, and Yelp third. And then what you would want to do is also all those different positive reviews from all over the places, you can syndicate and publish them directly on your website. What that means is that Sometimes when you go to a website and you see they have 100, 200, 500 reviews on one page, the reason is because they pull all the positive reviews and they’re only showing positive reviews on their website. You can do that. There are filters you can apply.

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Say if a review is less than 5, don’t show it on my website, and then boom, you show those reviews on their website. You can actually aggregate all those different sources. So Facebook, industry-specific website reviewer, and Yelp, and all the places that you can get reviews from and then display them on your website. That’s it for behind Google. So you don’t need to always have your all your reviews from Google, although Google is extremely powerful and is important, is probably the most important one.

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I hope this podcast has been helpful. You get something out of it. What you need to do, your action plan now is to go ahead, look at and ready to use a simple review process. Put that in place for you, for your team, and make sure your team understand that. Make sure you answer all the unanswered reviews that you have on Google, Whether it’s positive, negative, we answer it, especially the negative one.

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And also train your team, make sure the team knows what they need. And last piece I want to mention is we have a system called NautiLead. It’s a lead management and reputation management that’s built for marine business specifically. So if you are interested, we will be more than happy to show you how you can automate your review process for your business. That’s it for this episode.

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Please don’t forget to subscribe and share it with anyone in the marine space that need to hear it. And we would love to hear from you, so drop us your questions or topics you would like us to cover in future episodes. And of course, if you need help implementing any of the tactics we talk about, head on to boatmarketingpros.com. We would love to help you grow. I’m Harry Casimir.

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Thanks for listening. Now let’s get out there and make some waves.

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Hey, what’s up everybody? Welcome to the Marine Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Harry Casimir. This podcast is all about marketing your marine business, whether you are a boat dealer, boat builder, boat club, all in between. If you want to get more leads, more sales, and marketing that actually works, you are in the right place.

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And every episode we break down what’s working right now in the marine marketing space. There is no fluff, no generic advice, just real tactics you can take home and grow your business. This podcast is brought to you by Boat Marketing Pros, where we help marine businesses grow through digital marketing. Learn more at boatmarketingpros.com. All right, let’s get into it.

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Google Business Profile masteries for boat dealers and other local marine businesses. Your Google Business Profile is often the first thing potential customers see. Most marine businesses have incomplete or poorly optimized profiles. This episode, we cover exactly how to optimize your profile for more clicks, more calls, and more showroom visits and more memberships. So let’s get started on what we’re gonna cover.

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On this episode, we are going to cover why Google Business Profile matters to your business. We are going to cover the foundation, get these things done and get them right first. How the optimization strategy that you can apply for your Google Business to make sure your business stand out when people search. Google post strategy, what are some of the things that you should be aware of or need to know and need to do. And of course, questions and answer section within their Google Business Profile.

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I don’t know if you knew that you could do that information, how you can get that presented. Let’s get started on why this matters. Google captures almost 80% of all online reviews as we speak today. That is huge. And customers rely now on reviews to determine whether they want to do business with you or not.

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And as we speak today, Google holds about almost 90% of the search engine market share in North America. Think about that.

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8 out of 10 people go to Google, almost 90, 9 of 10 go to Google to find information that they are looking for when it comes to specific information. Now that’s from a search engine perspective. We’re not going to talk about AI on this one, but let’s focus on search engine. Your Google Business Profile, when you do a search, you will see it on what they call the local packs result, which is often before you see your website or any of your competitors’ website. The first thing you see up there, there are usually 3 of them next to the map, is what we call the local pack.

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And there’s a lot of factors and different filters that apply before you could get to be shown on that 3 spots. For your business to show on that 3 spots, there are things that you need to do, and we are going to cover them piece by piece here today. This is free marketing most dealers are leaving on the table. I mean, you do not pay for Google Business Profile. Well, you could pay for someone to manage it for you, but you don’t pay to actually be on Google for you to have your business inside Google Business Profile.

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And you will see the difference between you managing it versus someone managing it for you and what you need to know. First, let’s go over the foundation, how to get these basic fundamentals right the first time. So the first thing you want to do, if you have not done so yet, is claim and identify your business profile. And this is crucial. It’s very, very important that you claim your business profile as soon as possible if you have not done so.

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And if you have already, congrats, that is awesome. But here are some of the things that you need to make sure you have on your Google Business Profile. This is very, very, very important. First thing is the exact name as it appears on your building and on your website. I will give an example.

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If your business is ABC123 Marine LLC, that’s the legal government name of your business. However, your brand name, what you market with, is ABC123 Marine Business. Then don’t put the LLC on your website and then put the LLC on Google. You don’t do that. You want to make sure that name matches everywhere.

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So I’m not saying for you not to put LLC if you want to, although you don’t really have to, but if you want to put LLC at the end of your business name or Inc. or whatever that might be, you can. You just want to be consistent across the board. So if you use LLC and the business name once, you want to use that across the board. Again, the LLC, Inc., or something like that would be the corporation slash the legal state and government name. Whereas your business would actually be known as ABC123 Marine Business, right?

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So you want that name on your building, that name on your address, that name on Google Business Profile, and that’s the same name that should be on your website. You also want a correct address with suite number if applicable. This is very, very important. Don’t just put the address, a random address, but suite number, especially if you have a suite number. Obviously there are businesses, a lot of businesses that do not have a suite number, that’s just a normal address.

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Have that, but make sure you looked at the address and add it exactly as it shows on the post office, uh, on this USPS address. This is crucial because when your business is going to verify on Google Business Profile, you want that information to match. The second piece is the phone number that someone would actually answer on the business. That is very, very crucial, and you will see why. And then update the hours, include seasonal changes, especially if you live in the Northeast, Midwest, where the weather change, season change, sometimes you close down completely.

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You want to have that information available. Once you get your business information to be accurate, which is what we call the NAP, name, address, and phone number, the next piece within the foundation is your primary category, meaning that what is the primary thing that your business does? If you’re a boat dealer, then you sell boats. Although you basically a boat repair shop, you could be a marina, you could be a boat rental space, but you want to put your primary function as a business and the primary categories. This is important.

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So let’s say, for example, you are a boat dealer that have all those different businesses I just mentioned, but you want to be known as the boat rental. The boat dealer would be a secondary. You want to put boat rental as the primary. Instead of boat dealer as the secondary. Now this is crucial because Google actually look at the primary business and give it priority.

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So this is important because locally you have 3, 4, 5, 7, 8 competitors in a world where everything is— if everything were to be equal, because if boat dealer is not your primary category, although you are a boat dealer or you have been known as a boat dealer, but you do not want boat dealer to be your primary category, then you wouldn’t be competing in the primary category anymore as a dealer, if that makes sense. So you want to make sure you have the proper category for your business. Additional category that you fit in, but they are secondary to the primary. So again, take the boat dealers as an example. Let’s say you are a boat dealer.

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There’s a good chance you are a service center. You probably do repairing for boating, you do detailing, you may you even weed planting, right? And then you may even sell marine equipment. So all of this information are secondary to your primary categories. And that is very, very, very important because Google does look at all that information to categorize you.

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So you want to get that information right. Now, again, once you have your foundation in place, Now you go to the next step, optimization strategy. This is where you really want to optimize, and this is where it becomes crucial because after the foundation, now how do we make sure our business is showing where it needs to be and we have everything that’s available to us, we can take advantage of this information hub. Google Business Profile provide you as a business for free. So the first thing you want to go in is service area definition.

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So within the service area definition, make sure you include all the locations that you are serving. So for example, let me take a big metro area that has lots of activities from a boarding perspective. Let’s stay with the Fort Lauderdale. Within Fort Lauderdale area, there are a lot, a lot of subdivision within that area, from Margate to Plantation to Coconut Creek to Davis. And I cannot name all those different subdivisions within Fort Lauderdale, but every one of them may be, may have one or two or three other businesses similar to yours.

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When you add that information, you want to present yourself as big of an area that you can. Now, obviously, sometimes there are slight restrictions, which I don’t think any of the manufacturers really kind of knocking down on this. If there is restriction in terms of geographically, regionally, how far you can broadcast your dealers, you want to make sure you not step on your associate or similar dealer to you that sell the same brand to you where you get in trouble with your manufacturers. But that’s an issue you can solve. You will know what to do, but making sure you include all the locations that you serve.

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For example, you’re a boat dealer in Fort Lauderdale and you don’t want to say you serve Orlando. That doesn’t make sense. And that can even punish you for just basically kind of lying. Unless of course you could, if you are an electrical company that could travel to Orlando. But if you are selling boats, there is a good chance you are selling it locally.

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You’re a brick-and-mortar type of business, so you want to stay within your geographically located location so that way you can get the benefits. Because the wider you spread, the less concentration you get from a visibility perspective. So you want to make sure you get the neighboring coastal community, the lakes and the waterways that you can cover. And of course, As a dealer, this is where your secondary options, your secondary categories is so important, as we mentioned in the foundation earlier, because you want to also add location that you provide a mobile service to. So for example, let’s take the same Fort Lauderdale scenario.

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You are a boat dealer in downtown Fort Lauderdale, but you will be able to provide service in West Palm Beach. Yes, that’s a very, very long distance, but because it’s mobile service and if your customers are up there, you will drive up there. That’s kind of what we’re talking about in terms of where you would be able to provide mobile service. Although that’s not the area that you selling the thing directly, but you can provide service there. That’s the service area definition because you have to define that very, very well.

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That helps. The next piece inside the optimization strategy is the attributes enabled, the attribution you add to your profile. So attribution is what are some of the things that make you unique or things that you provide and things that people can— it’s almost like the tangible items people can deal with you right away. So as a dealer, for example, You provide test ride and you test ride is available. They can come in, they just need to submit the form.

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They can come and see, trial a boat with you. Again, I’m not saying that’s what you do, but if that’s available to you, make sure you have that on your attributes. Make sure if you have certified marine technicians, make sure you have that. Make sure if you have certified fiberglass technician, you have that on your website. If you have both financing available to your consumers, make sure you have that on your website as well.

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You have a part department, you make sure you have those part departments, and depending on how elaborate your part department is— some part departments is that they only sell just the part and done with, whereas some of them actually can ship the part, some of them can actually customize the part, so make sure you put the correct attributes for that section.

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The third piece inside the optimization strategy we’re gonna go over is the photos and video and some content. Make sure within your Google Business Profile you do have your high-quality image of your showroom. I highly, highly recommend if possible do a quick run-through video. It doesn’t have to be professional, high-quality stuff, but it needs to be good enough where the information makes sense and it’s very easy to understand, and a user can watch that video and have a good sense of all the brands, all the inventory that you have, the one that you want to show them. But of course, within the high-quality showroom image, you also want to have an image that shows different boat inventories that you carry.

[00:15:59.420]
It’s really, really helpful if you can, if you are able to, to have your team photos in there because Google Business Profile is really, really embracing love, authenticity, and providing your team photos shows that you guys are a real company, a real team. You have the things that need, that is needed to be a true company and you are local. Of course, the service department images. So show your technician working on engines or doing detailing on a boat, things like that make a big difference. And you will see why that’s very, very important when you go to a business profile on Google that is very, very well optimized.

[00:16:43.030]
Those guys usually number one on Google 3-pack, and 87% of the time those guys get clicked before you do because they are number one, they are on top. So the fourth piece on this, we’re gonna go over the Google post strategy. What does that really mean to you from a business perspective? What posting on Google Business Profile looks like. So the first thing you want to do is making sure you have a schedule.

[00:17:13.870]
We highly recommend that if you can, to have a post really on a weekly basis about your inventory, about the team, about events, always have a post ready. And if you think about it, if you’re a boat dealer or even like a boat rental, you can have a post once a week. There’s a lot of things you can actually talk about in a post. Boat dealer is easy because you just post a new model just came out. You don’t put 3, 4, 5 models at once.

[00:17:47.380]
Maybe you schedule them every week, you drip them. Almost like a drip campaign, one at a time. Or if you have news both coming in and post at least once a week or couple times a week, you can have one or two posts a week on Google for strategy, very easy. And of course, one of the things that I feel a lot of businesses neglect and missing out on is posting upcoming events boat shows. If you are a boat dealer, there is a good chance you participate in some boat shows, at least the most successful one.

[00:18:26.370]
That show is very, very well published on Google, but Google also looking for content that is unique for a specific location. For example, let’s say you are a boat dealer in Orlando, you will be participating in in the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, big show, and maybe you will have a booth there, right? So what you want to do is inside your business profile, you will create an event in the boat show that will be coming in, put as much detail as possible. Why that matters? When someone search in Orlando area, upcoming boat shows or upcoming boat dealer events or whatever that search is, there’s a good chance you’ll be the one that’s showing for la, la, la, and then our show, both shows within that search result page.

[00:19:18.150]
There’s a good chance you will be number one because of your locality, proximity, and relevancy of the search. And of course, inside the Google post strategy, highlight service special as well. All businesses run special every now and then. Well, some don’t, but if you do, make sure you highlight your service special. So whether it’s a free oil change, free engine tune-up, you pick what you want to offer as a special service and make sure it gets posted on Google Business Profile.

[00:19:57.350]
Just so you know, most posts in Google Business Profile expired after 7 days. So that’s why consistency matters so much. You cannot post once a month and be okay with it because in 7 days, this post is not relevant anymore. This is why you want to keep up with Google Business Profile as much as you would keep up with your website, actually any other social media. Google Business Profile, you can consider almost like a social media but strictly focus on business search results.

[00:20:33.480]
Number 5, questions and answers section. So within the Google Business Profile, you can actually create frequently asked questions and proactively answer those questions right in there. So for example, you can say, do you offer financing? Yes, we offer financing. If you want to add more information, what brand do you carry?

[00:21:05.890]
We are a proud dealer or proud distribution of the following brands, pom pom pom. Of course, you can monitor for new questions that come in often and then answer those questions and then turn them into question and answer within the Google Business Profile. So that way when someone search for that specific questions based on proximity locations, you have the answer for them. And then when they click for more information, guess where they’re going? To your company website, to your Google Business Profile and company website.

[00:21:39.880]
So this is why it’s so important to optimize your Google Business Profile. All right, hope this helps. See you soon.

[00:21:51.890]
That’s it for this episode. Please don’t forget to subscribe and share it with anyone in the marine space that needs to hear it. And we would love to hear from you, so drop us your questions or topics you would like us to cover in future episodes. And of course, if you need help implementing any of the tactics we talk about, head on to Boat Marketing Pros We would love to help you grow. I’m Harry Casimir.

[00:22:22.260]
Thanks for listening. Now let’s get out there and make some waves.

[00:00:00.670]
Hey, what’s up everybody? Welcome to the Marine Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Harry Casimir. This podcast is all about marketing your marine business, whether you are a boat dealer, boat builder, boat club, all in between. If you want to get more leads, more sales, and marketing that actually works, you are in the right place.

[00:00:29.440]
And every episode we break down what’s working right now in the marine marketing space. There is no fluff, no generic advice, just real tactics you can take home and grow your business. This podcast is brought to you by Boat Marketing Pros, where we help marine businesses grow through digital marketing. Learn more at boatmarketingcourse.com. All right, let’s get into it.

[00:01:09.360]
The speed to lead problem: why response time is killing your sales. Research shows that almost 80% of customers buy from the company that responds first. Yet most marine businesses take hours, sometimes days, to respond to leads. In this episode, we are going to cover why speed matters and exactly how you can fix it for your dealer. Here’s one of the things that we’re gonna cover in this episode.

[00:01:50.520]
We’re gonna cover the wake-up call. We’re gonna go over the why this matters more in the marine industry than any other space. The reason you are slow, and we’re gonna do a deep dive, no feeling on this, right? And then we are going over the 15-minute solutions and how you can implement that. Let’s dive right in.

[00:02:14.820]
The wake-up call. As I mentioned in the introduction, almost 78%, to be exact, of customers buy from the first company that responds to them. And this is a stat you can find everywhere and across the board. If you think about it, when was the last time that you reached out to a company and they never get back to you? I can guarantee you, if you were in a very, very bad need and there are few services of that company’s type around, I’m pretty sure you were upset.

[00:02:50.130]
With that number, 41% of consumers expect a dealership response within 1 hour. So that’s the expectation, but the reality is almost 80% don’t get that. As you guys know, what we have seen over and over in the marine industry across the board takes way, way longer than that 1 hour. And every hour you wait to get back to that lead, your close rate drops drastically. The opportunity to put these leads in a warm category or a good possibility category is significantly decreased as the time goes by.

[00:03:38.650]
So this is why it’s so crucial to understand those wake-up calls and what are some of the things that you need to know. And you might wonder why this matters more, especially in the marine space. Well, let me break this down. So the average boat purchase sell cycle at the moment is about 4+ months. So at least someone takes roughly about 4 months to fully make the final decision or at least sign on the dotted line.

[00:04:10.650]
And when we talk about the sales cycle, we’re looking at when someone shows interest in the product that you are selling and they reach out to you. From there, that’s when the sales cycle starts until that person signs on the dotted line and they take the key from you this is the end of the cycle. On average, it takes about 4 to 5 months. What happens if you lose them at first, you may never get them back because think about your competitors that already reached out to them or they reached out to 2, 3 dealers, whoever called them first, there’s a good chance they go on with whoever they go on with. Unless of course, you’re the only one in town that has that one piece of inventory they need, but at the end of the day, there are too many options around.

[00:05:05.020]
People now have more resources around. They can do their own research. They see what’s available. They’re not going to wait for you to get back to them. They will take action.

[00:05:20.100]
And of course, when someone submit a lead to you, they are already comparing and shopping around. Across multiple dealers, multiple manufacturers’ websites, marketplaces. So when they get to you, it’s not because you’re the only one in town. It’s just that you may be the one that carry the one piece of inventory they have, the type of malo or the type of boat they want, you the one that have it. So the longer you wait to get back to them, the more chances that you are giving them to get away.

[00:05:54.590]
So first impression, set the tone, get back to them right away, especially in the marine industry. A lot of things are not automated. So you want to make sure you are on top of getting back to the customer because that can set the entire relationship going forward.

[00:06:16.340]
So what are the real reasons that you are slow to get back to your leads? We’re gonna, let’s do that. Deep on this. Again, this is not a personal statement to anyone, but it is true that you will get leads from all over the place. Phone calls, direct email, random person calling.

[00:06:40.990]
You get leads from your website, leads from marketplaces, leads from social media, leads from you name it, from the brand you carry. You’re getting leads from at least 10 to 12 places depending on how you set up. And with those leads coming in from all those different places, and they are not centralized. If you do not have a centralization for your leads capturing, then it will be very, very hard for you to be on top of follow-up as well. The other piece is there is no clear ownership of who is responding to what.

[00:07:18.830]
When the leads coming in, who’s taking charge of it? Do we have a system in place that automate that information? And if you do not have that, it’s one other reason why you are slow. Salespeople are juggling showroom traffic and phone calls. So if you have one or two people on your sales team, that’s a killer.

[00:07:40.490]
This is why it’s crucial to understand what the dynamic is between the sales team, their scheduling, their workload, and how we are responding when a new phone call coming in, when a new email coming in, how are those leads are being distributed and making sure the salespeople have plenty of information, plenty of time so they can execute from a sales perspective. And if that’s not in place, that’s another reason you are slow.

[00:08:11.400]
Manual process and sticky notes instead of a true system, a platform that automate, that keep everybody in check. That’s another reason you are slow. We are in 2026. Sometimes it blow my mind seeing that many, many dealers still using yellow pads and sticky notes just to track leads. I can only imagine what that looks like in terms of following up, who’s in charge of what, what some of the information that’s needed.

[00:08:49.130]
Now I’m not saying that because there are a lot of dealers, I have spoken with hundreds and hundreds of dealers or maybe thousands of dealers over the years where I would say half of them don’t have any system whatsoever. They have manual process and a lot of sticky notes, and they are extremely successful businesses. It’s insane. So I’m assuming to some degree those things are working, but as we get into the age where a lot of things are moving to system and platforms, it’s crucial to have those things in place. So your manual process and your sticky notes instead of using a platform system, that’s one of the other reasons why you are slow.

[00:09:40.120]
So how are we gonna solve all of these problems? Well, here’s the 15-minute solutions that we have for you. The first thing you want to do, set up automated email and text messages inside your CRM. If you do not have a CRM, start looking at getting one. And if you want recommendation, I highly recommend you go with notolead.com CRM, or obviously if you already have, whether it HubSpot or Salesforce or any other CRM that you are using, set up automatic email response.

[00:10:19.760]
So when the leads comes in As soon as the leads hit your inbox, your CRM, there should be an automatic email that goes out. There could be multiple. The first one you want to go out is making sure whoever’s in charge of sales or the salespeople you want to receive this email, make sure they get that message like right away. The second piece is make sure that is very well communicated among your salespeople because there are information you want them to know so that when they call, they don’t look like a fool. Either you set up another email that when someone contacts you from your website, from social media, once they hit your CRM, they will get an email automatically that tells them, hey, we got your message, someone will reach out.

[00:11:08.560]
Sometimes that’s all it takes. It doesn’t really need to be complex and nothing, just Hey, thanks for reaching out, so-and-so. If you can automate and personalize that message, even better, but you don’t have to. Just say, we got your message, thanks for reaching out, one of our team members will be in contact very, very soon. That is a long stop.

[00:11:33.360]
I wouldn’t say bleeding, but because that person is just in the trends of things, they are willing And you just let them know you got the message, that alone is good enough. What’s next to follow is making sure whoever’s getting that lead do follow up because we just promised them we will follow up. But also, you can even take a step further, adding in a text notification. So text that person because everybody’s on their phone 24/7. Make sure you send them a text, say, “I got your message, we’ll be in touch.” And it’s okay to send both an email and a text if you want, and that will be fine.

[00:12:17.310]
Everybody’s okay with that. And of course, create lead notification alerts on your phone as whether if you are the general manager or in charge of the business somewhere, integrator, wherever your position is, and if you are responsible for bringing leads or at least distributing leads, especially if you’re in the marketing space of things, business owner or general manager, you want to know, are we getting those leads coming in? And you can set up a notification on your phone to make sure whenever a new lead’s coming in, you see it. And so that way you make sure your sales team are on top of it. And assign clear ownership.

[00:13:00.130]
Again, I have seen before where Some dealers will have one person and they have, you know, 6, 7, 8 salespeople and they have one person that would be in charge. And if that person’s sick and not showing up that day, and that person is responsible for all the leads that need to be distributed or even responds to, sometimes that person is not available, then boom, all those leads that’s coming in, they’re in shambles. What you want to do is set up a clear ownership for leads response and how those leads get distributed. And we’re gonna talk about a little bit on this. So that would be the first immediate first step option.

[00:13:42.740]
Set up automated email and text, create a lead notification on your phone, and assign clear ownership. The next step on this you will need to take is implement a CRM if you do not have that in place. Get a CRM that can automate all the tasks we just mentioned. And you can create templates for every single one of the inquiries that coming in, because you will have different inquiries, different information that’s coming in. Someone may go to your website and they are looking at a specific boat.

[00:14:22.900]
Inventory item, they contact you based on that inventory item, you want to respond based on that information, not the generic information. You can generic, but it’s good to showcase that you wish they reach the right person for the right information and you are getting back to them. You can automate that through templates within your CRM. And of course, track response time. This is the beauty of CRM.

[00:14:49.410]
You will see of the 3,100 leads you got this month, you can see when the team responds, when was all of your automated message went out, and is your team responding on time and what that time frame looks like for each one of them. And of course, again, track the metrics, and so that helps you make adjustment to your system. The Third thing you can do for the 15-minute solution is add a chatbot. Add a chatbot to your website. That’s just one of the fastest, most efficient way to capture leads because sometimes people want someone to answer them right away.

[00:15:33.870]
And that chatbot can serve as a lead capture, but also help streamline and filter people because someone comes to your chatbot, there’s a good chance they are very, very interested in buying something. And you can either answer them right away or have the chatbot get their information. That’s another way to get leads. Instead of someone click on contact information, they go to the contact page, the chatbot is super easy. When they click on that chatbot from your website, they will provide their name, maybe email address and phone number.

[00:16:07.840]
And when you get the information from the chatbot, you would know what page they were visiting anyways. So you, when you get back with them, you can actually chat based on that information. And of course, set up automated lead routing. And what that means is who’s getting what and when, how. There’s a lot of different ways you can set up your automated leads distribution.

[00:16:31.390]
One of the common ways is one-on-one. It’s basically if you have 6 salespeople on the hub and every time a lead comes in, it goes to the next person, to the next person and next person. So that really helps, but sometimes it’s tricky because you will have to create workflows so that if someone is not available, we will have to either mark them not available for the day or for the week. Or someone have to monitor this. Round robin works perfectly when you have a very consistent sales team that’s been around for a minute, for with you for a long time, and they know what they’re doing.

[00:17:14.720]
Round robin is perfect. There are other sub, semi-manual automatic one as well, where you would assign it to someone, but because the CRM will trigger both whoever gets assigned the lead and potentially even paying additional salespeople or an assistant salesperson, a general manager assistant, to help them understand the lead is in the queue, make sure it gets assigned. That’s some type of automation you can create as well. And of course, one of the things that you would want to do is create accountability for response time goals. So a lot of times it’s not just about sales, sales, sales, but it’s managing, nurturing the leads that’s coming in.

[00:18:05.510]
That means, are we touching base with them and what the timeline looks like? And you can attach those as part of your goals for your team. I know we unpacked a lot of information here in terms of We went over the wake-up call, you know, the numbers of people that goes with the first company that reached out to them, why this is very, very important to the marine industry and why you need to implement this. And we went over the 5 reasons why you are slow to get back to your leads and offering the 15-minute solutions, by breaking down, the first thing you will do is set up automatic response for email and text, create lead notification, and assign clear ownership for each of those leads. The next step within the 15-minute solution is set up, implement a CRM if you do not have one already, create response templates email that basically whenever someone’s submit information to you, that template is pre-built and personalized to get to them.

[00:19:18.800]
And also within there, track response time as a metrics to ensure that you are capturing leads, those leads are getting response, and your team is on top of it. The third step within the 15-minute solution is add a chatbot to your website to capture leads. Set up automated lead routing, whether you use a round robin or a step-up type of lead assignment. And of course, create accountability for response time as part of your goals for your organization. And the last piece is really get buy-in from your team.

[00:19:59.680]
This is it. I hope you get some nuggets on this in terms of how the speed-to-lead problem and why that is killing your sales and how you can fix it. That’s it for this episode. Please don’t forget to subscribe and share it with anyone in the marine space that needs to hear it. And we would love to hear from you, so drop us your questions or topics you would like us to cover in future episodes.

[00:20:30.160]
And of course, if you need help implementing any any of the tactics we talk about, head on to bootmarketingpros.com. We would love to help you grow. I’m Harry Casimir. Thanks for listening. Now let’s get out there and make some waves.

[00:00:00.670]
Hey, what’s up everybody? Welcome to the Marine Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Harry Casimir. This podcast is all about marketing your marine business, whether you are a boat dealer, boat builder, boat club, all in between. If you want to get more leads, more sales, and marketing that actually works, you are in the right place.

[00:00:29.440]
And every episode we break down what’s working right now in the marine marketing space. There is no fluff, no generic advice, just real tactics you can take home and grow your business. This podcast is brought to you by Boat Marketing Pros, where we help marine businesses grow through digital marketing. Learn more at boatmarketingpros.com. All right, let’s get into it.

[00:01:09.460]
AI for boat dealers, practical tools you can use today. In this episode, we are going to cut through the AI hype and focus on practical, affordable AI tools that marine business, especially boat dealers, can implement right now to save time, generate more leads, get their team to be more efficient. This is not about replacing people. It is all about making your team more effective. So we’re gonna dive deep into what are ways that you use AI to generate leads and doing marketing, AI for customer relationship, how you can use AI in operations of the business, and where do you get started.

[00:02:01.870]
We gonna do a deep dive for each of those points, and let’s get into it. So you cannot go anywhere nowadays, actually everywhere, everyone is talking about AI, AI, artificial intelligence. But most boat dealers have no idea where to start. And the good news is that you do not need to be a tech expert to benefit and to use AI. Today we are covering some of the real tools that you can use, and those tools don’t really require much, just like you would use a DMS, for your dealer or you would use a basic CRM for your dealer, we are going to cover some of the things that, some of the tools that you can use to do most of the things or to become more efficient of the things that you are already doing or sometimes not even doing, but with the help of AI, you can actually get started and get you going.

[00:03:06.310]
So the first piece we are going to cover is AI for lead generation and marketing. You’ve seen it everywhere. Most websites now have a chatbot on. The chatbot is on and ready to capture leads. And how can you use that to help your dealer take advantage of this new technology?

[00:03:32.060]
A chatbot on your website, you can actually train it or you can use a simple one, Simply. To capture leads 24/7, even after hours. You can help use that tool also to answer basic and commonly asked questions such as, what are the brands you carry? Or obviously it will be very difficult and tricky to get your chatbot to answer specific pricing questions for you, but a chatbot can really solve a lot of things for you. And some of the tools that do this already, and that’s just kind of top of mind, obviously there’s Drift, there’s Intercom, our own CRM, we, Boat Marketing Pros has its own CRM called NautiLead.

[00:04:25.860]
NautiLead is a CRM for and built for boot dealers and boat dealerships. Builders so they can manage the customer journey from leads to loyal customers. Then there are a ton of other platforms that’s available as well. There are some of them that’s actually dedicated, like Connect, that’s dedicated simply to the marine space. You could use AI-powered email campaign.

[00:04:52.880]
An AI-powered email campaign really helps automate the follow-up based on customer behavior. And there’s a lot of different ways you can use this, but the simplest way is to ensure that when someone asks specific questions or submit a specific form on your website, or they meet certain criteria, actually you can automate the campaign so that only specific information go to them. So that helps personalize the content at scale. Let’s say you have a database of customers, you’ve been in business for a long time, you have a database of 3, 4, 5, 10,000 emails. It would be very, very hard for you to personalize individualized email for each one of them.

[00:05:41.860]
But because you have some basic information about the location where they at and what the interests are, and that may not be 100% accurate, but if you can hit the 80-90% mark accuracy on that information. You can personalize a lot of that information. That is the power of AI. And some of that information, even if you don’t have the nitty-gritty detail of it, you can use AI to help filter and help even further enhance some of that information. And what are some of the tools that we have seen that works very, very well?

[00:06:21.670]
Actually, Mailchimp have their productivity tools that really pretty slick. It actually does a pretty good job at those type of campaign. There is HubSpot AI that’s available as well. But even Salesforce does have its own built-in campaign that’s a little bit, can be overkill, but it will do the job. But we also have NautiLead as well that is pretty good at creating personalized campaign at scale.

[00:06:51.370]
And sending specific information based on the customer data. You can actually help create ads at scale as well. You can generate ads imagery and get copy quickly. You can do a lot of A/B testing variation. You can create those ads actually even with Google Gemini, ChatGPT.

[00:07:15.560]
There are some other tools that just upcoming. I don’t want to recommend them at the moment because they’re kind of fairly young. So I don’t want to recommend tools that could be gone tomorrow, but tools that can help you generate very, very well-defined ad campaigns at scale, not only create those images, but also help you build a variation of A/B testing to see what ads creative that works best for you. The other point is you can use AI for customer relationship management, AI for CRM. So what an AI within your CRM does, it helps predict when, it’s not a, sometimes like you’ll be surprised.

[00:08:03.730]
With AI, a lot of information that you will have to go in or someone in your team will have to go in and try to figure it out, an AI can help predict when a customer are due for service. And AI can actually determine, depending on how you set up your workflow and your complete— the level of complexity you want to add to this, follow-up email can be sent automatically to customers, sending to mass customer, let them know when service are due, or what are some of the things that should be doing now to their boat. It can also help you identify buying signals from past customers. So let’s say, for example, you’re a boat dealer that is selling Boston Whaler and Pursuit, all right? These are kind of very strong brand, and if someone is interested in one, sometimes they kind of interchange, but sometimes they are not, right?

[00:09:01.290]
But you have an idea that person is very interested in a Pursuit. But let’s say, for example, you have a lightly used pre-owned Grilly White coming in. You can actually automatically send email because that customer has bought or show interest in Pursuit, and Pursuit is not available at the moment. You can actually show all the inventory that’s available to them based on that signal, and that is the power of AI. And a lot of the follow-up task assignment to your sales team and to even internal or the team members that may not be involved in sales day to day.

[00:09:45.740]
But sales is not a one-person job or just the salespeople team job, it’s the whole company thing. So you can actually assign, automate some of the assignment things that we used to go in, we have to build this crazy workflow manually, but now with AI, you can actually automate a lot of that information. There are tons and tons of different CRM out there that’s ready to do this, including Salesforce. Einstein is very good. I know Pipedrive Smart AI is pretty good at that.

[00:10:19.370]
HubSpot AI is good at this as well. Even Zoho has a CRM called Zia. That actually can do what we’re talking about here, automate some of this. And cannot forget to mention, Naughty Lead actually has most of these already pre-built because it built just for boat dealers. So as a boat dealer, you don’t, many of these things, you don’t really have to think about them.

[00:10:45.070]
You can just plug and play with the Naughty Lead CRM. AI for operations. This is kind of where AI can really help in lots of things. You know very well there’s lots of information, no matter what kind of business you’re running, there’s multiple departments, multiple things to keep up with from phone calls that’s coming in to team members that need to share notes and information to scheduling for the service departments, workload management, part ordering and services reminders. The list can go on for days.

[00:11:26.910]
As operation grows, so is the demand for consistency, efficiency, and most so reliability. So this is where I think AI could really, really help from transcribing phone calls, taking a phone calls that just happened, to take the voice and transcribe it into text. Service notes automatically get distributed among team members and making sure everybody’s in line. And also predictive scheduling and workload management. Think about it.

[00:12:02.400]
As a business owner, operator, manager, general manager, it’s very hard for you, even if you have your nose day in, day out in the operation, you don’t know every Wednesday at 10:00 AM you have an influx of people, June 27th, you wouldn’t know that. You actually would have to do a lot of analytics, a lot of data pushing to get that information out of a system. Whereas AI that’s actually embedded within your operation can help determine all those predictive scheduling and workload for you and really determine what this workload going to be from May to June or from December to January. So that way you can even determine what are the people you would need on the team to stay behind, not taking vacation at that time because the workload will be coming in. And those are just examples of things that you can get AI to do for you.

[00:13:08.150]
And also because AI can predict a lot of things based on repetitiveness of nature of your business. It can also automate a lot of things that can happen, or you can semi-automate some of the things happen in the business. So for example, part ordering. So because of how the AI would look at all the scheduling, all the different services that you offer, and look at when certain parts are ordered the most, what are some of the information they looked at for them? Guess what happened?

[00:13:47.820]
Every time the system looked at, for example, between May 1st to May 15th in the last 3 years, we always have at least 2 engine repairs happening. And these are the parts that needed to be in place when this happened. Now that does not equal, that you will always have that, but that gives you an idea. That information would be very hard for you to pull off. You could, but it’s a little bit harder for you as a person to just go in and dig that information.

[00:14:24.940]
Service reminders, based on the service request, service scheduling for parts and services for a customer, for a boat, those reminders can be going out directly to the customer. But if you don’t want them to go to the customer, actually you can send them to whoever responsible within your company, let them know this boat, that the contact information for that boat need this type of service at this point of time, and then they can send that reminder themselves. But that you don’t even have to do the double work. You can automate part of that. And there are a ton of tools that to do just that, including Salesforce again itself that can do that.

[00:15:08.750]
I know Zoho is pretty good at that, same thing HubSpot as well. You do not really need to go out and rebuild any of these, you just have to implement some of them within your operation. So how do you get started with any of those different tools I just mentioned and different things that you can do? Let’s first recap. One, You can use AI for lead generation and marketing.

[00:15:39.970]
You can use AI for your CRM, inside your CRM to do a better job at customer relationship. You can use AI for day-to-day operation from transcribing notes to sending service reminder to existing customers. But How do you get started? So here are the steps I would suggest and highly recommend that you do. First, identify your biggest pain points at the moment.

[00:16:15.420]
Leads follow-up, not enough qualified leads, or the leads that come in and they’re not qualified enough based on certain information they provide you. Is it scheduling? You have issue with marketing? Or do you have issue with reporting or the ROI information that’s not clear enough?

[00:16:36.630]
Step 2 is start with one tool. Do not try to transform everything at once. It would be a nightmare, too much, and that can overload you very quick. And even if you’re not 100% sure you will keep a tool that you are trying, Try one tool for a little bit and making sure it’s working the way you envision it working. Once that’s working for you, then you can slowly either add additional items to that tool or get other tools to do one thing.

[00:17:13.940]
Number 3, train your team for adoption because Adoption is the biggest barrier in every single business I have seen. Training is very, very crucial, but more important is the buy-in. Get your team to accept and embrace AI because it’s here whether we like it or not. AI is here to stay. It will really forever change how we do business.

[00:17:46.620]
When we do business and what business really looks like in the next 2, 5, 10 years from now. So it’s crucial that you, from a business perspective, to start thinking, to start embracing, and you don’t have to jump all the way in. You can start putting your toes in the water to start testing how things look like and what this could do for you, for your business. And of course, the fourth piece is measure results before you expand. And if the result is right, is good for you, start expanding from there.

[00:18:24.570]
The last thing I would suggest, a word of caution, I would highly recommend that you do not try to make one tool does everything for you. It’s almost impossible. I truly believe in Having one tool that does an extremely good job at one thing versus having one tool that does half job or not much at all for all of your things that you need. So there are a ton of tools out there that says they do everything, but at the end of the day, no one is perfect at everything. That’s included for software.

[00:19:07.000]
Let’s take Microsoft Suite or Google Suite, for example, business suite, for example. That’s why Excel and Word document and PowerPoint, all of the softwares are independently available. And it’s because you wouldn’t be able to do your calculation easily within inside Word, so you have to use Excel. Just like you wouldn’t be able to easily write a full paragraph and multiple paragraphs within an Excel, you use Word for that. So every tool has its purpose.

[00:19:38.050]
I’m saying that is because I have seen over and over one mistake people make in businesses is that they get one tool, they’re trying to fit their business inside that tool. If anything, that tool needs to fit inside your business. When you get the tools, whether it’s a CRM, basically leads management, whether it’s a phone system or an operational piece, you want that system not to conduct your business for you, but you want to dictate how that tool will be used inside your business. And this is crucial. I have seen this over and over.

[00:20:20.970]
So that is it. I hope you guys have fun with this episode. Don’t forget to check us at bootmarketingpros.com/ai to see some of the recommended tools that we have in place. And of course, we’re always here to help. Feel free to reach out and we’ll be more than happy to help you reach your goal this year.

[00:20:44.560]
That’s it for this episode. Please don’t forget to subscribe and share it with anyone in the marine space that needs to hear it. And we would love to hear from you. So drop us your questions or topics you would like us to cover in future episodes. And of course, if you need help implementing any of the tactics we talk about, head on to boatmarketingpros.com.

[00:21:10.820]
We would love to help you grow. I’m Harry Casimir. Thanks for listening. Now let’s get out there and make some waves.

[00:00:00.670]
Hey, what’s up everybody? Welcome to the Marine Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Harry Casimir. This podcast is all about marketing your marine business, whether you are a boat dealer, boat builder, boat club, all in between. If you want to get more leads, more sales, and marketing that actually works, you are in the right place.

[00:00:29.440]
And every episode we break down what’s working right now in the marine marketing space. There is no fluff, no generic advice, just real tactics you can take home and grow your business. This podcast is brought to you by Boat Marketing Pros, where we help marine businesses grow through digital marketing. Learn more at boatmarketingcourse.com. All right, let’s get into it.

[00:01:09.430]
The state of the marine industry in 2026— what boat dealers need to know. This is what we’re going to cover in this episode. We’re going to do a deep dive. Let’s get ready. We plan on covering what happened in 2025, and we’re gonna talk about the market reality that we are seeing, what actually happened, and what some of the things that smart dealers are doing that help them get ahead, and giving you some 2026 action plan to take home and focus on build up on so you can execute better for 2026.

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Let’s get started. Let’s tackle the 2025 year. How was it? How did it go? 2025 was one of the most challenging years for the boarding industry in recent memories, actually across the US and maybe across the world.

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What we’ve seen is especially the smaller powerboat retail side of the business. Last year we saw a 10% year-over-year decrease in sales for 2025. But what’s very interesting about this number is that the interest in boating has not gone anywhere. People even show more interest in boating during the same period, which is very interesting and kind of how the two sides of the equation are shifting. So the market reality that we are seeing is from pontoon to jet boats and wake sport boats, all of those numbers are down by about 13 to 14% down from the previous year.

[00:03:08.080]
That’s for new boats. However, for used boats, we have seen a 17 increase on used boats last year. And that’s a very, very strong indication that there are people that still holding on to their boats that they bought back in a few years back. And what we also seeing is the days inventory stay in the market, especially for premium vessels, it’s much longer now. So With all that, it’s not because the buyers are disappearing.

[00:03:43.260]
Actually, if anything, they are right there. They are just taking longer to decide. They involve themselves in multiple sessions, go to different medium channels where they would visit multiple platforms and systems to help them determine. So this new buyer journey becomes the norm. Longer sales cycle, which we’re going to cover in a little bit more detail.

[00:04:12.840]
So what is the reality and what’s actually happening?

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What we’ve seen is buyers are conducting much more extensive research across multiple mediums and media. So that means they are not just looking at your website, or the manufacturer website or the marketplace. They are using all resources available to them, including social media, including friends, influence from friends, to determine how they’re gonna buy and if they will even buy. Also, there is a significant increase on social media, on mobile usage. That also means, especially for dealers that don’t have a responsive website with lack of information, it will really hurt you if you do not have all of that information readily available from a mobile perspective.

[00:05:16.220]
And what that means when your website is mobile ready, there’s a few things that you have to keep in mind. One, make sure the navigation is easy for the user visitors to find that information they’re looking for, just like they would do on desktop. Make sure the website loads fast on mobile. Again, what loads fast to you may not be the same. Believe it or not, there are people that are still on very, very slow connection from a mobile perspective.

[00:05:44.460]
So you still need to keep that in mind. So your website needs to be flexible so that the user can get the information they need when they visit wherever they are. And we have seen buyers now really map out the journey in terms of how they will buy, when they will buy based on information they are saving. So they take your listing, save that information, and then monitor price changes over time. So they looked at when did you change that price?

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When price for X model change? All of that information or more that the potential customer is harboring so that they can make a better decision for them and obviously a slower decision on what they need to buy. But also with all that, the economy uncertainty does not help. It makes consumers more price sensitive, price conscious, and really think about where they’re spending their money. Many potential buyers don’t buy boats, not because they do not have the money, but they’re just not certain what the economy gonna look like 6 months, a year from now.

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So they are very careful on how they approach this. With all that, we looked at the reality and what’s actually happening. So what are some of the things that smart dealers are doing to help expand their market. Well, what we’re seeing is over and over, some of the dealers that function extremely well, that’s moving inventory very, very well in good or bad times, are dealers that usually think ahead, that think long-term, don’t have the short, quick sell cycle in their mind that they can sell anything overnight. The reality is not the case.

[00:07:46.470]
Those are the dealers that expand their marketing team and digital presence. So they really, really put their foot in the ground from a marketing perspective, really push what we call a true omnipresence. So that if you enter those dealers’ market, there’s a good chance you will see them across multiple, multiple mediums and hear them across multiple mediums. So you will see them on your Facebook feed. You will see them on your Instagram.

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Their website is super polished and well optimized. You will find them on Google local search. You will find them on Google Ads. You would find them on your local radios and, and you will find them in even some national network. You will find them some on TV.

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You would find them on YouTube. You will find them everywhere. Those are the type of dealers that really know how to execute and how to keep the momentum going. What we have seen over and over, those dealers usually don’t complain much about inventories not moving. The market is strange.

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They don’t selling as much like early 2021, but they are moving inventories. What we also seen is smart dealers are hosting a lot of in-person events. They create a very special intimate event that help them stay connected with potential customers, but also their existing customer base. We have seen over and over that what happened with customers that you already have, it’s very easy to maintain and retain them so that they can think of you with the next purchase. And of course, make sure cleaning up aging inventory before the new model year started, because what we seen is everybody’s looking for a deal.

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It doesn’t matter how much money they have. Where the status is at. Everyone is looking for a deal. Smart dealers understand that. And at the end of the day, the deal that you give to someone can make or break the deal, can determine whether they will go with you or go to the next dealer down the street.

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So it’s very, very crucial that you look at, analyze your inventory, analyze the market, see the interest, and look at your database of potential buyers, people that have reached out to you or bought before from you, which we’re gonna cover in a second. How can you tap into this and offering incentives to bring them in so that you can get rid of the previous year model? But also, the very smart dealers are focusing on both segments where the demand is very strong. So for example, right now demand is very, very strong for used boat. That’s the one segment that you can capitalize on.

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I’m not saying you just need to bring all your inventory into used boat, but that’s a very strong segment where the demand is very high. Again, I just mentioned to you from last year, used boat sales were up almost 17%. So with that number, we seen the trend is continue to grow even from the previous year. The previous year was 13%, now it’s 17%, and there’s a good prediction out there that it will hit about 21%, which is crazy. So if you think about from a dealer perspective, it makes sense to be where the demand is at, which is used boat.

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And we’ve seen this where some smart dealers put themselves in a place where they have, or they are ready for where the demand is very strong. Another piece we’ve seen over and over, I just mentioned this a moment ago, but let’s dive deep a little bit on investing in customer retention over pure acquisition. Yes, it makes sense from a dealer perspective, from a business perspective, to invest in lots of marketing outreach and get your name out there, build the brand and make people see you and make people want to buy from you when they’re ready for whatever model they are looking at. However, the database of past customers, people that bought from you before, it’s a goldmine that I have seen over and over that businesses just ignore. You cannot ignore this goldmine.

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Your existing customer base, I hope you have all that data in place and a database or CRM to tap into, because if you’ve been in business for a moment, so let’s give an example here. Let’s say a boat dealer has been in business for 20 years because of that longevity. And let’s say they carry, give or take, 3 different brands. During that time, over that last 20 years, Say for example, on average, these are 100 boats a year. Again, I’m just making that number up.

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So if you think about it, 100 boats a year times 20, you understand where we’re going with this, right? That’s 2,000-some boats. Now that’s not a lot over 20 years, but again, that’s just the number I’m making up. Every one of these people are people that socially bought from you, and there’s a good chance, especially in the last 5 years, those people still have their board. With that information on hand, this is where you can do a lot of outreach, build customer loyalty, and bring those people again and again.

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So for services, offer them free services, offer them peer connection, and even create a specific event or some kind of mastery board information just for your customer base so they can stay with you. And that’s, my friend, is true customer retention over acquisition. Because at the end of the day, acquisition doesn’t come cheap. Now I’m not saying your existing customers are gonna come cheap, but at least you already have information from them. You do not have to reintroduce yourself.

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You just reinforce your brand. You just reinforce your— build loyalty and bring those people back in. And this is kind of a subsection within investing in your existing customer is making sure that your outreach is on de, meaning that those people, you keep them in contact, making sure they hear from you on a consistent basis. So whether it’s through newsletter or flyers that you send over to them, make sure you are front and center all the time. So with all that, What are some of the action plans or things that you should be doing as a dealer for 2026 to help you propel yourselves, your team to the next level?

[00:14:49.470]
Let’s clear the air here now. Accept the longer sales cycle and adjust follow-up accordingly. I have seen over and over people still don’t get the sales cycle of their business, and that is very, very critical. To understand, especially as boat dealers. You all use and know we have seasonality, so you do not have perfect weather all the time, and people are not in the mood to buy new boats, used boats all the time anyways.

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There’s always friction, seasonality, a lot of aspects you cannot control. So you have to adjust your follow-up accordingly, making sure you are targeting and approaching the right buyers at the right time. The other point is doubling down on your digital touchpoints throughout the buyer journey. As I mentioned to you earlier, the buyer journey changed and is becoming longer, and that’s the norm now. Because it’s become the norm, then staying in front of those potential buyers becomes more crucial, more important, and it has to be consistent.

[00:16:06.390]
It’s not something you can do today and hope for tomorrow they will come or remember you a month, two months from now. You have to stay in front of them. Your digital footprint should consist of a very, very well optimized website. In different episodes, we talk about what a true optimized website is, but a truly well optimized website, your social media footprint, your ads that running from different platforms, depending on where you run ads, and making sure the consistency of your inventory from the marketplace to different directories to your website and your DMS, all of that sync very, very well so that the information that the buyer seeing about you, the branding, all of that match up. Consider what you can do with your used inventory.

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Strategically thinking, there are tons of different ways you can approach your used inventory. And depending on the market that you are in, meaning where you located regionally, that can make a difference. But think about how can you use your current used boat inventory to drum up sales, more people and potential buyers that may not be able to buy brand new boats, but if you can get them in a pre-owned use both, how can we get them there? And strategically, what different methods we can use to bring not just one or two buyers, but many of those potential buyers that we have on our lead management system. And this is where a true CRM comes into place.

[00:17:50.130]
Make sure your 2026 plan has a complete CRM really mapped out for your team. So your CRM should be very, very basic information in terms of your team have access to manage every single leads that’s coming in with clear responsibility ownership for each members of your team. Probably most of the salespeople ensure that they have their own account. They are logging in, they are able to see leads that’s coming in, deal they are working on and where those deals are. But also making sure deals that fall through or people that are not ready to buy, make sure you have a nurturing campaign going out so that those people will continue to be aware of you, see your brand all the time so that when they are ready to afford what they want to buy from you, you will be the first one because you are the one that consistently checking in, consistently sending those reminders, giving them inventory updates and so forth.

[00:18:58.210]
So that’s things that you need to do in 2026. Last but not least is focusing on customer experience at every interaction. And that’s part of the CRM integration, but let’s do a deep dive a little bit on customer experience at every interaction. What does that mean? Long ago, a customer before they buy from you, seeing your brand or mention 2, 3 times, they’re good to go.

[00:19:27.250]
Not too long ago, it used to be 7 to 9 and changed to 14, but now customers want to see you all the time. Depending on what stats you’re looking at, they have to see you about 21 times now to actually make that decision. And that may not even be enough. Just seeing your brand alone may not be enough. The brand has to have reputation behind it.

[00:19:52.760]
That means every interaction or possible interaction you may have with your potential customer, make sure that you are on point from a branding perspective, making their experience super easy when they get to your website, when they see you on social media, you trigger things emotionally that helps them get over the hump. When they get a newsletter from you, that there are clear calls to action, information that entice them, but also get them to take action if possible. Offer something to help them make the experience easier and make it easier for you and for your team. There’s a lot to unpack in 2026, but those are the 5 key things that I think in 2026 you can implement. So one last thing before we go.

[00:20:46.190]
Don’t forget to download your 2026 Marine Marketing Checklist. You can find it at boatmarketingpros.com/marinemarketingchecklist. Download this and get to work. See ya. That’s it for this episode.

[00:21:05.680]
Please don’t forget to subscribe and share it with anyone in the marine space that needs to hear it. And we would love to hear from you. So drop us your questions or topics you would like us to cover in future episodes. And of course, if you need help implementing any of the tactics we talk about, head on to boatmarketingpros.com. We would love to help you grow.

[00:21:32.670]
I’m Harry Casimir. Thanks for listening. Now let’s get out there and make some waves.

[00:00:00.000]
Welcome to the Marine Marketing Podcast, where we cover marketing and website topics for the Marine industry. While you’re listening, subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss any future episodes. And now, here’s your host, Harry Casimir.

[00:00:17.220]
Hello and welcome to the Boat Marketing Podcast. I’m Harry Casimir, your host, CEO and founder of Boat Marketing Pros. Today’s episode, we are going to do a deep dive and share with you why making your website ADA compliance is so important. So the first question is, what is ADA compliance? We’re going to go back a little bit and talk about the history. How did we get here? I’m going to state a few dates here that may not be super accurate, but close enough to where you get this sense of how did we come about to have website ADA compliance in the conversation. So in The architectural Barriers Act was passed by Congress that basically we move any barriers that prevent someone to access federal information. Meaning that when someone is physically unable to open a door, and if the door is too heavy, that makes it very difficult for that person to come in. So that was 1968. Fast forward two years later, 1970, the Urban Mass Transportation Act, which mandates wheelchair, lift, and all transit vehicles, which is basically all busses, trains, and so forth. Then where the initial act we have today that really set off the rest of how all of the ADA compliance come to place since 1973, when the Rehabilitation Act prohibited discriminations by federal agency when it comes to technology.

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So meaning that just because someone cannot press a button and keypad because they don’t have the finger, you cannot discriminate against them for that. That same act, they enhanced it to fast forward to 1982 when the Telecommunications Act for this disabled past that make telephone services for the hearing impairments to be able to access the telephone. Again, all those are building up from the 1973 Act. In 1973, the Voting Accessibility Act for Older and Handicap People was passed. In 1988, the Fair Housing Act mandates that the protection of individuals with disability and accessibility requirements for multifamily units, all of that. Then come the 1990s. That’s where things really changed. In 1990, the American Disability Act, what we know today as ADA, was basically one of the biggest major revamp of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. That a complete re-event of it set into motion what we know today that really impacted almost everything. So how you open the door when you go to a restaurant, to basically how you listen to music, all of that really have a big impact on all those different services and products we looked at as standard today for many of us. So that happened in 1990 when that prohibit discrimination against individual with disabilities and any various areas, whether they’re for both employment and telecommunication.

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So when they fast forward in 1990, Section 508, 508 was added to expand government accessibility requirement for all digital content. That really set off and really kick things to high gear when it comes to digital accessibility, when it comes to computer itself. In 1999, that’s when Cag 1.0 was introduced. Cag stands for Web Content Accessibility Guide, WCAG 1.0. It is set by the World W3 World Conservium, that’s actually set to create the standard on how webmasters, web designers, and web developers, how they should design a website that is in compliance with this standard so that people with disabilities could access this website. And you can fast forward to 2003, the The Department of Justice finally published a notice to promote how accessibility should work for all those different website that government provide money to. So what that really means in 2003, the Department of Justice says that if the US government, so take it as state, local, and federal government, if they spend money something, then the public should have full access to it regardless of the individual’s type of disability. Meaning that, especially, specifically for website. Every single municipality This county and state website, according to the Department of Justice, should need to be an ADA compliance.

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Now, whether that’s the case, that’s a different story completely. And let’s fast forward to 2008, which is very interesting because this is when CAG 2.0 was offered, really giving you full detail and created a true criteria on how even the design, the description of each of the elements on the website, how they should be presented so that people with disability can access those website. And so that was 2008, building up from the 2003 Department of Justice Publish notice. Then in 2018, the Department of Justice, again, clarifies its stance on website with ADA compliance. Basically, really, what they add to this is making sure that people with mobile devices have the same access that someone with a desktop, computer, or laptop have when it comes to accessing the web. Now, between the 2017, 2008, a few updates on this is how many of this impact many businesses, and we’re going to go over that in a second. Fast forward to 2020, the Unlicer Accessibility Act was introduced to the House. As a representative, as we speak today, this law has not been enacted, and many of us actually, as an agency that specializes in ADA compliance website, we cannot wait to have this law officially passed.

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That way, it can be very clear where the line is at. At the moment, as I mentioned in 2003, when the Department of Justice in 2018, when they published their notice, it’s clearly stated that federal, state, and local government website are required to have their website compliance. But it never really say business, but technically, within that fine point, it stated that if you provide a product good or service to the public, then you need to have your website ADA compliance. Meaning that, for example, if you are selling cookie online, that’s a good example, then your website should be ADA compliance according to the way Department of Justice see it. Whether you agree with that’s a different thing completely. In 2020, the US House representative tried to rectify actually recreate this, creating a whole new act that we call Online Accessibility Act. A little bit a revision of our 08 article within the ADA Compliance Act from 1990. But this one will focus exclusively on online presence, so website to mobile devices and everything. And this one is a little bit clearer. Hopefully, it gets passed through Congress, but time will tell. I’m not going to go into the detail what it means, and you can find that information online.

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But what we do know, between 2017 to 2020, there were about 8,000 lawsuits filed in federal court for website that did not meet ADA compliance. And what that means is basically anybody can file a lawsuit against you if your website is not ADA compliance, technically. When are they going to win, that’s a different story completely because there are a lot of gray area here and how someone can actually win a lawsuit against you when it comes to ADA compliance for a website. But I’m not a lawyer. That’s my disclaimer here. I wanted to go through the history a little bit. I know that’s a lot to unpack, but understanding the context how we get here, it’s good sometimes to know how do I navigate through all that basically as a business owner, a director of marketing, however, whatever the position that you have at your company, how do you ensure that you are not in hot water with this? And what are some of the tools? What’s available? What can you do or what should you do or should be aware of? So this is what we’re here to talk about. So in this episode, we’re just going to explore the importance of why your website, accessibility, ADA compliance is so important.

[00:10:29.650]
And we’re I’m not going to talk about the difference between accessibility and actual compliancy. There are two different things, and it’s really misunderstood by many business owners that have a website that really want to stay out of legal trouble. And at the end, Sometimes I feel bad because many of them don’t understand the difference in that a recipe to get you in trouble. Sometimes if you don’t understand the difference between what you’re looking at and what you need. We We are going to talk about how different agency and how they approach this and how you as a business owner, marketing director, general manager, whatever the position you have in the company or possibly even from a legal aspect for your company, how you can make sure your website is in compliance. Let’s dive into ADA compliance for a website and its significance for your website in the marine industry. As I mentioned before, website accessibility is crucial because it’s not just that you have a website that’s good enough, but having opened it up for other individuals that are able to access your website is very important. One of the things you may notice, especially during COVID, a lot of people coop up inside their house.

[00:11:58.140]
Now, it’s really showcasing their disability because they don’t have a lot to do. Let’s say you physically couldn’t go anywhere, someone would have to go with you wherever you may wanted to go. It was never a problem because there was no COVID, and it’s not a big deal. But when COVID happened, then you couldn’t really go in a lot of places. So you stay in-house, so therefore, you need more accessibility to the web. And that really exacerbated the issue in terms of people that are not able to access certain website. This is why it’s so important and how it can impact your business in having your website ADA compliance, how it can create a positive impact for your user experience and create customer satisfaction and so forth. So the American Disability Act, ADA Compliance, especially Section 508 that deal with electronics, device, and online digital records, really break down into three key elements. You have the law itself, which is part of the ADA Compliance, the 508 section. Then you have the Department of Justice that’s basically provide notice and what should be considered compliancy and not on their guide. Then there is the W3 World Conservium that’s basically set those guidelines.

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Based on the law, they look at the law and to some degree work in conjunction with the Department of Justice to create those guidelines to determine what make a website truly ADA compliant. With that guideline, a developer, a designer, or a business owner can look at this guideline and determine whether the website meets compliance. There are a lot of different tools out there which we’re going to talk about in a moment. Why do you need your website to be ADA compliant? The first thing is for a few reasons, But one of the obvious one is you open the door for more people to access your website, especially for some of the elderlies that may not be able to access your website. They might even have their own kids that have disability access your website. You basically open the door for more people to access your product and services. The second piece, a website actually that meet ADA compliance, oftentimes is a website that’s actually well-built. So there’s a lot of extra piece of software that usually get installed on website that are very unnecessary in my eye. But when you meet the DA compliance, you actually have to remove all those bloated software.

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So that make your website really lean. Although, according to Google, there isn’t really a pro and con. Google is really in difference for a DA compliance. That’s what they said. If you look at how SEO impacted your ranking, and if your website If you meet ADA compliance, which means the website speed, the loading, the imagery, all that have to be accounted for ADA compliance, those are the things that you have to do for a CEO anyways, which is basically if you meet ADA compliance, you are half that way there. That’s part of some of the reason. Now, I want to address two things here. There’s a big difference between accessibility and compliancy. Accessibility is your ability to access the website with a website meet compliance by using existing tools that in the market right now to view a website. Let’s give an example. Let’s say someone has a physical disability that prevent them from typing on the keyboard, but they can use their eyes or they can use their brain to move the mouse throughout the website. There are software that make the person be able to click certain button on this website. Basically, even this website is not in compliance, but it’s able to manage that’s accessibility.

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But when a website meet compliance, meaning that all those barrier that you have to install a software to get that person to access your website, you don’t need any of those software. In a sense, most of those widget at the bottom of those websites, when you visit them, they’re basically accessibility tools that make that website accessible to people with disability, but they are not in compliance. Websites that are in compliance, a website, you don’t even see the content, that little icon at the bottom in their website, because the website is built from the ground up. The code of that website is built to be in compliance. That’s the big difference between the two of them. Now you might ask, Harry, how do you go about getting your website to be in compliance? A couple of ways you can do that. The first thing you want to do is to do an audit of your website. There are free tools out there. There’s AX, there’s too many of them actually. The browsers are getting smarter, Chrome browser, so Firefox and Microsoft Edge. All of them are getting more smarter at helping you identify a website that is not accessible/consulting Compliance.

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You can actually do an audit on your website. But for us, we look at four different components on your website to help determine compliancy and maintain compliancy. The first one is an audit. Audit is the process of actually run to the website. We use both tools, software to part of it automate, and then we have team members on our staff that actually knows how to to identify key element that are not in compliance. So that’s the first thing you do in audit. The second thing is remediation. Remediation is the process of going through the audit and make changes that the audit request or suggests to make on that website to make it compliance. The second thing is a re-audit of the website. Now, this is very critical because once you audit a website, you do the remediation, meaning is you make those updates, you have to come back, re-audit the website to ensure that most, if not all of them, there’s changes that you saw earlier that needed to be made or actually… And then there the monitoring and logging of changes and log. So this is crucial. Once your website meets ADA compliance, it is important to ensure you stay in compliancy.

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A good example, your website could be meet compliance this morning. Let’s say you meet compliance at 90%, 95% this morning at 07:00 AM, and then someone logged in on your website that have access to it, make changes, and did not pay attention or did not follow the proper guideline to ensure that you maintain your compliancy, they can get your website out of compliancy within that nanosecond. Now, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to get sued, but this is very important important to understand how that impact you stand in compliancy. Making sure that identify those are three key components that you have to be aware of and making sure that you do. Now, Coming back to how do you go about getting your website or making sure your website is in compliance. There are many tools out there, including Apps, that you can use to take a look at your web accessibility. Actually, within Google Chrome browser, when you’re on your website, you can actually go to the developer tools and click Accessibility. This is give you a good amount. I guess we were even talking about this a while back. We see Google Chrome give you a good 60% of good way of whether your website isn’t accessible or not.

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And that can give you a sense of where you are. What are the things that you should be looking for as a business owner or a person in charge of your website to ensure that you stay out of legal trouble for compliancy? One is run an audit on your website, making sure all the content, all the information are in place. And then once you have that audit done, it’s going to give you a bunch of information. One, there are information that’s called blocks. There are information that’s called errors, warning, and alert. Four different types. Depending on what tools you use, some tools give you different naming for them. But for the most part, you want to take care of the blocks and errors right away. As soon as you see them, you want to change and update those right away because blocks are really what it means. It’s blocking people from accessing specific things on your website. Those blocks, oftentimes, is not just a barrier for people with disabilities. It’s actually a barrier for even normal people that come to your website that need to just browse your website. Compliancy Oftentimes, it’s not just for people with disabilities.

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It’s actually a good thing for your business to ensure your website is clean and well-coded. That’s the beauty of having your website business compliance because the website is very clean, very light, very fast, and easy to navigate. That’s almost a guarantee your website will meet those if it is properly optimized for compliancy. I find it very convoluted and can be very overwhelming for a business that really want to run a business and you don’t have the time for this. This is one of those things that it’s best to consult with people that actually do this day in, day out to ensure that you meet compliancy and also get with someone that really truly understand this stuff and that can get you some ideas. So as we close up in this ADA Compliance episode for Marine Industry website, remember, the accessibility is not not just a legal obligation to avoid getting sued or demand letter from lawyers, but it’s also an opportunity to create exclusivity and welcoming online environment for your business. As I mentioned earlier, people with disabilities are oftentimes people that’s really taking care of all their loved one as well, that able to do certain things.

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So by prioritizing your website accessibility and ensuring make sure you meet basic QDA compliance, giving other people good access to information, and enhance your user experience, and also demonstrate your commitment to exclusivity in the online space for your business and product. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Board Marketing Podcast. If you find this information valuable, make sure to subscribe to our podcast, wherever podcast available. We are syndicating to all those different places. And don’t forget to visit our website, bootmarketingpost. Com. And under our resources section, there are tons of valuable resources that you can get information from different blog posts, white papers, and even the webinar that we have as well, and more episode of our podcast, so you can listen to more of the content we have. If you have any questions and topics for a feature episode, feel free to email us, podcast@bootmarketingpost. Com. Until next time, my friend. Happy selling, and stay tuned for more exciting episode. Appreciate you.

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Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Marine Marketing Podcast. If you have any questions, send them to media@boatmarketingpros. Com. For additional resources, visit boatmarketingpros. Com/resources.