Off-Season Marketing for Boat Manufacturers

Episode Transcript

Harry Casimir

Hello, and welcome to the Boat Marketing Podcast, your go to source for insight, strategies in the world of digital marketing for the boating industry. I’m Harry Casimir, Founder of Boat Marketing Pros, and I will be your host.

For this episode, whether you’re a Boat Manufacturer or Boat Dealer, we are here to help you navigate the world of digital marketing landscape and drive success to your boarding business. So let’s dive into this episode where we will explore the off season digital marketing strategies specifically tailored for both manufacturer and some of the things that you can do to make sure whether you are off season or right in the season, you are taking advantage of that. Let’s dive right in.

As the off season approaching and many of you guys already in season, depending on where you are, especially in the United States, obviously, the country divided possibly in, like, three different season to some degree. So it depends where you are. Most people in the Southeast Coast of the United States, specifically Florida, they usually have all season unless there is hurricane or bad weather. But for the most part, They usually don’t have off season, but most of the rest of the country do have winter and all the different weather changes that make in off season truly off season where you guys don’t do it a lot when it come to boarding unless it has to do with Ensign.

As the off season are approaching, how do boat manufacturers handle this? Boat manufacturers face a very unique challenge in maintaining momentum and making sure their brand, their new model, all the order elements that come with getting their visibility out there, building trust. It’s very challenging because there is possibly less boat show, less footage where do you usually stay at? In this episode, we will discuss effective digital marketing strategy that can help Boat manufacturers make the most out of the off season and keep their branding, their visibility right in of the potential customers. So off season provide a unique opportunity for boat manufacturer to to audit, optimize, and relaunch their marketing efforts, that can also help strengthening your branding to online presence in different channels. So we’re gonna explore some of the key strategies that you as a boat manufacturer, some of the efforts you can take to ensure you can achieve some of the achievement and leverage some of the tools in digital marketing strategy that’s available to you to ensure your brand continue to flourish even during the off season.

So the first thing is leveraging Social Media Platforms. I start with social media because it’s become so relevant and so important in a day to day, operations from a business perspective and branding and marketing, you can’t ignore it. You may not subscribe to it. You may not love it, but it is one of those necessary evil in business. That’s where consumers are. Most of boat owners are the in the age of thirty to, you know, sixty, or seventies. And if you looked at the average Facebook user, they are above fifty. So the what that tells you is that you may not be in social media or actively in social media, but your potential customers are there. So, surely, the platforms, we look at it as if it’s truly powerful tools that manufacturer can use to Do a lot of different things, including showcasing the latest models. And that’s probably one of the easiest and fastest way to launch and get a brand new model tested by the consumer, get opinion on it. That’s the easiest way to engage with your potential customers and give them a taste slash behind the scene of what this looks like. And through all that, start building brand loyalty. Now brand loyalty can be built in lots of different ways, but I think social media can play a big component of your overall brand loyalty building strategy. So Let’s dive into, like, how do you effectively use those different platforms to making sure that you Stay engaged, creating compelling content, establishing the brand. So the first thing we looked at when we take into account and work with other manufacturers is to ensure that if you already have an online presence To those different social media platforms, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and, obviously, TikTok could be another one. You need to look at all those different platforms. If you already have the account, what you want to do first is do an audit of your existing social media presence. That’s very, very critical to do. So Based on that audit, there are a lot of different tools that you can use to do this audit. Once you create that audit, You can easily see some of the gaps where you are missing content or content that performed very, very well. Now from there, you can start creating contents that people like the most. Most of the social media at the moment do have complete analytic tools in the back, So you can actually go in, look at the different data points in terms of what type of content people engage with the most, What time does content wear consume the most, and what’s the engagement level looks like? What are the comments looks like? How How many people that like this? So you can actually build based on just using what the social media platforms already give you from a reporting perspective. So there’s a lot you can do. So if you have not claimed your social media platform profile for your business, This is the time to do so right now. It’s very straightforward. Most of those platforms do require you to associate that account With a personal account, so Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram, you do have to have someone logged in. And this is I would highly, highly recommend as a boat manufacturer that you own this account, not the marketing agency that you work with. If the marketing agency create this account for you. Make sure you have ownership access to it. Once you create that account, there are many, many tools that you can use Such as SocialPilot, Hootsuite, a ton of many more that you can use to clean your company’s social media for you. And the reason you want to do that is you’re probably very, very busy. You don’t have the time to handle this on a day in, day out. Maybe you take a Sunday or maybe you have a dedicated team member that actually handle social media. Even that, You might want to use one of those tools to schedule the content creation. Leverage social media platforms to get engagement, build your loyalty, get more visibility for your manufacturer brand out there so that people can See, hear, feel you all the time, and social media is one of them.

The second one is crafting engaging content both external use, internal use, and the social media, and you will see how all of that tie in. So creating engaging content is so crucial, and we all know the story that is well told is the story that is well stood and oftentimes remembered. So the better your content is crafted, the easier the reader can understand it, the better you are able to get that message across. And, oftentimes, this content we’re talking about here couldn’t be how you create the message around your brand. If you look at some of my other podcasts and videos, I talk a lot about the three fundamental m’s in most businesses. You have the first M, which is the Market. Who is your target audience? Once you determine that, then you move to the Message. What kind of message that resonate with your current target market, and the third one is the Media, which is the third M. So How do we go about finding where to feed our target audience that message that will resonate with them? This is where the content comes to play in terms of the messaging. Different type of content such is the key. You want to Create a variety of content that really can help the user digest the type of content you want. Hey, you’re serving two different masters here when you create content. So one, obviously, the user, you have to keep it in mind that And when I say user, I’m looking at consumers. Someone that visit your website, that go to your social media platform, that want to understand more about your brand, The models that you’re pulling out, you have a lots of different type of content you can create, but some of the most effective one that we found and Is number one is video. Video will continue to be an effective tools from a marketing perspective, branding, and you name it, Put video next to it, and it it fit. So the other piece is blog post. Now you might say, well, everybody’s writing blog posts. No one have the time for it. Well, blogs blog post is is very, very important in that The tip and how it’s been written. I agree that as of late, it’s kind of everybody has a blog. But the key here, though, is to write effective content that tells a story that draw the reader to your content To stay longer. And what search engines draw from that is if people stay on your content, on your web page, on your website, Then there must be something that they really like. And if there is something they really like, then they want to push more people that search for that keywords to go to that content. And the better your content is, the better ranking you can get. Obviously, there is a lot of factors involved in that in terms of How well the web page is optimized, the website is optimized, the slowness of it. There’s a lot of little detail, but focus on create quality, good content when it come to blog posts. And, obviously, visually appealing imagery that captivate the audience, the your target market’s imagination. Make them feel like they are part of this or inside of that boat that you want to showcase. So really effectively showcasing the different models, the different methods to use those models that you have, All that are key importance of content. So when we talk about content, we’re not just talking about right pieces of content. We’re talking about video creation, imagery and so forth. And all of that can easily evoke the emotion associated with boating itself that makes people feel good. That make people feel they want to associate with this brand. Those content you create, not just content that in whole bringing someone to your website, but this content should evoke someone’s emotion To take action to make them feel they need to be part of this. Those captivating content, those engaging content Can captivate your audience and differentiate your brand from everyday competitors that you have in the marketplace.

The third piece is enhancing user experience on your website. Your website is basically, your showroom for your boat manufacturing business. If you have listened to any of my previous podcasts and videos, I say this often, your website is probably one of the best employee in your team, Even better than yourselves. I’m sorry to say that. Because it is available twenty four seven, doesn’t really complain much as long as you keep it up to date. What that means is often What you want to do in audit of your website, a full audit, there are tons and tons of tools out there, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest. There’s a lot of different tools out there you can use to create an audit for your website. Once you get this audit, it will tells you a lot of different things that are wrong with your website. So if you fix one of them, there could be many thing that get fixed. But many of those issues are things that can impact the user experience on your website, the potential customers, the person that’s actually love your brand. So you want to Make sure you update those type of content, type of information to make sure the website is always optimized. And part of that, when we talk about optimizing website, it’s not just about good content, but we’re looking at from the navigation of the website to how fast it loads, is the content easy to understand? Is it easy to click from one link to the next link to the next page to the footer to all the different logos imagery on that website? Are the images are too large? Are those videos are too large? Are this video hosted directly on the website? Are they hosted in third party such as YouTube or other places? All of that has to be accounted for when you build your website because those are very, very important things that can affect the user experience, hence, The user leave your website very quick. So focus on the user experience from how your website look like, Very clean, very nice navigation, no ambiguity. We move all things that can make it difficult for the end user to get to the information they need. Give them clear call to action on your website. Our take here is on the website we build, On the home page, there has to be at least the minimum is five call to actions. Those five call to actions varied from Call now, book now, reserve now, buy now, or schedule a call now. All of that or different call to actions to make the user take an action, and that’s part of optimizing your website to increase Your visitor engagement boost conversions and establish choice for your brand because a user can understand The content feel relatable to your content, and when they come to your website, it’s very easy to navigate. That, my friend, is a trust factor that you start from there, and the rest of it will be up to your production line.

So we’re gonna go over the fourth thing that you want to look at when it comes to off season is Search Engine Optimization, you might heard of it as SEO. SEO Is the result of being seen making sure you are seeing on all the search engine result so that when someone search for keywords or your company’s name, your services, or product that you are selling, they are able to find you so that you can attract organic traffic and reach more potential customer eventually. As a boat manufacturer, you want to include SEO as part of your marketing strategy overall. Now there are a lot of different marketing strategy you can apply, obviously, when you look at SEO, it’s one of those that doesn’t really come overnight. It takes time. It takes lots of knowledge. It require good content, good backlinking citations, good updates across all the different directories. It includes how you structure the content and whether you are a local company, national or global company. So all of that, they have to play big role In terms of how the content is presented, how you optimize your website. So that is why it’s so critical to ensure that The type of content you put on your website and how that content will lead to SEO will play a big effect on your website. For us, we break SEO into three key categories. The first one is technical SEO. Technical SEO is the methods of Making sure everything inside your website is aligned and meet the basic technical requirements, The basic standard for search engines to index your website, to make sure the website got proper speed, The hosting is not lacking. The templates that build your website is making sure it doesn’t have all those bloated software to slow you down. Those are key technical pieces on the SEO, including schema tags and different linkage within your website. The other component we look at into SEO is local maps SEO. And that’s basically include Citation, different directory submission that included. In addition to Google business profile, Microsoft, Bing, places for business, they changed their name every chance they have, so hard to keep up. And then now, which become very, very prevalent for businesses is Apple Business Directory Connect, I believe. That’s the name. So all of those different directories, all the information need to be accounted for when it come to local SEO, and we will see Well, as a manufacturer, you might say, well, I’m global, OEM. I don’t really need I can push this to the dealer channel. Well, when you build your brand, it’s very critical to build your brand, and the dealer that’s here today may not be They’re tomorrow. So you want to build your brand and feed the dealer when you can, if you can, and they will appreciate it. But it’s very critical as a manufacturer to build your own brand from an SEO perspective. And by implementing those different best practice can really help you. The third piece on the SEO we looked at is organic SEO. So this is the piece where We looked at a full content strategy in terms of the type of content we will create, how we’ll create it, where we’ll distribute it, and overall, How each of the different components play a bigger role on your overall web presence to ensure that you are seen by everyone. So by implementing SEO best practices and those looking at those different staging in SEO, You can easily improve your website visibility, your online visibility, increase organic traffic to your website, to your brand, and really bring more leads to your business slash the dealers that you serve and work with. Fifth thing we looked at is digital Marketing advertising campaign. When you are off season, again, one of the things that died off a little bit, maybe there’s no board shows And you don’t have a true channel to have to put up any events by yourself easily. But one of the advantage you have to stay In front of your potential customers is possibly pay per click, what we call PBC, and for the different channels In terms of display ads, we look at digital advertising as a very powerful tool that can help you as a boat manufacturer to reach Your target audience and generating more awareness and interest on your brand, the different models that you carry, Especially the newer model that you are bringing in. So digital marketing, pay per click specifically, is one of the key piece that can help you accomplish that. There are a lot of different channels that you can use to create those different Pay-per-click advertising. So whether it’s Google advertising, Bing advertising, obviously, Social media have their own version of paid advertising as well, and each one of them can be effectively Bring in more awareness to your brand and create more loyalty. And, eventually, when the season is off, Those people that have been seeing your ad, heard of you, when they visit those brochure, they already know who you are, And and that’s the type of customer that you want to bring in. It is crucial to understand that those digital marketing aspect, those ads, A really built for you to target your audience.

The other piece we looked at is Influencer Marketing for your brand. This one is a little bit trickier because, obviously, you want to associate your brand with the right person and people. And this is Something that I see that can work extremely well if the owner or director of marketing or someone within the company It’s extremely well known within the boarding industry, and they have a a voice. It’s very easy to amplify your brand through that. And what I mean by so is as a manufacturer, there’s a good chance you are building when you bought new models all the time. Who’s better to tell the story of that model, that brand, than someone that actually worked for you? So my suggestion is to use The power of influencer marketing to really get your team out there to explore how to identify and collaborate With that person in house, sometimes it’s not that easy, and you might have to go outside your company, work with someone within the bullying industry that already have a clout and that already have a very good audience, but making sure that partnership is truly authentic. Right? You have someone that represent your brand and that’s someone you are proud of to work with because there’s a fine line between Someone that can execute and someone that can become more work for you at the end. So by utilizing influencer marketing, Someone that represent your brand, talk about your brand, and push your brand, it really can tap into a new audience that you may have not been able to tap into who are hired to tap into an influencer. And, again, influencer can be come on all sizes ship, if you may. So it’s critical to understand what is it that you want to accomplish and whether that influencer is within your target Audience market, spear. Right? So you want that to work for you as well. And that’s where I brought Our discussion on off season digital marketing strategy for boat manufacturers. As you guys can see, There are lots of little moving pieces into creating a true marketing strategy for off season. But as we discussed, if you really looked at how you can leverage social media, creative content, optimize your website, implementing a proper SEO technique strategy, and take a look at ad pay advertising and influencer marketing, all of that combined and part of can make a significant impact On your brand’s visibility, generating more leads, more interest, more loyalty, And more awareness of your brand during the off season so that when the season comes, boom, people are really aware of you.

Alright. It’s a wrap for us here. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode. If you find this information valuable to you, please don’t forget to subscribe and share with, someone that you think that could use some of those information to help their boating business go to the next level. In addition to that, don’t forget to visit our website at boatmarketingpros.com/podcast. We have lots of information from white papers to books and other information that can help you propel and take your business to the next level. We would love to hear from you and if you have any questions, or suggestions for future episodes, feel free to reach out at podcast@boardmarketingboards.com. Until next time, happy boating and see you around, guys.

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.