Episode Transcript
Announcer
Welcome to the boat marketing podcast, where will feature tips and advice that will help your boating business grow and thrive while you’re listening. Subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss any future episodes. And now here’s your host, Kristen Bachmeier.
Kristen
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the boat marketing podcast. As you just heard, my name is Kristen and I am the director of operations for Boat Marketing Pros. And we’re a digital agency that helps marine industry businesses basically grow and harness the web. So we originally intended to talk about this earlier on in the year. Just a quick recap of the three marketing tools that you should include into your mix. Things sometimes don’t go as planned.
Kristen
So we figured, you know, even in July and August, this is still pretty relevant. So today I wanted to touch on a few key tools that you should add to your marketing mix in this year. The last half of the year is already here. Or consider adding these things into your mix in 2022 because, you know, quarter four will be here before we know it. We’ll all be scrambling to get our marketing together.
Kristen
So if you’re doing these things, that’s great. I still encourage you to listen and just make sure that, you know, you’ve got these three things taken care of and then you can always head over to another podcast episode if there is something that is more suitable for where you’re at and your marketing journey. So the first thing I want to talk about is having a responsive website, if you’ve been in business for any amount of time, whether it’s 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years at this point in 2021, chances are you already have a website.
Kristen
So pat yourself on the back if you’ve already got that taken care of. So first step is having a website. The next step is making sure that you keep it updated. So I think I read a stat just earlier this week and this was from 2020. So still pretty relevant. But I think it’s adults spend an average of six hours and 50 something minutes online per day. It didn’t get into the details about whether they’re on their desktop or their mobile or tablet, all collectively.
Kristen
We spend a lot of time online and we’re accessing it on our phones, some people on their watches or maybe their Google home displays or what have you. So if you have a website, that’s great. But it’s also really important to make sure that your website is responsive. And if you worked with any sort of Web design company or digital agency or if you stay up on the news in any sort of digital marketing information you have seen or heard or had somebody talk to you about a responsive website.
Kristen
So what that means is that if you have a website, it responds on a device such as a tablet, mobile phone or a PC. So a desktop computer, and it still functions properly for the user. They don’t have to go to a mobile dot, you know, your website, dot com, it’s all the same site. They can access the same information. It’s just easy, no matter what device they’re using. And what we’ve seen a lot in our space, especially in the you know, when you’re making a large purchase, such as a boat, users and customers will spend a lot of time researching that information and use different sources to do that.
Kristen
So make sure that your users and your customers can view your information on their phones or tablets. And then also, you know, at this point, if your website is not responsive, it doesn’t work well on a mobile device. You’re going to get demoted in the rankings by Google just because in the last few years, they really honed in on that and made sure that, you know, websites are responsive, people can access them. And if they can’t, you won’t rank as well for the keywords that you want to rank for the next tool to add to your marketing mix.
Kristen
And you’ve heard me talk about this before. You’ve seen it in our blogs and our newsletters. I highly recommend having a blog on your website. So we talked before in a previous podcast about what pages to include on your website. And blogging is definitely one of those sections you need to have. And it’s often met with some resistance just because it seems like such an old school thing. I think a lot of people still associate blogs with more of like a personal journal or personal opinion website or something like that.
Kristen
But blogging on your website this year and for years to come is going to help you maintain or increase your organic search presence. And what I often tell my clients is that when you have a blog, you know, you can post a blog today. So we’re in just about August of twenty twenty one. If you can post a well-written piece of content in August of 2021, you might not see the benefits start to pay off in the next month, the next month after that.
Kristen
But if it’s a well-written, optimized blog post, it could get you some traffic, you know, two, three, four, five, six, seven years from now, depending on, you know, again, if it was written well, relates to your keywords and whatnot. So we have one of our clients, a blog about Chaparral Boats versus Sea Ray’s. And this was something we posted, I want to say, just a few months ago, so earlier on in 2021.
Kristen
So it might have been January, February, I can’t recall. So we posted that blog and then now we’re in July, almost August, and we’re seeing some traffic start to increase to that blog. So if you have an agency that can help you define your blog topics, help you write the blogs, because I know that, you know, people listening to this, you might be really busy and not have time to write blogs for your company.
Kristen
But if you outsource that to a digital agency, you can invest some time and money into blogging now and then see those results and those benefits pay off long term. And then what that also does is it helps to, again, increase your organic presence and your keyword rankings and then it just helps you just really establish yourself on the front page of Google. So if you’re taking the time to blog and also run ads and also keep your Google my business profile updated, you know, you can just pretty much dominate that first page on Google, which just collectively will just pay off over time.
Kristen
The third and final tool I want to talk about today is Google ads. You know, you’ve heard me talk about I think it was a couple of podcasts ago where I think I said if I could recommend any sort of digital marketing, if you’re running any paid campaign, the one thing I’d recommend would be Google ads. So I had a note in here for this podcast to say to ditch the TV and radio commercials. I don’t know that you should ditch those altogether if you’ve got the budget for that and you can accommodate TV, radio, print and digital, I would recommend doing that.
Kristen
Then they have their place at times. But if you’re working with more of a limited budget, say you you’re a boat rental company, you target people in your immediate it’s a 20 mile radius. You have maybe 10, 20. 30 keywords you can get new customers with. So in that case, if you have a small budget for something like that, Google ads is definitely something you should add into your mix. I often say, if you want the most bang for your buck, use Google ads and very specifically, the search ads or PPC ads, as they’re called with that.
You know, the whole method behind that is to you have a campaign keywords directly related to your business. And when people would search for it and then your ad shows up for that keyword, it’s really easy to target, you know, within a certain zip code, within a certain mile radius of your business and things like that. And you can also run display campaigns. So if you’re driving, if you’re looking for brand awareness, run video campaigns on YouTube.
Kristen
Just all in all, Google ads offers an amazing amount of opportunities for small businesses and big businesses to to advertise online and with a more modest budget. So just to kind of recap everything that we talked about here, you know, like I said, a lot of these are kind of digital marketing 101. But if you’ve been in this space for a long time, you might not have all of this in your mix. So if I were to say you need to focus on at least three things, it would be a responsive website, adding a blog and looking into running Google ads.
Kristen
And that’s all I’ve got for you guys this week. As always, if there’s anything you would like to hear about from us or any topics you’d like us to cover, please, please, please reach out to us on our website or email podcast at BOPE Marketing Post.com. We’re happy to oblige and provide any information you’d like to hear. And as always, thanks for listening and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks for the next episode of the boat marketing podcast Happy Boating.
Announcer
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Boat Marketing Podcast. If you have any questions for Kristin and the marketing pros team, send them to podcast at boat marketing pros dot com for additional resources and strategies to help grow your business. Visit boat marketing pros dot com. That’s boat marketing pros dot com.
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