Digital Presence and Its Direct Correlation with Success

There is a clear connection between the excellence of your website and brand image with the company’s overall success, as I have discovered via my work with SHIPSHAPE.PRO and MIDA (Marine Industry Digital Agency).

According to statistics, 88% of all online purchasers looking for goods or services prefer to conduct online searches before proceeding with the deed. Consequently, a business lacking an online channel to portray itself misses out on the opportunity to seal the deal and is instead seen skeptically.

Marine Industry and the Digital Presence (Or the Lack Thereof)

Many other sectors have evolved with the times and created breakthrough platforms to enhance the user performance of their clients. Angi’s List, Homeadvisor, Thumbtack, and Car Gurus are just a few examples of systems you may be familiar with outside of the nautical environment. A market that affects every encounter has been left behind, which is the recreational marine sector.

While it has been established that digital presence is of utmost importance, it is also essential to note that the transition to online channels has been the biggest concern currently faced by the leisure marine industry. Many marine companies were created before the widespread usage of the internet, and as a consequence, their internet presence has been ignored. Even today, a new group of boat owners, usual families in their early 40s, are entering the market and making most of their investment decision online. Firms need to be aware of this.

Is word of mouth enough to take you to the top?

For the most part, the maritime industry relies on word-of-mouth advertising to spread its products and services. There’s no denying that word-of-mouth marketing is the finest way to get highly qualified customers who won’t question your talents right away. However, when aligned with a digital presence, word-of-mouth can do wonders. A successful firm may be built by word-of-mouth and service quality, but an empire with a strong online presence can be built.

Not Every Expert Understands the Intricacy of Maritime Language

Even if you’re starting from scratch and recognize that you need a digital presence to succeed in the business, how do you accomplish these goals?

First of all, if you believe you’re going to recruit your cousin or bring in someone who has had success in other industries but has no knowledge of boats, you’re going to be disappointed as loss of money, resources, and time is inevitable.

To someone unfamiliar with the maritime industry’s jargon, attempting to explain a boat would be a monumental undertaking. When I mentioned our firm (www.mida.pro) and the difficulties of communicating about boats to the CEO of a digital marketing agency, he answered with a list of all the bad failures he’d had dealing with maritime businesses. He said it’s as difficult to speak about Aerospace as it is to talk about it. That prompted me to reflect on what he said: I know a great deal about the marine business, but I have no idea where to begin or where to go for information about aircraft.

Dealing with Digital Dilemmas

The dilemma can take you down if not handled carefully. The experts you get on board will now be in charge of a marketing firm, but they don’t comprehend the business’s terms and jargon and hence lose the essence of your offerings.

You’ll spend a lot of time and effort on this, and the marketing firm will keep charging you even though you’re spending most of your time teaching them the ropes. Either way, you’ll be in sticky waters.

This is why it’s of utmost importance that you bring in experts who can do the grunt work for you. That too, expertly as a result of expertise and experience.

Marine businesses can go about it in a manner of ways. However, only one of these has the potential to take your empire to the heights of success. You can:

1. Find/hire a person who can write and knows boats (very difficult)
2. Do it yourself (exhausting and not suggested)
3. Hire us (www.mida.pro)
4. Hire a content company to offer you generic content

We’ll leave the rest for you to decide which option should offer you and your firm the most ROI. (Hint: It’s #3)

Build Your Online Presence with Us

Online visibility is like a breadcrumb trail going to your active profiles with backlinks pointing to your website. A long-term strategy that might take anywhere from six months to several years, depending on your objectives, is required to establish an online presence. In today’s digital world, having an online presence as a business or a person is critical to gaining a wider audience for your products and services. You may, of course, bring us on board, and we’ll take care of the following for you.

Website

Having a website is the simplest way to develop a brand. Astonishingly, this is an area in which the maritime sector is severely weak. When a firm does not have a website, clients utilize the internet to make financial decisions and become distrustful. Make sure your online presence is up to snuff before a prospective consumer does.

Make sure you transmit the content on the web when you engage an outside web developer to design your site. Some may copy and paste your document into your new website with all of the spelling mistakes intact, making it impossible for you to build your credibility.

Make a list of the services you provide, and be careful to elaborate on each one. It is common to see “bobs mobile marine” as a broad stroke of “we work on engines,” but what precisely does it mean? Can you service stern drives or inboards or outboards, how far can you repair them aside from replacing the oil and winterizing them, and, most importantly, can you perform a repower?

Certainly, a new boat owner will not grasp what you can accomplish if they don’t know what services you provide. The idea is to be as clear as possible to leave little room for doubt in the boat owner’s mind. Your aim should be to offer yourself as a one-stop-shop to relieve them of their challenges.

Ads & SEO

SEO

Let’s start by letting go of the myth that any of these triumphs over the other. It’s important to strive toward both goals. If you have a website, you’ll soon be inundated with offers from persons claiming to be experts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) who will bring you to the top of Google’s results for a charge. If you want to appear on the search results page, you’ll have to put in time and effort.

There are several books on SEO, but the fundamental idea is that based on many characteristics that Google isn’t particularly transparent about, your website will appear higher on a search results page than others. Having a better ranking on a search results page means that more people will see your ad, which leads to increased traffic to your website and, ideally, more business.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is based on Google crawling your site and analyzing the keywords you choose to describe what your business does. As a result, you’re forced to hire SEO businesses to produce articles for you on subjects you have no expertise in. While hiring SEO experts might seem like a wise decision, it is not that since writing content is more than just whipping up a document. You need to make sure that your content adds value to the reader and is relevant to their needs, which a fellow maritime expert only does.

ADs

A more expedited way to reach consumers is through advertisements. When I first started, I wondered whether there was a magic figure for how much to spend on advertising, and I still haven’t found out what it is. All major social media sites like Google, Instagram, Linkedin, and Facebook are essentially marketing black holes since such platforms will attempt to waste your hard-earned money quickly. In advertising, CPC or (cost per click) is the most frequent method you bid on keywords, and if a person searching for one of those phrases clicks on your ad, you’ll be charged for that term.

You may believe CPC is a good marketing strategy since you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Because many individuals who aren’t your intended audience will see the ads you buy on these platforms, you’ll quickly discover that you’ve spent a lot of money for very little return. If you don’t keep an eye on what keywords are bringing in the most income, you may waste a lot of money. This is why it’s advised not to go for generic marketing agencies and instead opt for a maritime expert that can guide you through the process keeping your sensitive target audience in mind, similar to how we do.

The Key to Balancing Search Engines and Social Media

Your audience and target market are two of the most important considerations for your marketing strategy. You should think about whether or not your business is “social” or only addresses a “pain point” before proceeding.

People flock to Instagram and Facebook to be “social.” Rather, Google is a platform for solving problems and addressing queries. Think of it this way, how many times have you gone on Facebook to find car rentals near me, and how many times have you done the same search on Google. Chances are, the latter is what the majority might’ve done.

It’s preferable to use Google for marine repair businesses since customer service is a pain point when deciding where to invest your hard-earned ad money. When it comes to finding “outboard repair near me,” customers are far more likely to use Google than Facebook in this scenario.

Those who do not already own a boat may be interested in your services if you are a yacht broker. The question then arises, how could I possibly find these people? They’ll likely be on Facebook and Instagram, but if they’re desperate enough to look for a boat, they’ll turn to Google. As a result, a good strategy may be to allocate ¼ percent of your advertising budget to Facebook, ¼ percent to Instagram, and 2/4th percent to Google.

If you think Google, Facebook, and Instagram are all that there is to it, you’re up for a huge surprise. LinkedIn, too, holds great potential for marketing purposes.

I believe in Linkedin’s ability to help people find jobs. Linkedin is a little different for the maritime business since it has become the only place to meet other marine professionals. As a surprise to many, Linkedin has emerged as the most popular platform for maritime professionals to connect. For those in the maritime business, where technology and innovation are just beginning a new era, keeping up to date with what’s occurring by connecting with others on Linkedin is the best bet.

Conclusion

To reach a larger audience, it is important to have a strong online presence. In the marine business, it is advantageous to employ digital marketing to spread your brand’s message on a personal level. The use of marine sector online marketing is a quick and easy way to get visibility. Even more importantly, it offers a wide range of innovative and intriguing online advertising options unavailable elsewhere.

To emphasize, the marine industry’s inadequate digital transformation is its worst shortcoming. The terminology of the industry is largely to blame for this failure. It’s a two-edged sword: you have to manage them, and they lack understanding of the issue if you bring in individuals to handle social and content. Contact us at info@mida.pro if you have any questions or want us to handle them for you, or visit our website at www.mida.pro to learn more about what we do.