By Lauren Labunsky The holidays are here and it’s a great time of year to truly focus on how your dealership is showing customers that you care about them. This could include things like excellent customer service, a special gift or offer, a holiday-themed sale or event, and more. But just as so much of the customer journey has moved ...

By David Gee How much fun was that?! Our Elevate plan was to create something new and different for the recreational boating industry; a unique, leader-specific, industry-wide, future-driven, smaller-by-design, strategic conference unlike any the industry had ever seen. And we are pleased and proud to say the first-ever Elevate conference went according to plan - and beyond! The event got ...

By Julie Holemans Let's face it, marketing trends evolve so fast it’s hard to keep up. Except you have to if you want to beat your competition. We looked at the landscape of marine marketing trends and picked the ones that are driving the most profit while being easy to put in place. Marine Marketing Trend #1: Content Marketing Content ...

By David Gee It's not too late to Elevate! Our first annual strategic conference for leaders, and emerging leaders, in the recreational boating industry, is just a few weeks away, November 22-24, in Orlando. We had several people engage us excitedly on the docks at Fort Lauderdale. One person, a long-time industry marketing person, told us he loves that it ...

By Lauren Labunsky Dealers may often wonder – what’s the need to have both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM)? If one of these digital marketing tools is at work for the dealership’s digital strategy, isn’t that enough? Doesn’t that mean the dealership website will appear at the top of the search engine results page (SERP), whether ...

By David Gee On our last day at the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, managing editor Adam Quandt and I had an interesting conversation with our Uber driver on the way to the show. I'll share a bit of it. Uber driver: So you're going to the big boat show, huh? Us: Yep. Uber driver: Are you going to buy ...

By David Gee Okay, I admit it. Any boat show I attend from now on that doesn't have a "Superyacht Village" might be a bit of a disappointment. Day two of the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show saw us in morning press events once again. For me, it was Groupe Beneteau to begin with, a company that builds 200 different ...

By David Gee How do you begin to describe it? Over 1,500 boats, most quite large, wedged in bow to stern, gunwale to gunwale, seemingly stretching to the horizon? Yachts that have tenders that cost more than your house, day boats, night boats, bowriders, center consoles...all here at the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, and all for sale and looking ...

It is often noted that people, over time, start to look their pets or their spouses. I suspect that in at least some cases, that may be a good thing. The question here is, do you, or your dealership look like your website? Your website, your online digital presence is every bit as real as your brick-and-mortar store. In fact, ...

By David Gee When you are in the media, you are on the receiving end of lots of marketing messages. Some are good, some are bad and some are really ugly. In fact, there is about an 80-percent chance there is something fundamentally wrong with your marketing. It’s flawed because it’s about you, your company, and not them, your prospect ...