Tag Archives: blog

By Sarah Prellwitz April is International Customer Loyalty Month! While I encourage dealers to focus on building customer loyalty all 12 months of the year, April presents a great opportunity to analyze your customer retention strategy and look for improvement. After all, loyal customers are the key to growing your business and supporting long-term growth. Not only do they come ...

By Mark Overbye Quit worrying about competitors, other forces closer to us are greater obstacles to our successes. The stories we tell ourselves and internal chaos can do more harm than any opponent. We all carry challenges that either become a rock in our shoe or the fire of inspiration. Mediocrity and disappointment hold hands. Give frustration a foothold and your dreams will ...

By Bill Yeargin My retirement is not imminent, but I cannot help but be focused on the future success of our company, even for the time after I am gone. One of the best things I can do for our organization is prepare the next generation of our company’s leaders for the day when they will be in charge. I ...

By Ezequiel Arredondo Are you struggling to connect with your online audience? Does it seem as though even the most carefully crafted ads fall short of achieving your marketing goals? If your ad campaign ROI isn’t where you need it to be, take a long, hard look at who is seeing your ads and whether your ad content fulfills the ...

By Ezequiel Arredondo Have you noticed in the last year how we seem to use our phones and other digital devices much more frequently? Last year’s surge in digital usage has resulted in our digital interactions becoming more fragmented and sporadic. But did you know that many of these seemingly meaningless interactions are opportunities to connect with motivated buyers? These ...

By Ezequiel Arredondo We’ve said it before, and we’ll gladly say it again: Shoppers contact your dealership to shop for boat models, but they stay for the customer service. As the buying process becomes increasingly digital, how does this impact dealers’ approach to serving their customers? It turns out consumers have an increased expectation for boat dealers to provide digital ...

By Ezequiel Arredondo The term “emotional marketing” does not do justice to the persuasive power that this marketing tactic grants your dealership. While it may sound very heartfelt—and it certainly can be, if that’s your goal—emotional marketing pertains to any type of persuasive messaging that’s used to tap into people’s emotions and form a connection. Over the years, studies have ...

By Ezequiel Arredondo In the past, digital marketing has been viewed as an optional investment for dealers—a means to pull in extra sales leads to supplement the number of customers who are browsing on the dealership’s lot—but now that the internet has become the central source for researching boats, parts and marine services, digital marketing is a must. Dealer Spike ...

By Ezequiel Arredondo It may seem practical and cost-effective to reduce your digital marketing spend during the slow months when you don’t have inventory on your lot. However, Dealer Spike has seen this practice weaken sales leads for dealerships in the long run. Digital marketing yields the best results for your business when efforts are constant, rather than stop-and-go. By ...

By Bruce Van Wagoner Catering to the Millennial Generation The millennial generation is often the subject of speculation as people constantly weigh in on how their actions and reactions will shape history. After all, the millennial population is 85 million strong in the U.S. – the largest in the nation’s history. Naturally, the boating industry is not immune to this ...