Profit-based marketing for the boating industry – Part Two

Editor’s note: Over the next several weeks, Boating Industry will be presenting a series of articles by marketing consultant Thaddeus Kubis about adapting to the changing realities of marketing to today’s consumer. Click here to read part one.

In the last installment, I introduced a new concept in marine/boating marketing, a plan that offers a way to adapt to the changing marketplace and enables you to recognize and cover the full range of needs that must be fulfilled to gain the trust and confidence of your prospect or customer. Installment two presents Engagement as our next waypoint, our exact position on the track to sales success.

Marketing + Engagement, Prospects, Integrate, Results, Buyers = Profits aka M+EPIRB=P

Engagement

Engagement is not a buzzword, not a trend, but an important and key component or foundational element for all your marketing efforts. How do you attract and keep your customers/prospects engaged during what could be a lengthy sales process? How do you keep their interest level high; recognize their wants, desires, and dreams; and anticipate their needs?

All of these are part of engagement. Engagement means not just selling, but is a true integrated marketing effort that is focused only on the customer/prospect. Being customer-centric is an important strategy. Being customer-centric does not mean a call to your customer to say, “Can we catch up on your boating plans?” Being customer-centric means providing, supplying and deploying the targeted messages and tools that will change a prospect to a customer. Being engaged with yout customer means developing a multi-tier, integrated, personalized, and customized communication program based on (for the customer/prospect) relevance, interaction, integration and measurement, or RIIM for short.

Being correctly engaged with your customer is the logical step forward that will keep you at the top of your customer/prospect’s buying short list, allowing you to work your magic and convert the lead into a sale! Understanding engagement means you can move to the next component—the prospect!

To become engaged with your prospect or customer, you first must have established a valid, valued benefit-driven dialogue. Here is where many programs go south. You may need, in this maelstrom-based market, to offer more marketing support to sell a new boat or to provide the reasons for a current customer to upgrade. Establishing dialogue and developing engagement may cost you more money. That is why you need to hone your prospect database into a weapon that does not waste your money and your prospect’s time but instead provides valued benefit-driven information that moves the prospect closer to the sale.

You need to change your view of marketing from its being a direct expense (no return) to being a profit center that starts and supports the sales process. To do so, you must move your marketing from passive to active. When you combine the two, you are on your way to a more customer-centric, realistic, success-driven marketing effort.

Need some proof of this concept? Look to what most major brands have done. They have moved to extensive social media efforts, using search engine optimization or search engine marketing programs that have limited or, in some cases, no ROI but keep their brand in the face of their customers or prospects. Some brands have made the commitment on a massive scale: Coke has over 62.5 million followers on various social media, but Coke has not seen “increases” in sales based on the social media numbers. Social to many consumers/prospects/customers is just that, a social experience. But Coke and others look to that as the key to any social media effort. Others see social, SOE, SEM as a destination, a place to go in order to gain knowledge, information, and (with the correct engagement process and understanding) start the dialogue with your next customer.

Engagement is what you look for when you make a purchase as well. Think of your opinion of a brand that looks to you as a sale only, a dollar sign, a one-time sale that will make their quarter.

Get the point? Marketing is the delivery tool. Make the first destination your engagement waypoint. Your successful arrival at the engagement destination will start your trip on the correct foot. Better still, by leaving the sales dock and filling out your sales float plan, you will nearly guarantee your marketing and sales success.

Look for part two next week on “Prospects.”

Thaddeus Kubis can be reached at thad.kubis@tifmc.org or 917-597-1891.

 

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