According to PEW Research, seven in ten Americans used social media last year to connect with one another, engage with news content, share information, and entertain themselves. As early adopters 
of technology and the social nature of recreational boating activities, there is no doubt that boaters engage with social media at an even greater rate.
Online Marketers are well aware of this trend and are turning more and more to social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and yes – even TikTok – for both organic as well as paid messages to their customers and prospects. To wit, social media ad spend, according to Oberlo, will reach $63 billion this year – up 11 percent from 2021. What’s more, last year a social media network specifically for boaters was launched.
What does this mean for Marine Marketers? How can you stand out in this clutter? Over the next few months, continuing our theme of how we help our clients “punch above their weight”, we will provide advice on winning the social media battles while not going broke.
First up: how to use storytelling in social media to boost brand awareness and generate leads. Since its inception, a major strength of social media has been its ability to connect with customers on a perceived personal level. This could be a byproduct of how social media users select who they will follow and what groups they will join. It’s amplified when publishers of the content they follow interact with them directly, especially in real-time. The best way to do this is to tell a story relevant to your business with a series (or campaign) of social media posts. There are many, many different ways to do this; here are a couple of examples.
Celebrating Community Engagement
One of our clients differentiates their somewhat commoditized service by zealously supporting the social needs of the community in which they operate. While we sell the benefits of their service in traditional advertising and PR, our social media efforts celebrate the various activities they engage in to “give back” to the community. Whether it’s hosting a holiday food drive, allowing town teams and youth organizations to hold car washes in their parking lot, or supporting community arts organizations with program advertising, this client visibly supports town activities and then boosts these activities in their social media profiles. Townspeople engage with the campaign, sharing the posts on community pages and groups. Since we launched it, the organic exposure and engagement metrics are up between 10x to 50x of their typical posts. And it helps drive the positioning that this business really cares about the town (which they do!).
Leveraging Shared Interests
Another storytelling tactic is to find an issue or theme that your customers will identify with and then serialize it in a series of social media posts. As any boater in the northeast knows, one of the
worst days of the season is when you pull your boat for winter. You literally begin counting down the days until you splash that boat come spring. We developed a Countdown to Spring campaign for our client Marine Special Products featuring drone images and videos of marinas encrusted in snow and harbors covered with ice.
We then turned these images into “Days until Spring” posts which we placed in the local boating Facebook and IG groups. Beyond providing a breathtaking and unusual perspective on the places boaters love most – their marinas – it also reminded them that Spring is just around the corner and the time is right to start thinking about vessel upgrades in electronics, boat AC or sanitation (services this client happened to sell). As the winter season ended, we turned the many drone shots we had taken into this video. The result – massive increases in the sharing of posts, followers of our FB and IG profile, and great awareness all at organic (non-paid) placement costs.
While storytelling can absolutely be used to educate customers and prospects about a brand, service, or product – it is our experience that the best way to do this is with something either tangential (borrowed interest) or emotional (a shared value or belief). It takes time and discipline to come up with these hooks and to make sure they are both complementary and complimentary to your brand, product, or service.
If you are interested in learning how we at Voncor Marine Marketing can help you use social media storytelling to increase the visibility of your brand and generate leads, contact us. But do it quickly – with Ground Hog Day around the corner, boating season may be here sooner than you think.
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