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Take a look back at this year’s Discover Boating marketing efforts to see how the industry-wide campaign is helping reach new boaters:

Introduced new people to the boating lifestyle
This year’s digital advertising campaign, known as Awesome Bay, reached the right people in the right places at the right time with video completion rates beating ad industry benchmarks across all platforms, including Connected TV, pre-roll and competitor retargeting.

PR efforts put boating in mainstream lifestyle media with more than 2,500 stories incorporating Discover Boating messaging in online, print and broadcast outlets. Top-tier national lifestyle placements were featured in The New York Times, USA Today, Men’s Journal, PEOPLE.com, Travel + Leisure, Maxim, theChive, MSN.com and Yahoo!.

Discover Boating partnered with 50 influencers across YouTube, Instagram and Facebook covering multiple verticals (outdoor/adventure, lifestyle, travel, fashion, health & wellness, parenting, photography) to share first-hand boating experiences and encourage their followers to get on the water. This included three YouTube content creators representing first-time boat buyer demographics with different boating lifestyles – BlackTipH, DevinSuperTramp and Knorpp and South. Through views, organic social engagements and sharing of 800+ posts, these influencer partners helped bring boating to life and inspire potential first-time boat buyers to get out on the water.

Advanced consumers’ exploration of boat ownership
Manufacturer referrals reached 2.3 million in FY 2019, up 9% over FY 2018. Social media drove more manufacturer referrals this year – tripling results from the previous year. Boat manufacturers, check out your Google Analytics to see traffic Discover Boating sites are driving to your website.

Discover Boating sites in the U.S. and Canada saw nearly 4.5 million visits this year. Nearly 100 pieces of new content were added to DiscoverBoating.com in 2019 alone—helpful boating-related information that can easily be shared from your social channels or website. New site content is crucial to organic search and in addition to gaining top positions on page 1 search results, Discover Boating gained top placements in “Featured Snippets” (meaning Google sees the value and quality of the content produced). DiscoverBoating.com ranks in positions #1 - #10 for 5,771 boating-related keywords/phrases (a 90% increase from FY18). 

Educated stakeholders on Grow Boating resources, program news and campaign efforts
Through a longstanding partnership with the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas, Grow Boating and MRAA launched the second of a three-part e-learning series created for dealers, titled “Growing Your Business with First-Time Boat Buyers.”

The Grow Boating Marketing Summit at IBEX, now a full-day of digital marketing-focused education, was attended by more than 175 industry stakeholder attendees. Missed this year’s Summit? Don’t miss out on all the learnings – download the presentations and recordings here.

Grow Boating also hosted more than 300 industry stakeholders for a three-part educational webinar series presented by Heather Lutze of Findability University, focused on maximizing SEO strategy. Check out her SEO tips and tricks in the recorded webinars here.

Stay tuned for more exciting Discover Boating marketing efforts in the New Year! Have questions on any Discover Boating marketing campaign activities? Contact Grow Boating’s Freya Olsen at [email protected].