Mission: Possible – Creating your 2025 marine marketing plan

When you don’t grocery shop with a list, what happens? You spend $40 on ice cream and grab food at random as if you were hosting a Viking feast. 

When you don’t plan out your CIA heist at Langley just so, what happens? Emilio Estevez gets trapped in the elevator shaft and Tom Cruise is seconds away from capture and imprisonment. 

Whatever your analogy, the foundationally sound method to improve your business next year is simple: 

Have a plan.

Assessment: Where you’ve been to know where you need to go.

An invaluable resource for any marina or marine-related business is that by simply doing business, you’ve accrued an enormous trove of data. This is the observational stage of your next year’s marketing plan: assess where you went right and where to improve. If you have a CMO or internal marketing team, communication is key. It’s time to review.

Look at your profit centers – your boat rentals, your bait and fuel, your service center – and see what notably spiked, declined, or held steady.

If you haven’t already implemented a review funnel or feedback form at your business, we recommend it. You can create a QR code to post at your ship store or office that leads customers to a feedback page on your website, or do it the old-fashioned way and have a literal feedback ballot box. The important thing is that you’re hearing directly from your customers about what they like and don’t.

Take a look at your online reviews for the past year. See where customers mentioned areas of your business they loved, and areas you could improve.

Your staff lives on the front line of your business. They encounter every intricacy and operational nuance. You can have a staff meeting or send an email and ask your team to provide their assessments. Besides the data, the team feels invested in their work and gets to exercise their voices.

Budget: Yeah, the classic party killer…

Right, so you’ve assessed your past year’s strengths and weaknesses, and your budget is like the guy who shows up at your costume party dressed unironically like an accountant from 1987. But you gotta do it.

Do some independent research, and you’ll find a massive range of opinions on how much a small business should spend on marketing. We have seen a ridiculous range that recommends sums one to 50 percent of gross revenue. Three to five percent of gross business income is a sound starting place. If you run a $3 million business, that’s $150,000 to invest in marketing. “Invest” is the key term. If spent wisely, the lifetime value of those new customers will far exceed the cost.

Connect with your local community entities.

It’s a natural instinct to plan for your business in a bubble. “This is what we need to do internally to grow next year.” That’s a totally valid line of thought, but most marine businesses have a support system that often goes untapped.

Marinas that live on a large body of water or within an hour of an urban center probably have a local tourism board. That tourism platform will have a team that hosts and plans community events way in advance, and from our experience, they’d love to help you be a part of them. It’s the same for the Chamber of Commerce and area nonprofits who might work to clean up your shores or have a mission that you can wholeheartedly get behind.

Connect with your network before planning the year and you may find your business now has a wealth of free publicity opportunities and vastly improved visibility with potential customers.

Learn from your competitors.

“Know your enemy.” Isn’t that what Sun Tzu said in The Art of War? Maybe that’s a little extreme when your “enemy” is a neighboring marina run by an amiable semi-retired guy named Dave.

This is an independent research phase. As you plan, see who else is running Google Ads in your region for services you offer. See who is acquiring local sponsorships and where. What do the Google search rankings look like when you search for your services online?

Growing your knowledge of what’s happening within your niche will help inform how you make decisions with authority.

Create a content calendar based on events and day-to-day activities.

The spring season starts and by Memorial Day, it’s like a runaway shopping cart zooming cartoonishly down a hill. A manager knows they host a tournament in two weeks, but the awareness of the event is suppressed because the team has been too busy to publicize it at the level it needs.  

Creating a clear content schedule for the year can mitigate all that. You know what you’ll publish and when. Something like this: 

• Create a list of the key community and marina events for the upcoming year. 
• Determine which events and organizations you’d like to support with sponsorship, then call their contacts to put it in motion. The earlier the better. 
• Create a Facebook, Instagram, and/or newsletter posting schedule that provides space to post well ahead of the event leading up to it. If you have a microphone for your business, making a topical content spreadsheet is a firm step in helping to maintain those publishing goals. 

Assess. Budget. Connect. Inform. Plan. It’s not a Langley heist, and it may not even be more daunting than making the grocery list. 

At the end of the day, when you’ve made the 2025 marina marketing plan, maybe $40 worth of grocery store ice cream and a Viking feast isn’t such a bad reward after all.

Article by Hammer and Nail Marketing

WHAT IS HAMMER & NAIL?

Hammer and Nail Marketing is a boutique marketing firm that helps small to mid-sized marina groups and marinas get noticed by boaters. If you’d like to focus on operating your marina without the additional responsibility of marketing, get in touch with us.

We’re boaters ourselves from a background of operating a family-run marina. From a group of experts who know the water, let Hammer and Nail Marketing help you be the waterfront your local boaters see every time they cast off.