A reminder to not forget to put the finishing touches on your holiday marketing campaigns. What holiday marketing campaign I hear you say!
Christmas sees a wave of seasonal marketing and promotions flooding our social media feeds. Some companies are cranking out unlimited cheery posts and deals, which can leave you feeling like the Grinch about your own social media activity. It can be challenging to compete for eyes on your yachting business – especially if you’re lacking time, ideas, staff or budget.
Fortunately, the Antibes Yachting Chief Elf has been busy! Join us for #AntibesYachtingUnwrapped where we’re counting down to Christmas with a daily post published on Instagram and Facebook featuring free marketing tips from Monday 14th December until Christmas Day. The aim is to unwrap a few marketing secrets and get you thinking about types of content you can create for your own business social media pages, relieve your marketing anxiety over the festive period and set you up to thrive in the New Year.
Day 1: 5 Tips To Grow Your Brand
1. Define a niche or two that you will be known for where you can share your expertise and insider knowledge whether that is supplying luxury toiletries to superyachts, selling sailing yachts 50m+ or taking care of yacht maintenance in winter. If you don’t clearly define your strengths then your customers won’t think of you for that either.
2. Audience engagement on social media is vitally important. Reply as much as possible to comments, direct messages and messages from Stories. (Unless you’re Gary Vee and get 2000+ comments per post and have a small army to do this for you 
).
).3. Attract your ideal customers by regularly sharing your skills and knowledge in public. The benefits of being seen as an expert far outweigh the downside of someone else stealing your ideas.
4. Move from being a content consumer to a content creator. Create shareable, relevant content such as mini guides or top 5 lists, launch a podcast or start writing blogs for your website. On LinkedIn, I publish ‘2-Minute Tips’ for marketing within the yachting industry which have been really successful over the past 2 years. Give your ideal clients a reason to come back!
5. Grow your business by networking. People that are good at networking organically expand their brand profile and customer base by being associated with the best in their industry.
Day 2: What Is A Yacht Without An Anchor?
An anchor secures and keeps a yacht in a body of water. It represents steadfastness, composure and for some, hope.
For today’s #AntibesYachtingUnwrapped tip, let’s explore “anchoring bias”, which is a fundamental principle in marketing and something top brands use daily to influence customers to buy.
During decision making, anchoring bias means customers have a tendency to put more weight on the first piece of information offered, which influences how they interpret the next information following and then reach a decision.
How can you use anchoring bias to increase your business revenue?
Anchoring bias is a psychological step that EVERY customer makes, whether they are buying crew uniforms or ceramic coating for their yacht or radio advertising for a boat show.
Your customers tend to compare options based on the first price they’re given. Anchoring allows a customer to make emotional (and in their mind, rational) choices by using a scale of prices.
Here’s 3 examples:- If you start showcasing a customer a €25,000 yacht toy then show them a €14,997 option it starts to sound more reasonable.
- If you plan events, give your clients a high price with all bells and whistles and then give them a second lower price that fulfills their budget and also allows you to make a profit.
- To make a better impression, first mention a competitor’s higher rate, forcing customers to compare it to your lower price.
Always use positive language when giving anchored quotes. DO NOT say to a customer “This is our heavily reduced price”, let them see the options and their brain will compare them.
For the option you want clients to choose, always give a specific price that is not a full rounded number, but close to one. You will see examples of this in yachting magazine advertising (subscriptions reduced from £250 to £197) or online shopping (crew sunglasses were €160 down to €129) etc etc
Thanks for reading Day 2 of my #AntibesYachtingUnwrapped series. Do you already use anchoring for your business, or will you try it in the future?
Day 3: Creativity Takes Courage
The image above shows Salvador Dali and his boat ‘Gala’ at Port Lligat, photographed by Jean Dieuzaide in 1953.
Have you ever been to the Carrières de Lumières in Les-Baux-de-Provence? Located a few hours from Antibes they host art exhibitions projected onto huge quarry walls. It’s spectacular and fantastically imaginative. (Their Dali exhibition reopens January 7 after the current lockdown restrictions and goes until January 24 so go see it if you can).
Dali’s art is whimsical, unexpected and totally bonkers, but it has a way of entering your brain for the day. And that is how Dali has inspired Day 3 of my #AntibesYachtingUnwrapped posts; Dali realised that the first idea for a painting was rarely the best idea and this is similar when marketing your yachting company. You need to play around with creative ideas, show up consistently and have a process.
Consistency is often a good predictor of success, however it’s often much harder to achieve than it sounds. Now that we’re all in a period of ongoing uncertainty, being creative from a marketing point of view is really important.
According to Lucidpress’ coverage in Forbes and Inc, brands with consistency earn 23% more annual revenue than brands that are inconsistent.
I read these statements below recently and I think they’re valid for any business owner – what do you think?
- Amateurs value intensity because it makes a good story. Professionals value consistency because it creates better long-term outcomes.
- Amateurs think in absolutes. Professionals think in probabilities.
- Amateurs solve the symptom. Professionals solve the problem.
- Amateurs show up to practice to have fun. Professionals realise that what happens in practice happens in reality.
- Amateurs think knowledge is power. Professionals want others to avoid their mistakes.
- Amateurs focus on the next quarter. Professionals focus on the next decade.
- Amateurs focus on tearing other people down. Professionals focus on making everyone better.
To learn more about the exhibitions at Carrières de Lumières go to: https://www.carrieres-lumieres.comDay 4: Should You Buy Followers?
For today’s #AntibesYachtingUnwrapped tip, I’m going to talk about whether you should buy followers.
If you’re on Instagram, you’ve probably received messages in your inbox saying that you can pay to buy followers and get likes or comments put onto your account.
How do you recognise an account on Instagram that has bought followers?
Quite often they have a minimal number of posts, and if you go into the posts they have quite low engagement. So hardly any likes or comments, yet their follower numbers look really high in comparison such as this example below:
Buying followers is a quick win, rather than building your brand for a long-term strategy. So it’s particularly tempting to buy followers if you’re new to Instagram and you see other companies that have been on there for a long time and they have a huge following, or if the economic conditions are a little bit uncertain, like the pandemic this year.
Because of the trend with influencers and brand partnerships, it’s paved a dark path for fake followers and then there’s an online community that obviously is fake, and quite often that is just followers that are bots.
So, does it happen in the yachting industry? YES. All the examples that I have shown you are actually from the superyacht industry.
Should you buy followers?
I don’t advise you to buy followers because it dilutes your true customer base. You’re not only damaging your integrity, you’re cheating your own company and suppliers by falsifying your reputation.
Most of all, buying followers means you eliminate the potential for true feedback from your actual customers. And when you do that, you lose a chain of communication where you can actually improve your own business and how you operate. A bot who’s at the end of your follower list will never refer you for business!
So I’ll leave you with this: Your profit is based on the impact you make to each one of your prospects, rather than the size of the audience you reach. In all cases, build yourself a COMMUNITY rather than a following because ORGANIC and AUTHENTIC engagement is always more VALUABLE than vanity metrics.
I hope you enjoyed the first 4 days in the #AntibesYachtingUnwrapped countdown to Christmas series. Please share this post if you’re found the information useful. You can join our mailing list by subscribing on our website home page so you receive marketing tips, news and updates about yachting companies in Antibes.
