Social Media for Boat Dealers: A Complete Guide

The key to your boat dealer’s continued success is nurturing qualified leads and bringing in new clients. Having loyal customers makes your dealership look good, and social media marketing for your boat dealership is one of the best ways to increase loyalty and engagement for your company.

A decade ago, a prospective buyer might exclusively shop for boats in person or with the occasional online search, typing in relevant terms to get the results they want. Today, however, more and more consumers are using social media to shop and explore products and brands.

This shift means companies are pouring more resources into social media marketing than ever before. If you want your boat dealership to remain competitive and continue to drive leads, keep reading this guide to social media for boat dealers.

What are the benefits of social media for boat dealers?

When leveraged with the right strategy, social media can bring hundreds to thousands of qualified leads to your boat dealership. Further, you can build relationships with your customers and educate people on topics important to you. Other benefits of social media marketing include:

• Improving brand awareness and recognition
• Gaining insight into your audience
• Demonstrating positive customer service interactions
• Boosting traffic to your website

A few of the best social media platforms for marketing your boat dealership include:

• Facebook: This platform has nearly 2.96 billion monthly active users, making it the perfect place to generate a large number of leads. You can host a business page with all the essential information users need to convert. Plus, Facebook hosts an advertising platform to make it easy to manage and track your campaign’s analytics.
• Twitter: Twitter centers around short-form text posts, and it’s a great way to connect with current and potential customers. It’s also suitable for conducting competitor research and finding out what customers think of your brand. People are more likely to post their opinions here than on platforms like Instagram and YouTube.
• Instagram: This photo-based app is a great platform for social media marketing, as it has some advanced features that make shopping easy on the platform. On average, 130 million users click on at least one shopping post per month. With shopping ads, photo content, stories, and short-form video, Instagram is a great marketing tool for boat dealers.
• YouTube: YouTube is great for longer-form content, and this video-sharing app is perfect for boat dealers. You can post detailed product videos showcasing the features of your boats and other watercraft, and even share how-to videos to help customers learn more about boating and proper procedures on the water.

Social media best practices for boat dealers

The following tips will help you make the most of your social media marketing efforts.

1. Target the right audience

Consider who your ideal customer is, and then dig into a little research to find out what appeals to them, what social media platforms they’re more likely to use, and how to encourage their engagement. As a boat dealer, your target audience likely includes people like homeowners, sportsmen, and individuals of retirement age.

Your audience also might not be on certain platforms. For example, if you’re targeting buyers of retirement age, investing time and money into TikTok marketing might not be your most lucrative avenue, as the audience there skews much younger.

2. Build a consistent brand identity

Having a consistent brand identity helps build a presence on your social media platforms. If you want your audience to recognize you, there are a few strategies you should employ:

• Maintain the same profile picture — like an identifiable logo — across your different profiles.
• Use a similar voice in your text posts and captions.
• Include similar colors, fonts, and designs across all your media.

When your posts have a cohesive flow across your different social media profiles, it helps customers recognize your brand more easily.

3. Schedule your posts

Juggling a few different social media profiles might seem easy, but when you consider the level of consistency and interaction you need to take to keep your audience engaged, just a few profiles can get to be too much. 

To manage the workload, many platforms allow you to schedule posts in advance. You might spend a day creating and scheduling posts, allowing you to sit back for the rest of the week to watch your posts gain traction and build leads.

If you really want to ensure the success of your social media marketing, consider social media management. With these services, you can focus on your business while marketing professionals take care of managing and tracking your social media marketing.

4. Track your analytics

When you open a business profile on many social media platforms, you can get advanced analytics on the performance of your posts. While basic profiles can tell you how many views and likes your content gets, business analytics can track impressions and reach per post, and even show you how many users click on the link in your bio.

Check-in regularly with your analytics pages to see how your different posts perform, especially on your paid ad campaigns. If you notice an upward or downward trend on certain kinds of posts, you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

5. Leverage both organic and paid avenues

While regularly posting engaging content targeted to your audience’s interests — organic marketing — can be successful on its own, paid social media ads will boost your reach. With paid social media marketing, you invest in sponsored or promoted content that almost guarantees your target audience will see your content.

With paid social media ads, you need to invest marketing dollars into your campaigns and identify who you’d like to reach with your ads. The platform can then ensure that your posts get in front of the eyes of your target audience.

Growing your social presence with WebFX is a walk in the park.

“WebFX allows growing your social media platforms to be stress-free! They are knowledgeable and adapt to your company needs!”

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WebFX can accelerate your boat dealership’s social media marketing efforts

Let WebFX handle your social media marketing campaigns so you can focus on running your boat dealership. Our team of experienced marketing professionals will ensure you have the best campaigns tailored to your target audience.

If you’re ready to get started, contact us online or call us at 888-601-5359.

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