It has been a whirlwind of growth for Seattle Yachts over the last 24 months. Significant investments have been made opening new offices in San Diego, California, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and most recently, an office in the San Francisco Bay Area. Seattle Yachts also recently purchased Northern Marine Yachts and has started production on a newly designed 57. And while all those announcements have been exciting to talk about, the most important investment made for our brokerage customers has been our commitment to marketing.
"We are investing more in marketing in 2020 than ever before, in fact we have scheduled over 12 pages each month in 9 different print publications, " said Peter Whiting, Managing Partner. "It's not just about spending the money though, we have brought in the best people to assist in our marketing efforts as well. Our brokerage clients are being taken care of very well."
Seattle Yachts has two marketing consultants and content writers in Bill Parlatore and Phil Friedman, both longtime industry experts. Bill recently came on board and is the original founder of Passagemaker Magazine. Phil has been working with Seattle Yachts for months now and was previously the CEO and President of Palmer Johnson Yachts. Seattle Yachts also has employed Rob Bowman to manage digital marketing efforts for Seattle Yachts. Rob has been in the yachting industry for nearly 20 years and has helped improve visitors to SeattleYachts.com by 158% in 2019 compared to 2018. Additionally, Seattle Yachts has an excellent support team to get every brokerage listing uploaded to all of the industry MLS websites. Every yacht, no matter where it's listed, gets the full attention of our entire support team and more than 35 yacht brokers at our company worldwide.
When you list your yacht for sale with a Seattle broker, the entire team and process is set in motion. From creating the best listing possible through professional photography, to advertising in the biggest industry magazines, to utilizing social media and Google to target the right buyer, Seattle Yachts is doing more so that you can experience better results.
(Seen below: Whether you want to list your motor yacht or sailboat, Seattle Yachts is investing heavily in print and digital in 2020 to assist you.)
While industry print magazines are certainly important and continue to be a place where buyers and sellers look each month at what boats are available, a good digital strategy is as equally imperative. It's our commitment to every yacht brokerage customer that your boat will be distributed online to as many websites as possible. In fact, the Seattle Yachts support team enters the vessel into two industry MLS systems. These systems then feed your boat to countless other websites, including competing brokerage firms. So not only do we list it on our own website, Yachtworld.com, Boats.com RightBoat.com, and others, but we also give our competition a shot to sell your boat as well. Also new for 2020, Seattle Yachts will automatically be sending all of our inventory to Facebook Marketplace. Here's how it works:
In addition to listing your yacht on Facebook Marketplace, your yacht will also be featured and "boosted" on Facebook and Instagram. What does this mean exactly? Our Seattle Yachts social media presence isn't the largest in the industry, but it's very targeted. Once we post your yacht for sale on Facebook and Instagram, we then create an ad for it to run on both websites. This ad targets boaters on both social platforms that are in appropriate geographic markets, of a demographic with the highest propensity to buy, and have shows interest in relevant activities. For example, we can easily target people living within 25 miles of Fort Lauderdale, are older than 40 years old, and have selected interests like Yachting Magazine, the Miami Boat Show, and the Art Basel event. On average, Seattle Yachts "boosted" ads on Facebook reach tens of thousands of people.
Many boat buyers today begin their research process by using a search engine like Google or Bing. It's a common practice now for yacht brokerage firms to compete both for organic search engine rankings and with a paid search engine campaign. On a Google search results page for example, someone searching for a "Hampton 590 Yacht" will get back approximately 8 to 10 results on page 1. The ads that show at the very top of the page are paid and can capture relevant traffic for you boat. The non-paid results below are called "organic results" that require your website to be among the best to be able to rank in the top five.
Email Marketing is still a great way to get your yacht in front of thousands of other yacht brokers and our network of boat buyers. Seattle Yachts has a current database of over 2,000 yacht brokers all of the world. Our marketing team will send your yacht out to all of these yacht brokers on a monthly basis to ensure it's front of mind to everyone in the industry. Additionally, Seattle Yachts sends monthly email newsletters to our customers list that includes several thousand boat buyers. Is your current broker ensuring your yacht is being emailed out professionally and consistently? Below are examples of our monthly emails blasts to brokers and clients:
We believe every yacht is different and should be treated as such. While the above-mentioned marketing strategies are executed daily by our team, there are many more opportunities out there to increase visibility on your yacht in a targeted and appropriate way. We invite you to reach out to one of our experienced, professional yacht brokers in one of our many offices from Anacortes and Seattle in the Pacific Northwest, to our San Diego and Alameda offices in California, to our Jupiter and Fort Lauderdale offices in Florida. Our own Brian Calvert is even available to help list and sell your yacht in the Philippines.
List your yacht with us now and we may even be able to fit you into "Featured Listing" position in the magazines. This is a full one page ad that highlights your boat. Seen below is a two-page spread featuring "Mad Dog's Treat", a 2010 Hampton Yachts 580 Pilothouse listed for sale with our Seattle Yachts Fort Lauderdale broker Bob Epstein. MadDog's Treat was featured as a full page ad in the January issues of Yachting Magazine, Power & Motor Yacht, and Passagemaker magazine.
