Page 38 - MARINAOFTHEYEAR

customers live in this complex. They have a monthly party and we like to sponsor the May
party… it’s a great kick off to the season. We also meet new people that become customers,
but it’s more about making the current customers feel proud to be a part of our marina.
This year we hosted a National Marina Day Celebration. This was a fantastic opportunity to
showcase how we are a gateway to boating (and eat donuts!). I’ll talk more about this in section
7… but it’s a great way to meet our customers in a fun environment.

Finally, we bring summer to the winter! Our prospective customers come to visit us in
February and March. Here’s the difficulty, it’s FREEZING. Do you know how hard it is to ask
customers to imagine storing their boat when there is 30” of ice on the lake? Here’s what we
do… we create summer in the store. I use our large flat screen TV and display a beautiful
stationary photo of the forklift with a boat in the summer. We use air freshner that smells like
summer either flowers or coconut lotion (suntan lotion), we softly play Kenny Chesney or
Jimmy Buffet, and we have fresh flowers, normally tulips, on the counter. Everything evokes
spring/summer memories. OH, and we kick up the heat to about 75. It’s just a way to divert
attention to summer. When we take them into the attached warehouse, which we insulated last
year, we have the heat at around 70. We can walk without huge winter coats to see the boat
club boats in our “indoor showroom” or we can see the racks of boats and clean forklifts for the
In/Out Service. It takes effort, but if you can’t have summer outside, we can do our best to
trigger the memories of it for each person.

To summarize. We market to the year our customer lives in. We use Mail, Email, Social
Marketing, in-person, and the phone. Ads generate leads, but we do everything possible to
keep those leads to reduce our dependence on social media platforms. Instead utilizing social
media platforms for awareness and the infinity marketing machine as an asset. We have turned
marketing into a profit center.

38