Marketing Built for Marine & Boating
Boat dealers, rentals, charters, marinas and repair yards — inventory that stays in step with Boat Trader and YachtWorld, availability by hull with a deposit taken, and the direct bookings that stop paying commission twice.
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Marine & Boating
Typical client results
Performance trend
CompoundingThe problems that keep coming up
Four things we hear on almost every first call in this sector. If two or more sound familiar, the fix is usually structural rather than a bigger budget.
Boat Trader, YachtWorld and boats.com are where a buyer starts, and all three sit under one owner. You pay for the placement, the enquiry lands as an email with a name and a hull, and the buyer never sees your site until they have already narrowed the list. When the feed breaks, and feeds break, you are advertising a boat that sold in March.
FishingBooker, GetMyBoat, Boatsetter and Click&Boat fill empty days and take their cut of every trip, including the repeat guests who already know the captain by name. The channel earned the first booking honestly. It keeps earning on all of them, because rebooking there takes two taps and rebooking with you means hunting for a phone number.
Splash, slips, summer, haul-out, shrink wrap, storage. Enquiries pile into a few weeks either side of the season and the yard goes quiet for the rest. A lead missed during the launch rush is not delayed, it is gone until next year, and on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts one named storm rewrites the entire quarter.
A small craft advisory ends a trip that was booked and paid for months ago. What happens next — full refund, credit, captain's discretion — is the most argued point in the whole trade, and when the policy sits three paragraphs down a page nobody read, the argument finishes as a one-star review with your name on it.
Six paying passengers on an uninspected vessel with an OUPV licence. Seven or more means an inspected hull, a Coast Guard Certificate of Inspection, a drug testing consortium and the paperwork behind it. A site advertising 'up to 12' on a six-pack boat sells bookings the captain then has to cancel.
Techs booked out for weeks, the lift schedule in a notebook, parts on backorder from the OEM, and a quote that depends on haul-out, blocking, pressure wash and how much old bottom paint comes off. While the message sits unheard, the owner has rung three yards and gone with whoever picked up.
How We Fix It for Marine & Boating
Four moves, in this order. The sequence matters more than any individual tactic.
You own every account
Domain, hosting, the Google Business Profile, the ad accounts, the booking system, the inventory feed and every tracking number are registered to your company from day one. The fleet photography and the drone footage are yours as well.
We start at the feed and the calendar
Before anything is designed, we test whether a sold boat actually leaves the site and whether a booked Saturday shows as booked. Most of what this sector loses is sitting in those two places, not in the homepage.
We measure cost per booked trip and per unit sold
Cost per enquiry flatters every channel here. New units, brokerage, charter, rental and service are reported separately, so a marketplace booking and a direct booking are never averaged into one comfortable number.
Credentials, not claims
Google Partner, Meta Business Partner, Microsoft Advertising and BBB Accredited. Feed setup, booking configuration and waiver flows are handled inside the build rather than handed back to whoever runs your front desk in season.
Published prices, 30-day terms
Every price sits on this site before you speak to anyone, work runs on 30-day terms, and there is no long lock-in. Sixteen years and more than 3,000 businesses have not needed a contract clause to hold anyone.
Services That Work for Marine & Boating
The channel mix we usually recommend in this vertical.
Everything a marine & boating business needs, under one team
Website solutions
- Inventory pages fed from DockMaster, Lightspeed EVO or Blackpurl, so a sold hull leaves the site without anybody remembering to pull it
- A calendar per boat with half-day, full-day and sunset pricing, captained or bareboat, and a deposit taken at the moment of booking
- Brokerage and used listings carrying full specs, engine hours, HIN, survey and documentation status rather than four photos and a price
- Service and haul-out scheduling built against travelift, bay and tech capacity instead of a contact form somebody answers in the evening
- Slip and dry stack pages that collect LOA, beam, draft and shore power before anyone quotes a rate
- Built to load on marina wi-fi and one bar of signal at the ramp, because that is where these pages are actually opened
Lead generation
- Boats Group enquiries routed into the CRM with the hull attached, instead of piling up in a shared inbox during a boat show week
- Boat show contacts worked as a proper sequence, with the unit they stood on recorded against the name
- Paid search on model names, engine packages and repower terms, kept separate from charter and service budgets so neither hides the other
- Post-trip capture so the second booking comes direct — email, text and a card on file, within whatever the marketplace's terms allow
- Off-season campaigns for winterisation, storage, refit and repower that keep the yard earning when the water is empty
- Corporate, club and group charter enquiries on their own path, collecting head count, catering and certificate of insurance requirements
Marketing
- Local search built around ramps, inlets, lakes and marina names people actually type, not the city name on its own
- Content that answers what gets asked before a deposit: what a survey and sea trial involve, what a bottom job runs to, what is included on a half-day trip
- Owner email timed to the calendar — commissioning, service intervals, storage renewal, new model arrivals and end-of-season deals
- Generative engine optimisation, because a family asking an assistant for a half-day snapper trip gets three names read out and no link to click
- Review handling across Google, TripAdvisor and the charter marketplaces, where a weathered-off trip is usually the first thing a buyer reads
- Retargeting measured against booked trips and units sold rather than impressions and clicks
Social media
- Short vertical video of the real thing — a hookup, a sea trial, a launch, a hull swinging off the travelift
- Guest photos and catch shots gathered with permission and reused as advertising, the one kind of content in this trade that sells itself
- Meta and Instagram campaigns aimed at owners inside towing distance and at visitors already planning the trip
- Recruitment posts for captains, mates and marine techs, because an unstaffed boat is a lost day and a good tech is the hardest hire in the yard
CRM & GoHighLevel
- GoHighLevel pipelines split by line — unit sale, brokerage listing, charter, rental, slip, storage and service order
- Owner records that hold the boat, not just the person: HIN, engine make and serial, hours, last service, slip number and renewal date
- Trade-in and consignment follow-up that keeps running long after the boat show stand comes down
- Two-way texting from the number on the dock sign, so a captain's reply from the helm lands in the same record as the booking
- Slip, storage and maintenance plan renewals with reminders that fire on their own rather than out of somebody's diary
Automation
- Instant text and email on every enquiry, because a buyer comparing four dealers rings the one that answered first
- Waiver, crew list and arrival instructions sent automatically once the deposit clears, with Smartwaiver handling the signature
- Weather rules that push a rebooking link to a whole day's trips at once instead of the captain making eleven phone calls
- Service status updates pushed from the work order — hauled, in the shed, parts on order, splashed — so the phone stops ringing for updates
- Winterisation and commissioning reminders fired by hull and engine hours rather than by a spreadsheet somebody maintains
- Review requests sent while the customer is still on the dock, not the following week when the cooler is unpacked
E-commerce
- Parts and accessories searchable by engine make, model and serial, so the counter stops answering the same impeller question all day
- Charter deposits, gift certificates and full prepayment taken online with the cancellation terms shown on the same screen
- Slip, dry stack and storage billed against a card on file, with renewals handled without an invoice run
- Detailing, ceramic coating and bottom paint sold as fixed packages priced by boat length
- Ship's store and merchandise stock kept in step with the counter POS rather than counted twice
Features this sector actually needs
One inventory record, everywhere it appears
Units live once in DockMaster, Lightspeed EVO or Blackpurl and flow out to the site and to Boats Group. Mark a hull sold at the desk and it disappears from both. Drop a price once and it drops everywhere.
Availability by hull, not an enquiry form
Every boat carries its own calendar with half-day, full-day and sunset slots, captain and fuel priced as options, and a deposit taken at booking. A Saturday that is gone shows as gone instead of being offered and retracted.
Waivers and crew details before they reach the dock
The Smartwaiver link goes out with the confirmation, names and ages come back signed, and the booking form will not accept a party larger than the vessel's certificate allows. Nobody arrives at the slip to be turned away.
A cancellation path the captain controls
The captain marks a day weathered off from a phone. Every booking on it gets the rebooking link and the credit rules applied as written, and the policy sits on the booking page where the guest agreed to it rather than buried in an email footer.
Service intake a writer can actually price
LOA, beam, draft, engine make, model, serial and hours, afloat or on the hard, trailer or slip, plus photos of the problem. Scheduled against lift and bay capacity, so the date offered is a date the yard can hold.
Slips quoted on the dimensions that matter
Length overall including pulpit and swim platform, beam, draft and shore power collected before a rate is given, with waitlist position visible to the owner so the office stops fielding the same call every fortnight.
Trade-in and brokerage valuation intake
Year, make, model, engine hours, HIN, survey and documentation status captured in one pass and routed to whoever prices used hulls, rather than a note about a boat somebody saw once.
Parts by engine serial
Mercury, Yamaha, Suzuki and Volvo Penta lookup tied to the customer's own engine, so accessory and consumable orders go through without a parts manager translating a description over the phone.
The systems this sector already runs on. We wire the site into them rather than asking you to change how the business works.
- DockMaster
- Lightspeed EVO
- Blackpurl
- Boats Group (Boat Trader & YachtWorld)
- Dockwa
- Molo
- FareHarbor
- FishingBooker
- Smartwaiver
- Jobber
Services for Marine & Boating — Starting From $200
Starting prices are based on basic project requirements. Final pricing depends on scope, features, integrations, number of pages, functionality and specific business requirements.
Any question in your mind?
The questions we get asked most, answered without the sales gloss. If yours is not here, ask us directly — you will get a straight answer either way.
Still have questions?
Book 30 minutes with a strategist. No deck, no pitch — just answers about your situation.
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Read all FAQsLet us look at your marine & boating marketing
Send us your site and current channels. You will get a written read on what is working, what is leaking, and what we would prioritise first — before any proposal.
- Free 15-minute review of your current setup
- Honest answer on whether we are the right fit
- No obligation and no follow-up sequence
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Grow your Marine & Boating business
Boat dealers, rentals, charters, marinas and repair yards — inventory that stays in step with Boat Trader and YachtWorld, availability by hull with a deposit taken, and the direct bookings that stop paying commission twice.