How to promote a yacht:

The third most important element of selling your yacht is promotion: the effort, process, and exposure of marketing your yacht. While some brokers or yacht consultants practice the “yacht in a bottle” method in the hopes of getting a lucky buyer… yachts dot not just sell themselves. Well at least not for the right fair market value in the shortest period of time.

If you are considering putting your yacht for sale, you have probably checked a few brokerage companies that have presented, in detail, all the marketing activities they will conduct to help you sell your yacht. But marketing has changed…

the truth about sales & marketing in 2019

Sales and marketing has changed more in the last 5 years than in the last 50! Traditional sales methods don’t work anymore because the way people buy has completely changed. A few years ago, 33% of the research (pre-sale) was typically done by the client on their own and 67% of the sale was done with the help of the salesperson.

Today, 85% to 90% of the pre-sale is done by buyers online, and 10-15% during the sales process.

Multiple studies have confirmed that over 80% of the buying decisions are now made online, before talking to a sales person. Customers are in control, more independent, and knowledgeable.

Selling yachts today is an online game.But just being online doesn’t guarantee results.

Today’s buyers are exposed to thousands of commercial messages per year: 6,000 to 10,000 a day — that’s 3.5M messages per year to be exact! Because of this, it has never been more challenging to reach buyers.

Every traditional marketing channel has experienced a significant drop over the last few years. Let’s take TV for instance: From 1977 to 2015, the number one TV show in the US went from 31.5% rating (Happy Days) to a 7.3% rating (Sunday Night Football). That is a 200% drop in exposure! This massive drop didn’t only happen on television but on all other channels available today. Prospects today are spread across thousands of different channels (TV, cable, radio, publications, websites, social media, YouTube, podcasts, magazines, newspapers, apps, etc.).

The biggest MLS platforms that were generating the majority of the leads a few years ago are becoming obsolete and not performing. We hear more and more brokerage firms complaining about the low numbers and diminishing quantity and quality of leads coming from major Multiple Listing Sites.

The principal objective of Multiple Listing Sites is to get more traffic and generate revenue from advertising. Here is a preview screen shot of a major listing site below. The page counts 31 call to actions to external links (links to suggested yachts, advertisements and other information) versus 4 call to actions to actually inquire about the yacht.

Note: Everything highlighted in pink is a link to an external URLs.

Today, super-platforms such as Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Youtube are the new Yachtworld. As we’ve said, although people are not on social media to buy a yacht, people who are buying yachts are on social media! For example, over the last 6 months we’ve sold a Sanlorenzo 104 via Instagram, a Sunseeker 73 via Facebook, and a Monte Carlo 66 via YouTube.