Google added a +1 button next to its search results today. It lets people recommend a result to their contacts. It is one more sign that search and social media are becoming intertwined. The announcement was followed between training sessions.
Robert Scales's work currently follows two tracks. The first is dive training. Since the end of last year, a sponsorship program run in partnership with PADI Asia Pacific has allowed him to work up through the instructor levels, starting with Assistant Instructor, with Master Instructor as the goal within a few years. He does not work for PADI, but the program places him inside dive operations every day.
The second track is the web, his profession for years in Vancouver. One question stands out: why are so many good dive operators so hard to find online? He has begun helping several of them with their digital and social media strategies. Here are the observations from these first months.
What does a dive centre actually sell?
A place and a team. Yet most dive shop websites follow the same structure: a large logo, a PADI badge, a course list with prices (Open Water, Advanced, Rescue, Divemaster), and sometimes a stock photo of a turtle that could have been taken anywhere on earth.
Every shop on the same beach offers the same courses, the same certification and the same card at the end. Leading with these elements means selling a commodity, and price becomes the only differentiator. No shop on the beach comes out ahead in that competition.
Customers choose based on other criteria. Which instructor do they want to spend four days with? What is the boat like? Is the reef in front of the centre worthwhile? Does the place make them want to stay after the dive?
Strategy work therefore begins there: present the team, with names and real photos; show the dive sites as they are; show the boat, the classroom, the tanks lined up in the morning. This may seem obvious, but most shops do not do it.
Why is the instructor the product?
Traveller reviews are about people: "Our instructor was patient." "The guide found us a frogfish." Almost never: "The certification process was efficient." This observation changes what belongs on the website. The team page stops being an afterthought and is likely to become one of the most visited pages on the site.
Why do local listings and reviews matter more than a pretty homepage?
A diver planning a trip does not land on your homepage first. They search Google, check the map, read TripAdvisor, ask questions on dive forums and look at where their friends were tagged on Facebook.
By the time they reach your site, they have often already decided. The site confirms that decision, or calls it into question if it appears abandoned.
The less visible tasks therefore come first: your Google Places listing, the correct address, the correct phone number with the country code (since the caller is probably not local), opening hours, photos, and a TripAdvisor page that a member of the team actually monitors. Each of these is a front door, and many of them are locked or lead to the wrong address.
We recommend investing in these elements rather than in yet another homepage redesign. A beautiful site that nobody finds generates no bookings. For a small operator anywhere, this is the essence of local SEO, and the cost is modest compared with almost any other expense.
How should dive operators use social media?
Facebook is where divers spend their time. After a trip, they are tagged in the group photo, and their friends see it. No paid advertising can produce that effect.
Here is what works in the shops that use it well:
- Photos from the day's dives, posted the same evening.
- Tagging guests, with their permission, so the photos reach their friends.
- Short updates on conditions: visibility, current, species observed.
- Prompt answers to every question, even when the answer is already on the website.
Posting special offers every day, or repeating the same "come dive with us" message, does not work. People scroll past, including those in the target market.
As for the +1 button, it is too early to tell. All indications are that the dive community will ignore it for some time: its members are on Facebook, and that is where the photos are.
Why do ideas tested in one shop spread quickly?
This is the most interesting aspect. The dive industry is small and highly mobile. Instructors spend a season in one place, then move on. Managers talk to one another. When one shop tries a new approach and it works, word travels quickly.
A dive shop is therefore an excellent setting for testing marketing ideas, because results come quickly. Within a week or two, it is possible to see whether the phone rings, whether emails arrive and whether customers walk in mentioning the photos. In agency work, by contrast, many projects required months of waiting before any change could be measured.
If an approach developed here proves effective, it should spread on its own. That is how this industry works.
For anyone interested in the professional side of diving, PADI's pages for dive professionals set out the levels, from Divemaster upward. The path is longer than most people expect.
What can any small tourism business take from this?
Replace the reef with a lake and the dive boat with a canoe, and almost nothing changes.
An outfitter, a campground, a B&B or a sugar shack in Canada faces the same challenge as the dive shops: the core product often resembles the one down the road. What customers choose is the place and the people: the view from the dock, the owner who knows every trail. We recommend showing that, with real photos and names.
The essential front doors should also be addressed before anything else: the Places listing, the hours, the phone number and the reviews.
Dive boats offer more concrete marketing lessons than many meetings, largely because the conversations there are direct and slide decks have no place on board.