Marine Marketing Budgets for 2013-2014 in an online world

by Brendan Maxwell on 20 Sep 2013 Background

Setting the marketing budget in the modern age means confronting, like it or not, the importance of the Internet in the advertising mix.

This has taken many marine industry companies well outside their comfort zone, which had been built around the plethora of boating magazines.

It’s actually very old news now, but special interest magazine readers have voted with their mice and fingers over the last decade and a half, and are now to be found on smartphones, tablets, laptops and even (gasp) desktop computers. The key boat buying demographic, the 40 to 65 age group, has embraced online media enthusiastically, with video, imagery and major feature stories providing much more information and entertainment than ever before.

Most marine industry companies, some happily, others more reluctantly, have very significantly decreased, or in many cases eliminated print media from their schedules, as the percentage of boaters reading them has simply faded away.

Whilst the marine magazines had their pecking order and their own niches, the leaders there have largely failed to transition to online formats, despite any clear intentions.

History

15 years after its launch, Australia’s TetraMedia is now the largest online marine news network in the world!

TetraMedia has no marine print magazine presence, even though its Owner and Publisher, Rob Kothe, comes from a print background. His family has rural newspaper interests going back six decades.

Kothe said today, 'When the Internet was burgeoning as a new source, the old media groups were busy defending their print territory, whilst the new media was breaking ground. By the time the old media realised that the Internet was in fact the key media, they were a decade behind, and a decade online is a lifetime.'

Sail-World.com grew out of the Australian pioneer sailing web site, Sailing-online. The group now covers the Asia-Pacific and World sailing scenes in great detail.

TetraMedia Group Benefits

There are seven Sail-World racing sites, with two more expected to launch in 2013. Sail-World is the major presence at regattas in Australia and on the world stage. It had the biggest sailing media team at the Qingdao and Weymouth Olympics and now at the America´s Cup regatta.

The team of editors and senior contributors behind these publications is highly regarded. The biggest marine sports event for 2013 will be the America’s Cup in San Francisco. Sail-World’s on the water reports are simply the best on the AC scene. They include material from the following industry heavyweights. Bob Fisher, the icon of America’s Cup journalism.

Videographer John Navas is providing some excellent insights of the racing and practice, with long-time America's Cup photographer and Sail-World contributor Chuck Lantz providing daily galleries of still images and Richard Gladwell, Sail-World’s New Zealand and America’s Cup editor, the all-important attention to detail.

Sail-World Cruising has a huge worldwide audience, with 100,000 followers around the globe. World cruising circumnavigator Nancy Knudsen, a high profile media personality (she has a Gold Logie) and marketer for many years, is now an eight-year veteran of the online cruising news scene and she has assembled a strong team. Nancy organised the Sydney International Boat Show Cruising Master Class, which included a wonderful group of special presenters.

Powerboat-world.com newsletters Editor, Mark Rothfield, has been on the marine scene for decades. We, and his big audience, look forward to his often off the wall Powerboat editorials each week and a strong flow of news from right across the boating scene.

FishingBoating-world.com is a rising star on the online scene. We get very enthusiastic compliments about the quality of the feature articles that Jarrod Day in Victoria, Lee Brake in Queensland, Gary Brown from NSW, Carl Hyland in Tasmania, Shane Murton of South Australia and Ben Knaggs in Western Australia deliver. The monthly feature content, more like a set of how to fishing tutorials, is significantly greater than any other Asia-Pacific fishing publication offers.

MarineBusiness-World.com - Long time Marine Business Editor, Jeni Bone’s audience is four times that of any other Asia Pacific marine industry publication. Why? Because Jeni works very hard to get the real news. MarineBusiness-World has been the sponsor of the Sanctuary Cove International Boat Show main pavilion and had a pivotal industry news role at the Sydney International Boat Show in the last few weeks.

As of early 2013, TetraMedia’s content, both online and in newsletters, is now viewable in 61 languages and we now have a marine technical glossary of some 1200 words and phrases which are correctly translated into Mandarin, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Turkish and Greek. Arabic, Thai, Korean, Russian and the Scandinavian languages will be added to this list over the next 12 months. This technical breakthrough has dramatically increased our international audiences.

Metrics

On the Australian scene, TetraMedia reaches more than 120,000 individual readers each week in the local marine marketplace and this makes it the dominant marine media group online.

'As it stands today, more than 50% of our 700,000 visitor sessions each month come from mobile devices, with large smartphones (phablets) and tablets being the growth areas', said Kothe.

'For positioning a company, the online feature article has no equal in any other medium across both the digital and traditional divide. They often include video and are always resplendent with lots of images.

News from Sail-World, Sail-WorldCruising, Powerboat-World, FishingBoating-world and MarineBusiness-World is search engine indexed within five minutes of publishing. Quite simply, this is a key factor for advertisers because it means large volumes of their content are search indexed virtually immediately', he went on to add.

Sail-World.com is the largest sailing website network in the world, with individual racing websites in USA, Canada, Asia, NZ, Australia, UK and Europe-Africa. There are also Southern and Northern hemisphere Cruising websites.

Sail-World USA, with 18,000 newsletter subscribers, is the second most popular sailing website in the USA.

Sail-World Canada, with 14,000 newsletter subscribers, is the second most popular sailing website in Canada.

Sail-World Australia has 13,000 newsletter subscribers, is in the top 1200 Australian websites and commands a massive 90% of the Australian sailing news traffic.

Sail-World NZ has 8,000 newsletter subscribers, but is an amazing 72nd most popular NZ website today and has broken into the Kiwi, sailing-mad mainstream. It has double the readership of NZ Rugby and Netball sites!

Sail-World Asia, Europe and UK collectively have 15,000 newsletter subscribers, is number one in Asia and Europe and number two in the UK.

MarineBusiness-World has 14,000 subscribers, which makes it number one in Asia Pacific.

PowerBoat-World.com has 22,000 subscribers, which makes it number one in Asia Pacific.

FishingBoating-World.com already has 24,000 subscribers, but is new and growing very quickly. It is already number two in the Asia-Pacific region.

Sail-World Cruising Southern Hemisphere has 29,000 subscribers and is number one in the Southern hemisphere.

Sail-World Cruising Northern Hemisphere has 44,000 subscribers and is number one in the Northern hemisphere.

Overall, the TetraMedia family of Sail-World, Sail-WorldCruising, Powerboat-World, FishingBoating-world and MarineBusiness-World reach a monthly audience of 250,000 unique readers. Note carefully here, that one reader might be reading content from four of these publications, but will be counted just the once only.

The last sailing website demographic indicates that on average, viewers had family income greater than $250,000, were in the 40-49 age group and 80% of them were male.

According to Alexa, the independent web metrics source, Sail-World has been ranked around 20,000th most popular website in the world over the last seven days, and 27,195 over the last three months. (The current traffic share has been distorted by the likely Kiwi success in the America’s Cup.)

On average, a viewer spends 22 minutes on site, with 9.8 pages read. We recommend you compare your own website traffic ranking at www.alexa.com

In an average month, across all the sites, we serve 210 million banner impressions in 700,000 visitor sessions, which means 300 ads per visit. Our ads change every 20 or so seconds, so advertisers are getting many, many multiple ad exposures per visit. Mind you those figures are surging with August figures up 20% from the norm and September up 50%, but we don´t expect an America's Cup every day.

Social Media

An important part of the online world is Social Media, probably the last nail in the coffin for the print media.

Many people thinking Social Media think Facebook, but for business there are more productive presences on Twitter. It’s the source of breaking news worldwide on both the private and public levels.

All the feature articles from our websites are posted on the relevant Facebook site and our nine editors are all increasing their Facebook input and the ‘Likes’ are growing rapidly across these sites.

However this audience is very fragmented, a fact recognised by Facebook themselves, who have just blinked and have added the Twitter invention - the # (Hash Tag) - to bring larger audiences together.

While Facebook has some value, for marine industry organisations, Twitter is proving to have much, much stronger leverage. It’s much more oriented to the boating buying age group.

The TetraMedia marine group has one of the largest and certainly the fastest growing Twitter news feeds in the marine space, growing at 15% a month, repeat 15% month. In an average month we send out some 4,000 tweets and because we are the largest generator of original marine news worldwide, many of our tweets are being re-tweeted around the world. Because we have regional news we have 13 different Twitter feeds across our titles.

The Twitter #Hash Tag for events which can now be automatically added to Sail-World, Sail-World Cruising, MarineBusiness-World, Powerboat-World and FishingBoating-World news tweets to provide exponential audience expansion to event and subject interest groups.

We have sent tweets to special interest audiences as small as 2000 and had re-tweets going to audiences of 40,000.

This is obviously of immense interest to marine advertisers looking for new audiences, and we will be ready to add the Facebook #Hash Tag as soon as they gain traction.

Closing the Loop

For advertisers, its all about hot leads. We have a highly qualified audience and some of our major clients tell us we have provided up to 70% of their leads. Feature articles, often multi-part provide positioning, competitions and surveys deliver large volumes of qualified contact details from people who are seriously interested in products and services.

Marine industry organisations who want to make an impact in 2013-2014 need to talk to us to promote products and services to the premier sailing markets across North America, UK, Europe,Africa, Asia, New Zealand and Australia.

If you would like to understand more about the advertising and promotional opportunities we can offer, please contact us now.

TetraMedia’s head office - Brendan Maxwell +612 80061873 email advertising(at)tetra-media.com

Asia - Guy Nowell +852 9680 7063 email asiaeditor(at)sail-world.com

New Zealand - Colin Preston +642 1267 4842 email nzsales(at)sail-world.com

UK, Europe, Africa - Jedda Murphy +44 2081 331 593 email jedda.murphy(at)tetra-media.com

North America - Greg Nicoll +1 877 620 9373 email gnicoll(at)kerrwil.com

Publisher - Rob Kothe +61 418441359 email media(at)tetra-media.com