Influencer Marketing & Engagement

Partnering with digital & social content experts to help share your brand and engage customers

Sitting in on an ICAST 2024 Lunch & Learn session dubbed “Learn from the Trendsetters: How to Be Influential in a Few Easy Ways,” I met five social media influencers who changed my perspective on partnering with digital personalities to share your brand and engage customers.

Having been in media, communications, PR and journalism for 30 years, I thought social media personalities existed to do silly things or sell their messaging for likes and get free stuff. But over the last five-plus years, I’ve entirely changed my view and found some connection with these digital influencers I follow. From anglers (Nas Peltz) and baseball fanatics (Baseball Bat Bros.) to fitness buffs (jlieb_fit) and zany personalities (like Joel Berry, aka Tavin Dillard), to name only a few, their messages speak to me as a learner, and consumer and “fan,” while helping me cheer, gain, struggle and laugh alongside them.

Influencer Marketing & Engagement
ICAST 2024 Lunch & Learn session: – “Learn from the Trendsetters: How to Be Influential in a Few Easy Ways,”

Jake Hutcheson, Content Creator at Mud Hole Custom Tackle, hosted the panel of influencers consisting of four women angling experts that included Anastasia Patterson, a tournament angler, Katie Jo Buchanan (Puff Mud Princess), Tiffany Risch (Snookie Fishing) and Patricia Clement (Rivah Sistah). Before the panel discussion began, I followed all five of these boating and fishing enthusiasts. All the panelists impressed me with their kind, genuine and professional approach.

The course description essentially hit on all my curiosities about influencers, including:

  • Promotional personalities for brands and businesses
  • Being a trusted source for product reviews and fishing advice from followers
  • Playing a critical role in sales (in this case, tackle sales)

Whether you’re selling boats, fishing equipment, or both, securing the right influencer and setting up a proper agreement for content is necessary to find success. However, sharing your content is the key to success. Here are some of my takeaways for your business after hearing their shared insights:

  1. Just get started. Since your business is passionate about boating and fishing, capture your brand’s story. Tell the business’s story and post it digitally. From there, use your CRM to identify potential influencer partners. One of your customers may have a strong social media following and is loyal to you. You can also assign your marketing team a project to find an influencer that meets your needs for coverage, audience and talent and adheres to your brand’s mission, vision and values.
  2. Be yourself and remember why you do it. Much like these influencers say to be yourself and remember why you do it, as a business, you must also remind yourself why you’re in boating and fishing. Always follow your moral compass when sponsoring influencers and providing monetary, product, or other forms of support. Your honesty and authenticity engage the influencer properly and also lead to better messaging that engages their online audience.  
  3. Be consistent. When posting, stay consistent. Develop a plan for working with an influencer and plan a schedule for posts that you’re both aware of. As their sponsor, help them keep that steady rhythm to hit their goals. Understand it may take products, money, or other forms of support to help them deliver on the agreed-upon numbers of posts and other deliverables.
  4. Be patient. Success doesn’t come overnight. And it’s not always about the numbers and followers but truthful messaging and content production. Of course, you will want to see the results from each post, campaign, or social effort to know you’re on the right path or need to go in a different direction. Capturing at least an understandable ROI is a necessity.  
  5. Seek to build a long-term relationship. Develop a mutually beneficial partnership with influencers. In doing so, you’re contributing to a digital and local community. You also build trust with an audience. You can establish trust by being transparent and authentic. Earn that trust and then support and reinvest in the influencers who believe in you and your products.

Forging Lasting Relationships & Trust
Hire an influencer if you don’t know where to begin on social media or have the staff to manage your social media, content management and posting. Jake suggests a retailer who doesn’t know how to post to social media can often rely on the influencer to help them try various channels, reels and posts.

“When you’re looking at social media, it may be intimidating … you don’t know how to navigate it, who to work with,” explained Katie Jo. “Does this one follow our account? vs. who is just authentic in themselves. Just realize social media – what we’re doing as far as marketing, the advertising – it’s not any different than any other business relationships.”

Anastasia suggests finding content experts with a common bond and passion for your products when deciding on an influencer. “There’s no purpose in paying someone to do something who doesn’t believe in your product.” Authenticity from both partners builds mutual respect and understanding and helps solidify the relationship and trust.  

Tiffany describes this as a second set of families you’re building and uniting to share your enjoyment of boating/fishing and the lifestyle that comes with it. That means providing products, staff and other promotional items to support them at the events they attend and represent your brand. Remember, you’re sharing your audience with them and vice versa.

Marine Industry
My Content Manager role at the MRAA has led me to many great conversations with boat dealers, marina owners and other retailers. I’ve run across examples of dealers sponsoring professional bass anglers and others who sponsor fishing tournaments, like Apopka Marine, Legendary Marine and many others. They see the values in the events and the content the people they sponsor produce. One could call it grassroots marketing and creating brand awareness through social and community connections. For some, it’s also about giving back to industries and people who support their businesses and reaching their core customers without pushing sales.

I understand not every dealership has the same budget for sponsorship or working with influencers. While some businesses have the staff and budgetary control to take advantage of these opportunities, others do not, or, as previously mentioned, don’t know where to begin. Still, others should explore adding a line in their 2025 budget to support influencer marketing.

Recently, I learned that MRAA Silver Member Collins Boating has a salesperson who started posting boats that the dealer had for sale on his personal TikTok account. The content has led to foot traffic in the brick-and-mortar store and is producing an online draw of 42,000+ likes and nearly 1,800 followers. On the site, he includes walkaround videos and others of boats in the lot, in the showroom and on the water.

His digital journey as an in-house influencer started slowly in November of 2019. Roughly 265 videos, and almost five years later, he’s refined his abilities and videos and connects with customers on a much larger scale in some videos. And this is just one social channel! His most-watched TikTok video has surpassed 340K views! He hosts the videos on his site and represents the business by sharing the dealership website and his work contact information (email and phone). Check him out here: @ethanhowardboatsales

If you don’t have an Ethan on your team, you can work with local pro anglers, kayak fishermen or other nano influencers (100 to 10,000 followers) who use your products and services to keep them on the water. Depending on your needs and budget, you can determine if you can afford to pay these influencers based on a content coverage plan, trade for services and products, or arrange for other trade-out agreements. Maybe you invite them to attend one of your customer events and share the boating/fishing lifestyle with their followers.

Discover Boating Uses Influencers to Share Boating
This past summer, as part of its marketing strategy and 2024 campaign, Discover Boating, powered by NMMA and MRAA, used content creators to share the recreational boating lifestyle with audiences of all demographics in the U.S. and Canada.

This influencer marketing strategy reached the next generation of boaters, inspiring them to get on the water and enjoy the benefits of summer boating. Discover Boating’s Instagram and TikTok influencer partners’ content has generated more than 3 million impressions and 1 million engagements. These content creators not only grabbed attention, but they also served as trustworthy brand ambassadors. Their short-form videos helped to relay Discover Boating’s brand messaging in a manner other consumers could connect with. The influencers’ reels shared personal stories and experiences while educating and guiding newcomers to Discover Boating resources.  

Discover Boating Instagram and TikTok Influencers:

For more information on working with social media and content influencers to share your brand story and on-water adventures, connect with Discover Boating at dealersupport.b2b@discoverboating.com.

Combining its influencer strategy with traditional paid media strategy, Discover Boating reached new levels of connectivity. This past summer, Discover Boating shifted its focus from solely driving awareness to one with consumer engagement. That resulted in nearly 1.25M visits (or 23 percent of the site’s total traffic) to the consumer-facing discoverboating.com.

Influencer Marketing – Engaging Content for the Win!
I grew up in an era of influencer marketing, back when athletes pushed products for brands. Iconic basketball players like Michael Jordan debuted the Nike Air Jordan basketball shoe and changed shoe culture forever. This was a time before social media. Today, there are nano and micro-influencers out there sharing basketball shoes (both collectible and newly launched products) knowledge and insights, influencing modern-day consumers of all ages. And you can find this for all sorts of consumer products, from angling equipment to watersports products.

According to Influencer Marketing Hub, “The Influencer Marketing Industry is set to grow to approximately $24 Billion by the end of 2024.” You can download the Influencer Marketing Hub’s “The State of Influencer Marketing 2024: Benchmark Report” to determine a plan for your business(es). Check out this Meltwater article from Samantha Scott called “The Most Important Influencer Marketing Statistics for 2024” to learn more insights to help you develop a unique strategy.

It’s clear influencer marketing, because of how it engages customers, is winning and is here to stay. HouseofMarketers.com projects the influencer marketing industry to more than double by 2027 and reported “Influencer marketing is booming because consumers trust authentic recommendations over traditional ads.”