Sitting down to write this blog on digital marketing for the outdoor industry, I was reminded just how broad the term ‘digital marketing’ is.

Here’s how Hubspot defines digital marketing:

That is one wide sea to swim.

To guide you through the sometimes uncertain, quick-changing waters of digital marketing, we’re going to set sail and cover five high-level topics that you should think about as you begin to leverage digital marketing for your outdoor business.

1. Know Your Target Market
2. Bring Your Brand to Life Online
3. Create a Content Marketing Plan (Social Media, Blogging, Email, and Influencer talked about here)
4. Optimize Your Website
5. Leverage Word-of-Mouth and Reviews

Before we dive into the first step, I want to acknowledge that there is a nearly endless amount of opinions on how to ‘do’ digital marketing. But I believe the topics that we will cover in this blog will help you get grounded in an approach that will help you truly thrive online.

Know Your Target Market

Your ideal customers, also known as your target market, are at the core of any digital marketing plan.

So before you take your outdoor business to the next level online, you need to have a clear idea of who your ideal customer is. Your target market might be one particular profile of person (think: age 45-65, located in Washington state, interested in hiking) or you might have a few different target markets to consider.

Here’s why knowing your target market is so important online:

The profile of the person in your target market will determine the best ways you can reach them online.

As we start to talk about different ways you can use content marketing, as we start to mention ways to optimize your website…this should all be done with your target market in mind.

Because, different…

• types of content marketing will attract different types of people
• social media platforms will reach different types of people.
• messaging will resonate with different types of people.

Hold your target market near and dear to your heart, and then dive into these ideas for leveraging digital marketing to build your outdoor business.

Bring Your Brand to Life Online

Before we dive into different digital marketing tactics, I want you to pause and consider, how is that you’ll bring your brand to life online?

Here’s what I mean by this:

When you excel at digital marketing, your business has a defined look and feel online that will attract your target market.

In order to create this, you have to first understand what your brand is.

At a high level, your brand consists of three main things: your name, your logo, and what your customers associate with you; think: what they feel when they see your logo and what they experience when they interact with your brand.

If you feel like your current name, logo, or other supporting marketing materials don’t represent your outdoor business well, you should consider getting at least your logo and brand colors updated before investing your time and money in digital marketing.

If you want help thinking about your current brand and how it can be taken online, we at Elevate can help you.

Or, maybe you feel good about your current brand and how it’ll represent your business online, in which case, let’s start talking about how you can leverage content marketing as part of your digital marketing plan.

Create a Content Marketing Plan

Content marketing is a key part of digital marketing for the outdoor industry. It is also a stumbling place for many businesses, as it can be easy to get overwhelmed.

There are so many options when it comes to using content marketing for your business.

In this section, we discuss:

• Social Media Marketing
• Blogging
• Email Marketing
• Influencer Marketing
• Creating a Content Marketing System

So how do you decide what types of content marketing to use and how to use it?

You look to your target market.

Your target market is already online, somewhere. Your job with content marketing is to create standout content that brings them to you. It’s easier when you know:

• What type of content are they already engaging with online?
• Where do they hang out online (which social media websites? which blogs?)

Now to the planning part of this section.

Your content marketing plan will be a large part of your overall digital marketing plan. As part of your plan, you will most likely choose to employ several of the different methods below.

Read through the different types of content marketing, keep your target market in mind, and see which of these areas you should be expanding into.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is important for businesses in any industry.

Some of the main benefits include: spreading brand awareness, gaining leads from your followers, or directly make sales.

Here are a few social quick facts:

• 73% of marketers believe that their efforts through social media marketing have been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business (Buffer, 2019).
• 54% of social browsers use social media to research products (GlobalWebIndex, 2018).

You’ve most likely heard of the most popular social media websites, but here’s a quick list: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and more.

If you’re overwhelmed just looking at that list, here’s my advice. Choose one or two of those social media sites to really excel at. The site you pick should reflect where your audience is.

Then, when you know where you are ready to build your following, you’ll start to create that audience-attracting content. Consistently create that content. (RIP to the many accounts on social media where business owners started posting, realized how hard it was, and said to heck with it.)

As we’ve worked with clients and also begun to build our own social media presence, we’ve encountered some great strategies as well as some really bad ones. Read our blog 9 Social Media Mistakes To Avoid to take the guesswork out of your strategy.

Social Media Ideas for the Outdoor Industry

Here are a few ideas that I’ve seen businesses in the outdoor industry do really well on social media:

• Highlight their products or services in use by encouraging customers to take pictures and tag them in it (user-generated content)
• Partner with other outdoor businesses to do a large giveaway on social media (encouraging follower growth)
• If the business is location-based, showcasing the nature around them by sharing shots taken by employees or resharing content from local photographers with proper permissions
• Sharing helpful tips, tricks, and information about their specific space in the outdoor industry

If your outdoor business utilizes Instagram, you’ll want to check out our blog Best Hashtags for Outdoor Retailers + Hashtag Guide (2020). In this blog, we talk about how to use hashtags, and even give you a list of some great ones to utilize, sorted by category.

Blogging

Adding blogging as part of your content marketing plan has many benefits, such as:

• Attracting new customers to your website
• Increasing your ranking on search engines (such as getting to the top spot for a term like ‘rent camping gear near Rocky Mountain National Park’)
• Developing your relationships with your current customers by providing them with the information they care about and that makes them feel like they know your company better
• 71% of B2B buyers consume blog content during their buyer journey. (Demand Gen)

Blogging Ideas for the Outdoor Industry

When you’re in the outdoor industry, you have a wide variety of ways you can leverage blogging.

• Bring in a guest blogger, like a brand ambassador, who is passionate about your product or service. Have them share the ways they’ve used your product or service.
• Showcase your staff. Let your customers know who the people are behind your business.
• Like on social, your blog is a place you can share tips, tricks, and helpful information about your space in the outdoor industry.

When adding blogging to a digital marketing plan, I set a certain number of blogs that will be written per month and then begin to fill in ideas for what those topics can be based on keyword research that will help your website’s Search Engine Optimization.

By setting a goal number of blogs per month, you’ll be more committed to consistently blogging, and by consistently blogging, you’ll be more likely to see results quicker than if you sporadically blog every time a random idea comes to you.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a widely-used form of content marketing. Most likely you have promotional emails from companies gathering in your inbox now.

So many companies use email marketing because of its benefits that include:

• Allowing you to directly contact your customers quickly and efficiently resulting in brand awareness, sales, and engagement
• Promoting your other channels of content marketing by linking your emails to your blog, influencer activities, and social media
• Insight into what type of content your customers respond to by analyzing subject lines and click-through-rates inside of emails

Statistics about email marketing are fairly staggering:

• By 2022, Radicati estimates that 4.25 billion email users will maintain 1.86 email accounts on average. As of 2019, 4.33 billion people have internet access worldwide and 3.93 billion use email.
•  77% of email users identified email marketing as their preferred method of receiving permission-based advertising.

When it comes to marketing, your customer’s emails are precious commodities. It gives you direct access to your customer’s inbox, which is why it’s important to make each email count.

How is it then that you leverage email as a business in the outdoor industry?

Email Marketing Ideas for the Outdoors Industry

There are many ways, but it once again goes back to sharing what matters to your target market.

Some examples include:

• A company focus on trail running creating a week-long email drip that sends one email a day with new workout ideas and stretches
• An outdoor gear company sharing information about seasonal adventures and how their gear can be used
• Any company in the outdoor industry could share ways on how they are giving back to organizations in their community while encouraging their email subscribers to do the same

When you add email marketing to your digital marketing plan, you should consider the number of emails you want to commit to per month (similar to what I mentioned with blogging.) Then, as specials come up or your team creates additional, relevant information, you can always fill in the month with additional emails.

Inboxes are crowded, so making sure your emails are filled with information your customer would care about is important. If you’re emailing them too often with offers or info they don’t care about, you can expect your open rates to be miserable and un-subscribers to be abundant.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a type of marketing where you create partnerships and campaigns with influencers to expand your reach, generate sales, and promote your business.

This type of marketing helps you:

• Expand your brand awareness and grow your own social media following
• Make sales: whether it’s a product or service, your partnership with influencers can bring about a great digital marketing ROI
• Increase your website’s Search Engine Optimization (by being linked to from a popular blogger’s website)

And, businesses who are using influencer marketing have found it to be effective.

• 91% of survey respondents [marketing agencies and brands] believe influencer marketing to be an effective form of marketing. [Influencer Marketing Hub]
• 89% say ROI from influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other marketing channels. [BigCommerce.Com]

You may think that you have to allot millions of dollars and collaborate with mega-influencers to see these kinds of results, but that just isn’t the case. Read our blog How Much Does Influencer Marketing Cost? to find out how you can utilize this tool in your marketing.

Influencer Marketing Ideas for the Outdoor Industry

As a business in the outdoor industry, you many fantastic options when it comes to influencer marketing. Without a doubt, there are influencers in your exact space that you can partner with and/or sponsor.

These partnerships might look like:

• Providing an influencer with free gear so they can experience your brand and paying them for a certain number of posts, giveaways, or videos
• Sponsoring a trip for an influencer where they document it and share it, tagging and promoting your brand along the way
• Partnering with other outdoor businesses that are in a similar space as you but have different offerings to do a multi-brand giveaway that a group of influencers can then promote

If you’d like to learn more about influencer marketing, read our blog: What is Influencer Marketing?

A Functioning Content Marketing System

It can take time, energy, creativity, and money to get to a fully-functioning content marketing system, but when you get there, it is a thing of beauty. The methods we listed above begin to feed into each other, helping each piece grow and succeed.

An example:

You partner with an influencer and feature that influencer in a blog. You send that blog out to your email list. Pieces of that blog are broken into bite-sized snippets for social media. Your social media followers then buy your product, signing up for the newsletter.

And the cycle continues.

But as I mentioned, it takes an investment of time, energy, creativity, and money to get this system to the place you want it to be. And then, you must continue to maintain it.

If that sounds like too much for you or your team, I’d encourage you to contact us at Elevate for a free consultation where we can learn more about you and your needs and see how we can help.

Optimize Your Website

Your website is your business’s digital home. Here, you can bring the feeling of your brand to life. You can welcome your new customers with open arms and create a sense of familiarity and loyalty among your returning customers.

The possibilities of what you can do with your website are endless, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing.

The good thing: When you design a website that speaks to your target market, you’ll be able to capture new leads, generate sales, and build relationships with your customers.

The bad thing: When a website is poorly designed, hard to use, or has messaging that misses the mark, it can really hurt your business.

Research shows that you have 50 milliseconds to make a good first impression.

From there, you have to continue to provide your customers with an excellent website experience because 39% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive.

These following points are extremely high-level, but they might provide you with some fodder to relook at your current website and see where you have room for improvement. If you’d like a more in-depth look at website optimization, read our blog How To Build A Successful Website For Your Business.

Suggestions for Optimizing Your Website

Here are some overall suggestions for optimizing your outdoor business’s website:

• Make sure the navigation of your website is clear. Your customers should be able to find what they need easily.
• Check that your website is mobile-friendly. In 2018, 58% of site visits were from mobile devices. You need to expect that a vast number of website visitors are coming via mobile and build a website that is responsive to that.
• Make use of white space. A wall of text, no matter how well written it is, can be an instant turn-off to some customers.
• Highlight images and videos of your product or service. If you’re an in the outdoor retail industry, make sure you have pictures highlighting your product in use (and make sure those pictures reflect who is in your target market.) If you have an outdoor adventure business, make people as if they’re experiencing the adventure right on your website.
• Fully leverage your home page. Hubspot put out some interesting statistics about what consumers want on a home page. 86% of visitors want to see information about that company’s products/services. 64% of visitors want to see the company’s contact information.2% of visitors want to see “about us” information. If you only have an image or two and a blurb of text, chances are you need to do more.
• Revisit your copy and messaging from your target market’s perspective. Ask yourself, what is the value I’m bringing to my target market? How can I speak into that more? What are the decision-making factors my target market cares about?

Do you know that your business’s website needs improvement but you don’t know where to begin or you don’t have the time to improve it yourself? Contact Elevate to see how we can help.

Leverage Word-of-Mouth and Reviews

Word-of-mouth marketing is when your customers become advocates for your business by sharing with their friends and family about their experience with your product or service.

And while word-of-mouth can happen naturally when customers experience an outdoor adventure they’ll remember forever or purchase their newest favorite product, you can (and should) take action to create word-of-mouth marketing.

Here are some quick facts that highlight why using word-of-mouth marketing is so important:

• People are 90% more likely to buy a brand recommended by a friend
• 64% of marketing executives indicated that they believe word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing

Word-of-Mouth Marketing Ideas

So how can you turn something that individuals do naturally (share about great brand experiences) into a marketing system? We have a few ideas about how you can use word-of-mouth marketing for businesses in the outdoor industry:

• Create a refer-a-friend offer. One example might be that if you had a great time on an outdoor adventure, set it ups so that if someone refers a friend, and they’ll both get a discount on the next adventure they book.
• Set up a system for getting online reviews. Online reviews provide you with virtual testimonials that can be a crucial part of your word-of-mouth marketing. Places that you can acquire reviews include Google, Facebook, Yelp, and more.
• Encourage user-generated content (UGC). Create a hashtag specifically for your brand and for sharing customer content on social media. This could just be your #yourbrandsname. Next, begin encouraging customers to use this hashtag and tag your business when sharing photos of your product or experience. Some ways you can do this are by hosting giveaways on social media, highlighting people who use the hashtag on your business’s social media profile, and more.

Word-of-mouth marketing can feed nicely into your content marketing efforts by providing your team with additional images, quotes/testimonials, and video assets of your product or service. When creating a digital plan, word-of-mouth is an important piece to consider.

Make Your Mission Known

One thing we’re interested in at Elevate is helping brands create a movement around their products or services. This is usually best implemented with businesses that have a strong focusing on giving-back.

Why?

Because when you can portray the ideals and mission behind a brand and a brand’s products, you can start to create a movement around that product. Buying something becomes something more; it becomes a way to show the world what you support and represent.

So, if you’re thinking of ways to make your outdoor business’s mission known, here are a few ideas:

First, be able to clearly articulate what you support.

If every shirt someone buys plants a tree, begin to communicate that. Help your customers understand what they’re giving back to by purchasing through you.

Weave your mission into your content.

Mention it on your home page. Let customers know how they can support you and that mission. Share about it in blogs. Highlight it through social media posts. Make it so that when individuals interact with you, they think about not only the products or services you provide but the mission of your organization as well.

In our Hashtag Guide blog, we mention some great Give Back hashtags you can utilize in your Instagram account.

Empower your customers to walk alongside you and support your mission.

This is where word-of-mouth marketing comes in. Think about how you can invite customers to share about your business and thus support your mission as they engage with you. Maybe it’s planning a community give-back day. Or, you might include a note in every purchase that asks them to share a picture of their gear and their reason for supporting you. There are so many ways you can do this, but you do need to be intentional about it.

How can we support you in your digital marketing efforts?

At Elevate Online, we are passionate about helping businesses in the outdoor industry thrive online through a variety of digital marketing tactics and strategies.

Interested in learning more about our services? Click here to set up some time to connect with our founder, Katie McNamee.