While I'm a community strategist by day, I'm a SCUBA instructor and boat captain in my spare time. The heart of SCUBA is the local dive shop (LDS). Some are large, most are small. Some are general in nature while others specialize in certain niche activities such as wreck diving. What they all have in common is they epitomize small business. A critical activity for any small business is customer acquisition. In activities like SCUBA (also golf, skiing, hang gliding, etc) there is a steep barrier to entry in terms of training time and cost, as well as specialized equipment rental or purchase. And let's face it - it's a leisure activity that is hard to justify when the economy or your personal situation is tight. A leading indicator many LDSs use to gauge customer acquisition is the number of initial certifications (beginner training) awarded. I've seen a number of "old school" dive shops that have barely heard of the internet, let alone integrated social media strategies.Many small businesses struggle with the decision to employ social media, thinking it's either a time sink, or has no real business impact for them. I recently came across some great initiatives in the SCUBA world that have used the power to social media to make real business impact. For example:
- Scubadivergirls, located in San Diego, is at its core a travel agency for female divers and is great example of using a website as a hub with feeds from many social platforms. Their reach on Facebook is over 60,000 likes with tremendous viral activity.
- Abyss Scuba, located in Sydney Australia, is one of those local dive shops I discussed earlier. They invested heavily in social media by blogging, with Facebook and with Twitter. The viral nature of these channels enabled customers and potential customers to become part of Abyss's marketing process through contests, promotions, photo tagging, dive site and weather reporting, and ultimately peer validation. Abyss has seen a large increase in equipment sales, but more telling is the effect on customer acquisition - a 54% increase in initial diver certifications which they attribute to this modest investment in social media.
In tight times for leisure and travel industries, I see the pool of potential customers shrinking rather than growing. Any opportunity to acquire a customer before the competition does needs to be seized, and with the right strategy in place, minor investments in social media can yield large measurable results.
