Art Hill: Digital Marketing Secrets for the Outdoor Industry

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 459 — Art Hill — digital marketing secrets for the outdoor industry.

Introduction

Art Hill: You know, we definitely try and help the fishing guys out as much as possible because, you know, me being an avid fisherman and captain myself, I want these guys to win because our mission is to get more people on the water.

Tom Rowland: Right.

Art Hill: Point blank period. And there's nobody I trust more to do that than a fishing guide. They know the water like the back of their hands. I expect them to always joke — I'm like, if you can throw a cast net better than you can make a Facebook follower or a friend, that's your job. You become the expert in that. Let somebody else kind of do this part. But it is the biggest thing, because it's communication. If you don't have a Google My Business account set up so that when somebody's visiting a town and they Google local fishing guide, you want your charter to pop up — because now they're either going to call you or look you up on social media, but at least they're in the realm of knowing who you are. But that older guy who's, you know, 60 — however old that guy is — he probably doesn't have a shot to get that new customer.

Art Hill: Hello. My name is Art Hill, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: Hey, guys, welcome to the podcast today. Got a great podcast for you — we've got Art Hill. He's with Rogue Marine Advisors, and Art has been somebody that I've gone to and asked a bunch of different questions over the years about digital marketing, about the things I don't understand about how we're being marketed to through our cell phones, our websites, and everything else. Art has a tremendous amount of experience, and he's a guy who really likes fishing, so I trust his advice and judgment. I wanted to get him on today to talk about the future of digital marketing and how it applies to the outdoor space that we all love so much. Some of the things he talks about are pretty surprising — how you might be targeted in your email, your social media, when you visit websites, all of that. He tells us how it all works, and it's pretty interesting. Art also has a podcast on the Waypoint Collective called Maritime Moment — you can check that out, and you can check him out at Rogue Marine Advisors. Just a cool dude.

Tom Rowland: Also, we've got a little bit of news. Just checking in on lots of different things — if you want to join the Inner Circle, that's the place where you can communicate with me directly. You can get updates on everything new, including new podcasts, new shows on Discovery Channel, new shows on Waypoint, new shows on YouTube. Any new thing we've got going on, that's the first place I'm going to announce it. That number is (305) 930-7346 — text the word 'team' to that number and you'll join the Inner Circle and start getting updates. I won't hammer you with unnecessary things, but when something new comes out, I'll hit you with it. That's also the place where you can contact me and ask questions.

Tom Rowland: If you like this podcast — I haven't asked for this in a long time — but if you do like it, the way you can thank us or support the show is to go to iTunes and leave a rating and a review. A review is really important. Just go on there, say which episode is your favorite or what you like about the show, and that really, really helps. We're also on every other platform podcasts are on, including Spotify, and we're starting to get more and more listenership over there ever since the Joe Rogan moment, when Spotify bought his show and it became exclusive to Spotify. A lot of people have moved their podcast listening over there. He's got the most popular podcast in the world, so where he goes, people follow — and if you're one of those people, we're certainly on Spotify and you can follow the show there, or on iTunes, or any other platform you like.

Tom Rowland: You can even watch a live video version of this on Samsung Plus TV — go to the Waypoint TV channel. Shout out to Waypoint TV — they've been a good friend of the podcast and have supported it since the first episode. If you don't know about Waypoint TV, it's a great place to watch hunting and fishing content any way you want — on the website, digitally, on apps, or on the plus channels like Samsung Plus TV, Tubi, Xumo, and Pluto. There will either be a Waypoint channel or our content will be on Pluto Outdoors or Pluto Backcountry. Lots of people are moving toward these channels — Samsung Plus is probably the most popular, Pluto the second most popular — and Waypoint content, including this podcast, is over there. There's a morning block of podcasts, like talk shows, and a late evening block as well. So if you prefer to watch that way, do it. Or the videos are on YouTube, or you can go to tomrowlandpodcast.com and see or listen to anything we do there. If you have any questions, text that number, (305) 930-7346. And here we go with a great show with Art Hill from Rogue Marine Advisors.

Tom Rowland: Alright, what's going on, man? How are you?

Art Hill: I'm good, Tom. How are you?

Tom Rowland: Man, can't complain. I really can't — nobody would listen anyway. But yeah, things are good. We've been doing some shooting, doing some fishing. It's been good. What have you been up to?

Art Hill: I've been trying to launch space shuttles, you know — trying to keep all these clients happy and really make a lot of content and tackle some clients. It's busy.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. So tell me how your business has grown and what you do.

Digital Marketing Services and Content Strategy

Art Hill: So basically, we help marine businesses navigate digital marketing. We come in with a strategic session and really analyze where they are as a company — where they are in their business and what their goals are. From there, we develop a plan of action: what content to make, should we adopt a website, or should we go full-bore on social media, what does paid social media look like — and then we come up with a plan of action to try to achieve those business goals. So, long story short, we think, and then we make a bunch of stuff.

Tom Rowland: So one of the things you're talking about is what's referred to as content marketing — you're making certain content for a company. That has taken a lot of twists and turns over the years. Yeti came out with their films, and that really changed the industry, because everybody was like, whatever they're doing is really working well, so I need to do that. Where do you think that is today?

Art Hill: I think it's in a little bit of a weird spot, because, like you said, you either have those really high production budgets and higher-quality film — and a lot of companies that can afford it should be doing it — but a lot of them are still kind of stuck in the traditional mindset of, okay, we're going to buy print ads, or we're going to sponsor these fishing tournaments, and they think of that as the branding play and where they're actually going to sell their stuff. Then they look at digital marketing as just a nice-to-have. So a lot of them almost punt the content part — they hire their niece, or someone lesser qualified who isn't really in touch with their business, to come by every now and then and fulfill those needs. But the companies that really understand that this is communication with your end consumer, and there's nothing more important than doing that every day as much as possible and growing that relationship — because that's going to pay dividends long-term for your company.

Tom Rowland: And so that's how you see it. Now, how does that discussion go — I mean, I try to keep my finger on the pulse of digital marketing and things, but it changes very fast, and then I talk to a lot of people who just have no clue. If I say something like what you just said, they'd be like, 'What? You've got to tell me again — act like you're talking to a third grader.' Like, the content creation — if somebody hires you to do content creation, what does that look like? Is that photography and video?

Art Hill: Yeah, video first and foremost, because from video we can pull the audio out for a podcast, we can take little quotes and make that into a graphic, and video just always outperforms on many different channels. So video — whether it's in our offices, out on the water, shooting from a plane, documenting that day-to-day interaction — as well as some full-production video commercial shoots, is really important. But what we've seen from an output standpoint and a reporting standpoint is a shift toward micro content — the smaller videos, fifteen seconds to thirty seconds, the two-minute videos — doing much better than the pillar content, like the one-hour show or episode on Waypoint TV. So we've actually started to kind of reverse the thinking — companies are understanding, okay, we need to do this really high-polish video, we can put it on our website, we can share it with our partners — but the micro content around it, the smaller videos you'll see on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok, are just as important, because there are going to be a lot more chances to actually be seen, and that leads to awareness for the big podcast or the big episode.

Tom Rowland: Right — that's certainly the way with the podcast. I wish we had more time, because I'd love to break the podcast down into smaller pieces and put those out more often, because they generally do better. You're asking a lot from somebody to listen to an hour-and-a-half-long podcast. You're going to have your dedicated group of people who listen every week, but for the most part, the majority of people don't have that kind of time. They may be interested in what you're doing, but they just don't have the time to devote to it unless it's a topic that really resonates with them. So that's the idea — you're always trying to get the topic that resonates, but breaking it down into shorter pieces is certainly good. Now, when you're talking about a piece of content doing better than something else, how do you measure that? Because there are a lot of different ways to measure that.

Art Hill: That's a good point — I'm so glad you asked that. One of the things we do differently is, when we have those business goals, we lay out what's important to us as a business and to us as that end financial result. So likes and shares are good indicators, but they're not really what we report on. The best way we measure it is actually the words people are saying — if they're saying something about our product, that can give us insight to change the creative we're making, or if five or fifteen people say the same thing, we know we can go back to our product team and say, we need to take a second or third look at this issue because it needs to be solved. Or, more importantly, if Valhalla or Viking customers keep saying, we want to go fast at these tournaments, it's a good idea to come out with a center console in the Valhalla line. So those indicators can have a tremendous impact on your business, and that's really what we like to measure. Of course you want to grow followers and comments, and that engagement is critical in helping get that end result, but engagement is really what we look for as a metric more than likes and shares.

Paid Advertising and Targeting

Tom Rowland: What's your opinion, and how much do you utilize paid Google ads and paid Facebook ads and all that?

Art Hill: That's a great point too. With paid ads, I feel like a lot of the industry has kind of put that over as something too complicated, or maybe under- or overpriced. But we actually use paid to build brand as well. If we know a strong collection of our customers live in a certain city, we're going to run paid advertisement that's talking about our podcast or episode in a way that's relatable to them. Say Kingfish, for instance — we know people who fish for Kingfish in Alabama do it a lot differently than they do it in Key West. So with paid media, we can target a two-mile radius, a ten-mile radius; we can target tournament fishermen who have a high net worth. Then we put graphics, videos, and words in front of them — we actually use slang that resonates with them so they can buy our service, check out our bait, come buy our boat, or whatever it is. So the paid media portion is really impactful, and that's where we go to measure the business. If we know we've grown sales in a region by a certain percentage just from these paid executions, we can track sales right away, because if they swipe up to our landing page and buy, that's instant. But a lot of tackle shops that sell through distributors get that feedback a lot slower. So when we isolate regions like that, we can go in and show them — say, hey Shimano, we've raised sales in Mobile, Alabama, which was traditionally a slower market for you. Now we're showing and measuring that result. But you can't control that in an organic way — just posting on your news feed regularly, you have no control over where that ad or video is going. With paid, we can target exactly who we want.

Tom Rowland: Interesting. That's definitely a strategy that should be looked at for sure. So one of the things people always ask me a lot, and I find myself asking too — you say something about, I don't know, anything you don't normally talk about, then you get on Instagram and, damn, there it is. You turn on the TV and there it is. How does that work?

Art Hill: A couple things — that's the digital way of essentially stalking you, or retargeting you. People don't realize that whether we're saying it via words we searched two weeks ago, we actually put that information into the internet. So they track you with cookies and retargeting pixels, and there are a lot of privacy issues going on right now with Facebook and Google that they're trying to work through. But basically, say you searched — let's stick with Shimano — if you searched for a wax wing, and then two weeks later, or even a day later, you go to another website and see a little ad in the top-right corner for a wax wing or a competitor's lure, they've targeted you as that customer, saying, you're looking for this thing — here it is, do you want to buy it? So there's a little bit of tracking there. For the boating companies, when you go into a boat show and you see a boat you like and grab a brochure, you have no way of tracking that customer back. But if you send them to a landing page, and you see they've spent a significant amount of time there and clicked four or five different things, and you've gotten an email address, now you're going to hit them with a retargeting ad to buy that boat for the next two or three months, until they actually make that purchase, because they've shown intent that they actually care about the product.

Tom Rowland: It's a qualified — I mean, that's a far more qualified lead, right? I can follow it, like, as you go to a website and then come over to another website, and it's like, okay, well, this IP address has already done this, so let's put these ads there. And that actually works. But then you have the things where you're just talking — you didn't search anything. You can try it at your house — if you have dogs and you don't have cats, and you start talking about cat food a bunch of times, you're going to get an ad for cat food, and you didn't search it. Something's listening to you — and it's probably your phone, but...

Art Hill: It's most likely — a couple of things. My wife really pushed back against us getting an Alexa.

Tom Rowland: I don't have one.

Art Hill: Yeah, see, there you go. It's just like, okay, you're going to literally let Jeff Bezos into your house — it's going to be coffee shops and tackle ads everywhere, fitness equipment for you — they're going to be tracking you all over the place. But I look at it initially as, okay, it's kind of like psychology. If you've been looking at a car, or say your friend just got a car — you didn't even search it, your friend just got this one vehicle you didn't really care about, the Hennessey Dodge Ram, 700-horsepower thing — now the next week, you're going to notice seven of these things. They've always been around, but your brain pattern hasn't been on it. So I think a lot of it, when we start talking about stuff like this, is just psychology and how humans work. You're like, wow, I wasn't thinking about that coffee shop in Orlando, but here's an ad for it — but nine times out of ten, they were running the ad anyway; now it just hits your radar because you've been thinking about that recently. That's one thing. But number two, with Amazon and the voice-assistant world, and Facebook Messenger — things have been known to kind of do that. So I think there is some truth behind the matter, and rightfully so. I'm big into kingfish — I say give me all the ads, you get direct deposit down the street. So it's great for marketers, but they're having a lot of pushback from consumers saying, hey, wait a minute.

Tom Rowland: At some point, it's going to get too much — that was going to be my next question. Where do you see this going? Is there going to be pushback, or is it going to get more and more sophisticated, so maybe we don't even notice it anymore? I don't know.

Art Hill: I think technology always wins — that evolution is already happening, so it's just going to get more sophisticated. But we're already pushing back. The thing that's going on right now with the iOS 14 update — they're calling it the Apple and Facebook war — came from consumers saying, Apple, we don't want you tracking our customers outside of the Facebook app. So with this update, now you have to opt in to let Facebook track you outside of the app, because before, if you went and bought something from, say, Dick's Sporting Goods or a tackle shop down the street, Facebook could actually track that purchase outside of the app.

Tom Rowland: Right. Will that include the Facebook Pixel? Explain what the Facebook Pixel is for people who might not know.

Art Hill: So the Facebook Pixel is just a little snippet of code hidden in your website, and that basically allows us to track people who come in — see how long they've read web pages, whether they bought something, whether they checked out in the cart or not. It's really tracking your every move on somebody's website. With that, we can see purchases too — I can target moms who bought Bath and Body Works within the last thirty days. From an advertiser standpoint, that's great, because it's showing intent for somebody who's actually going to buy. But from a consumer standpoint, people are like, we don't want you knowing all of our information. So that's where the Facebook Pixel comes in, and with this latest update, they're actually restricting that to a smaller window — we can't track them for a hundred and eighty days anymore; that window is a lot shorter now.

Tom Rowland: Really — so you'll have that trackability for ninety days or whatever, and then it just disappears?

Art Hill: Right — Facebook wipes it clean, so you can't track that person as much. And some of the other features, they've gotten rid of totally, a lot of the attribution. So I don't want to get too far into the details, but they've really restricted a lot of the tracking capabilities they had before, out of consideration for Apple's users.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, but I don't know if that even makes a difference. Like what you were talking about before — you're looking for a new set of tires, you're shopping around, this one's a similar tire, costs about the same, better warranty — you're making your decision, and you're probably going to buy those tires within the next couple of months, probably within the next ninety days. So if you have that tracking window as a manufacturer or retailer, that's probably all you need. A really long window would be if you're thinking about buying a 42 Yellowfin — that might be longer, because there's competition out there, you want to make sure it's the right boat, but then there's a twenty-five-month back order, so you're going to continue looking and continue doing these things before you actually drop the deposit, probably. And that's a much longer purchase — I guess if it's not a much longer purchase for everybody. I'm just thinking about a boat like that — a dream boat for most people, but a lot of people just have that kind of money, they just drop it like it's nothing. And you see it more and more today — man, I just can't believe how good the economy is after being closed down for a year. It's crazy, isn't it?

Art Hill: It's crazy — I was just at a boat show in Connecticut last weekend, and the boat sold before I got off of it. We were there taking pictures, shooting video, and the guy came on, like, oh hey Billy, how's it going, haven't seen you in a long time — here's my wife, and his son was like, here's my dad, he can tell you if you're really interested. And he said, yeah, I'm really interested, let's sit down and talk, and he literally bought it within the next two minutes. Really well-known guy — I don't know if I can even say what he does, but they've got a lot of money, and that was just a toy for their Connecticut house — disposable income for $1,200,000. Who cares? It's not even a thought to them.

Tom Rowland: It's relative. It could be less — for some people, a $1,200,000 purchase could be less than a $250 purchase for other people. $250 might be all you have, or all you make in a month, and for somebody else, they're making a million and a half dollars every thirty minutes. There are people out there making serious money. But anyway, it's kind of cool to think about the digital marketing side — I think about it all the time, because it's obviously getting more and more complicated and sophisticated, and you just kind of, as somebody who might sell something, want to be on the cutting edge of what's happening. I feel like maybe we don't even know what the cutting edge is — the people who really know are Amazon and Apple and the people actually manufacturing these devices, thinking about what the potential is here. And I guess that's why, for a lot of people, they're like, I don't understand why Facebook is so powerful and has so much money when I don't even know anybody who's on Facebook — but people are on Instagram, and a lot of people don't realize how much information the Facebook Pixel has gathered over all these years, and how much that's worth.

Art Hill: It's the biggest conversation. And that's where, when we're working with the yachting world and the MLSs, I always push — I'm like, look, the data is more important than getting a few likes and shares, or even having people come to your boat. Their information is how you'll make money — that's why Facebook and Google are the biggest companies, because they have every purchase behavior, every user intent, everything from Social Security to what you're spending and where you live. They have everything, all day, every day.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, we do. If you read 1984, that George Orwell book about Big Brother kind of forecasted all of this, and everybody was like, no way, we're not going to let Big Brother know about anything we're doing — but now we voluntarily carry it around in our pocket, way more than that book ever could have forecasted. Your location, your wants, your dreams, your goals, everything — whatever you're scrolling on Instagram is probably kind of what you want to do. If all you look at is fish, they're like, yeah, we could probably sell this guy a boat right here.

Art Hill: And it's the biggest sale — even when we take over a new client account and go to the Explore page on Instagram, we can tell who's been running it. If all you look at is girls in bikinis, that's all that's going to be there; if all you look at is boats, that's all that's going to be on mine. It's no different from your wife signing onto your desktop computer and being like, oh, I'm logged in under your account, because all I see is fishing videos. So that's why we pushed back with advertisers — we said, look, men and women are different, let's just start there. If you make $50,000 or you make $1,550,000 every thirty minutes, like you said, your value is going to be different, so the stuff we put in front of you has to be different. So when you synthesize that, and think, okay, there's TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and WeChat and LinkedIn — which is a monster, by the way, really pushing everybody into LinkedIn right now — there's a lot of content that needs to be made, number one. But then, number two, like you said, how do you measure its efficiency? That's where we come in and say, okay, here's the industry standard, here's what a win looks like for us, and now let's keep the ball rolling, because we want to dominate, not just play to keep the lights on.

Email Marketing and the Sales Funnel

Tom Rowland: One of the things you haven't mentioned is email marketing, and I know that's kind of how you got into this business — when you read your bio, you had an opportunity to do an email campaign, did really well with it, liked it, liked the space, and moved in this direction. But what do you think the value of email is? Because at times, email's thought of as the old way to do things, and then you hear, no, it's the old way, but it's the most valuable of all of them, according to some people. I'm interested in what your thoughts are.

Art Hill: So email, when you look at that marketing funnel, or conversion funnel, email's power is actually once you've gotten them into your system — once they become aware of you, and they become a customer, or they've liked you and signed up for your email list, now the fortune is in the follow-up. We've heard that term many times — fortune is in the follow-up — whether it's email or text messages or phone calls or telemarketing, that's where you can really drill down for that repeat sale and that long-term relationship. Now, email open rates have gone down drastically, from 80% open rates to, you know, 25% if you're a rock star. So I look at email two ways. One is transactional — if I buy something, I need that transactional email series: yes, the purchase has been shipped, now I know I can track it, here's the email that says it's completed, I know what to expect. That's utility — that's information, and that's good. Bad email is when it's spam, spam, spam, buy, buy, buy, every single day, and then we tune it out — we don't even open our emails anymore, thus the low open rates. So what we've seen is, when we send emails, we do a lot more branding in it, to get them into a cadence of opening it up, and then when we have things to sell, we put it in the second or third slot of that email. But we really want that brand value, something valuable to them, which is why content matters — if you have a welcome series of, say, how to tie your knots, that first three days after you've acquired a new lead, that's really valuable to them if you know they're a fisherman. That's building brand before you go in and ask for the sale, or ask them to support your new product launch. So I still really love email — it's really impactful and important down the funnel.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, it's interesting, the funnel idea — you hear this a lot, and it becomes kind of general speaking terms for somebody like yourself in this business, or somebody like me who's a client of somebody like you. The funnel — not everybody kind of understands what it is, but there's a big catch at the top, which is something — for us, it's like the TV show, that's obviously our biggest thing — and then you take those people and bring them in, and work them down this funnel until there's some sort of transaction, where you've built trust and brought them in as part of your group, and they're part of the family now, and then here's all this other stuff you can do, and all these other things you can learn, and then — I don't know — you can book a fishing trip, or whatever. That sales funnel is something that's implemented in almost every digital business these days, but some people don't quite get it right — they've got pieces and parts of it, but it doesn't actually lead down to the sale, or to whatever the conversion is. Is that where you help people too — work on those different steps, and maybe they're putting too much concentration on one and not enough on the other?

Art Hill: Exactly. So like I said, we start with the strategy first, and in those strategy sessions, we actually map out that sales funnel. Here's the awareness place — here's all the things we're going to do on social, on podcast, on YouTube, here's all the places we can get people's attention. Now they become aware of us — they could come and follow us on social media or through an email campaign. Now that we have their information, we can target them for a sale, like you mentioned. But after that, like we said, the fortune's in the follow-up, so we actually map out how you follow up — do they get a text message, an email, how often — all these things have to be planned out and tailored to that customer. So there's a lot of work upfront to get that full view of the funnel. But after that — say, after you become a purchaser and you like that product, you become a fan of it, an advocate for it — now you see influencers saying, here's a testimonial for a product, I really like it, and now they're using their network of friends to tell people about your product, thus beginning the cycle again. Now people are saying, who are these guys? They're going to Google you, check you out on social media, see what kind of social proof you have, and go into that process of becoming more aware of you.

Becoming a Digital Marketer and Helping Fishing Guides

Tom Rowland: Yeah, so how — you know a lot about this, and I'd imagine a lot of it is being learned daily, because everything seems to change really fast in this world. But how does somebody find the pathway to become a professional digital marketer?

Art Hill: I think it's different for everybody. Some kids come straight out of school and do it; other entrepreneurs, that's all they know — you see a lot of t-shirt brands that just kind of come out of nowhere, they bought a Shopify site, came up with a funny saying, and off they go. One of the people we really admire from a consumer standpoint is Billfish Gear — those guys took their Instagram account and started creating a clothing line from it, basically all geared for fishermen by fishermen, and all they did was focus on the sport-fishing community. Now every sport-fishing team wants their merchandise, their team name, made by Billfish Gear. So the path to becoming a digital marketer can happen many different ways — I think, just like anything else, a fishing guide, a pro athlete, there are levels to it, and once you get to a certain pinnacle, you branch out into other things. But to your point, it changes every day, and that's what keeps us going, because as soon as we think, okay, this is the move, and we can deploy it to all our clients, then something changes and it causes us to go back. But we'll win a lot more doing that than sticking to one traditional thing, because there's a lot more upside in moving with the customer than in just reporting, or doing what you've always done. Those companies have seen a lot stronger decline in clients and value, because Jimbo down the street always loved buying his boat from XYZ, but he saw seven videos last week on his social media account, and now this new boat company just makes a lot more sense. And then we get the phone calls of, why did they book with that fishing guide, he's not even that good? And I'm just like, he made a connection with them.

Tom Rowland: Well, I'll tell you what, man — that's a very interesting subject, and I've talked about it a little before on the podcast, but when I first started guiding, there was no social media, there were no websites. Really, you could buy an ad in the back of Florida Sportsman or Saltwater Sportsman magazine or something like that, but other than that, you dealt with the hotels, you were hoping you were on the list at the fly shop, and your number-one resource for trips was other guides. And the only way you got those trips was being out there all the time — you were being rewarded for being on the water all the time. And even if you got a phone call, you didn't want to return it too quickly, because it would seem like you weren't busy. People would wait. And then cell phones came out, and people started answering the phone on the water, and that changed a lot — and then websites, and now social media. With young people asking about advice on being a fishing guide, or making a living in the outdoors, it's a funny time — it would seem like the more time you spend on the water, the better it would be, just get out there, learn the water, be the best fishing guide you can be. But honestly, that's not enough anymore. You see a lot of these older guides who are so good, but they've done zero marketing over their entire career, because they almost took pride in it — no, I don't have any more room, I'm booked for life. That's what it seems like — these people are telling you, I'll fish with you for your whole career, but what you're not thinking about is that person could die, or they're getting older too. You start fishing with that guy when he's 65, and he says he'll fish with you forever — well, now he's 85, and he doesn't fish like he did when he was 65. And that guide who's done zero marketing — all the new people coming in don't know who he is, and don't know why they should be fishing with him, and they're fishing with the younger guides and the social-media people instead. It becomes a real strange situation — it's not enough to be really good at one thing, whether that's being a fishing guide, a hunting guide, a personal trainer, whatever. You also have to be good at the digital marketing side, or partner with somebody like yourself who's good at it and can show you what to do — that's probably the way to go. It's one thing to do it yourself, it's another thing to — every business is different, but the fishing guide business has become incredibly competitive, and the people who are good with social media are getting more trips than the guys who are really good at the actual fishing, sometimes, a lot of times. Do you help people like that — the fishing guides? You've got some fishing-guide clients?

Art Hill: Yeah, we've got some guide clients — not as many as when we first started, just because of time and allocation. But we definitely try to help the fishing guides out as much as possible, because, me being an avid fisherman and captain myself, I want these guys to win — our mission is to get more people on the water, point blank period, and there's nobody I trust more to do that than a fishing guide. They know the water like the back of their hands. I expect them to always joke — if you can throw a cast net better than you can make a Facebook follower or a friend, that's your job, you become the expert in that, let somebody else do this part. But it is the biggest thing, because it's communication — if you don't have a Google My Business account set up, so somebody visiting a town Googles local fishing guide and wants your charter to pop up, they're either going to call you or look you up on social media, but at least they're in the realm of knowing who you are. But that older guy, whatever age he is, probably doesn't have a shot to get that new customer.

Tom Rowland: No, but what there's a lot of people that don't do is find out who's really good at the other thing, and just say, look, man, I need trips, or I need somebody to run my social for me. It would almost be better — like, I'm the best fishing guide here, I just want trips, and I'm not afraid to pay for them — I'll pay your 10%, your 15% commission, whatever, but fill me up, because I don't know how to get them anymore. I took twenty years off of marketing, and a lot has changed. More has changed in the marketing space in the last twenty years than — I don't know, the other time in history might be when radio was created, or television. I mean, I guess the newspaper was the first big shift, and then radio, then magazines, then television — but since the advent of television, I don't think we've seen any monumental, fundamental shift in the way people gather information for a purchase like the internet and social media. If you're not part of that, what would your suggestion be to somebody like that?

Art Hill: That's funny — back to building brand, one of the first ads I ran in Tampa Bay was Five Steps to Becoming a Fishing Charter Guide — here's what you need to do. One of the things was, do your Google My Business first — Google is a monster, because everybody searches for information to buy. So go in and set it up, and what that does is help your website come up faster, because when people Google local fishing guide, that map in the top-right corner is going to show all the local fishing guides in that area, and you want your charter to be there. That's number one. Number two, get a website or social media account immediately — start posting daily if you can, or even just pictures if that's all you have. Video is best, but even pictures of where you caught bait, what you're catching, what challenges you faced that day — start putting information out there, because you need that awareness of being the expert in your local area. That's number two. And number three, use the network — when you're at the dock, that's the older way of doing it, shaking hands and getting well known. Then you start collaborating — once you see somebody has a social media account, you can partner and do some joint things together, go live on each other's charters, cross-promote each other's channels. It's kind of like that old dock talk of, hey, we're really booked up, can you take my clients out tomorrow? You can do that digitally now, a lot faster, through social media. So networking in person is important, and then network online as well — that's why I really want to push the local captain to do that in whatever market they're in, because they need that awareness out there, and people need to actually search their name, or even know what to type into Google to find them.

Website Basics and Local SEO

Tom Rowland: Yeah, you know what's always been kind of a pet peeve of mine — when a captain calls himself, like, Captain Ryan, and there's no last name. There's a lot of Captain Ryans — why wouldn't you use your name, so somebody could actually search it? I see it happen all the time, and I'm like, Captain Ryan who? Where are you? The other thing is when you go to somebody's website, it doesn't say right at the top where they're located — so it's like, tarpon fishing in Florida — okay, well, I'm planning a trip to this particular city, is this my guy or not? That seems really elementary, but it happens all the time.

Art Hill: And that's you being in it, right — that even that thinking is more advanced than where a lot of the guys who come in are. One of the things I'll say is, put your phone number at the top of your website. If your clientele is 50 and he's got big fingers, you don't want him searching for your little phone number at the bottom of your website — he wants to call you, he doesn't want to scroll through all your pictures. Chances are he already got the referral from a friend anyway, so he just needs to actually talk to you — make that easy for him. Web design theory calls it don't make me think — treat somebody like a three-year-old, big text, big headline, who you are, where you are, what makes you special. That's the key thing — why should we hire you over the next fifty listings on Google, or the person we've always fished with?

Tom Rowland: Yeah, in that vein too — if you're going to go through all this effort and time and focus to build a website and write your own content, how about getting somebody to proofread it? Because that's a tell right there too. One of my biggest pet peeves used to be — and I don't know why it was a pet peeve, because it was actually a benefit to me, since it was my competition talking — but I always thought it was funny when somebody would write, I specialize in site fishing — s-i-t-e — for the weary permit — w-e-a-r-y. So I'm like, you're going from place to place looking for tired fish? I don't know what that means — you're sight fishing, s-i-g-h-t, you're looking with your eyes into the water. I always thought that was so funny, but all it takes is getting your wife to proofread it, or your uncle, or the kid down the street who's in school — you'd pick that out in one second.

Art Hill: And they want to do it — even my wife, or my mother-in-law, always say, do you need me to proofread? I'm like, we have a proofreader, we have copywriters, and we pay them money. So that's definitely important. But I think, to your overall point, the pipes are changing every day, and there's a lot of things we can do with them — what we fill it with is the most important part, whether that's copy, video, which words we choose. Those things are the difference-maker — the communication, and the creative that we put out there, is really important.

Art Hill's Athletic Background

Tom Rowland: Yeah. So what was your first job out of college? You were an athlete in college, right?

Art Hill: Yeah, yeah, yeah — I played track and football. I was a defensive tackle in football, and I also got recruited — I went to college for track. The football coach saw me lifting weights and was basically like, who are you, and where'd you come from?

Tom Rowland: Why are you not on the field?

Art Hill: Yeah, yeah — so he was like, oh, you played for Jimmy Wallace? He knew my high school head coach and called him, and I was like, yeah, I'd like to play football, but you've got to get that past my track coach. He pitched it as, your off-season is our on-season — he basically said, look, we're here to win championships, and you might get one with track, but you're definitely going to get one with us. Coastal Carolina University — we won three conference championships, two with football and one with track.

Tom Rowland: Wow. What was your track event?

Art Hill: Thrower — I was all-conference in discus, and hammer throw as well.

Tom Rowland: Do they even have that anymore? You don't see the hammer throw much anymore.

Art Hill: They still have it at the collegiate level — definitely not in high school, but at the collegiate level, leading up to the Olympics, they still have it.

Tom Rowland: Why wouldn't you also be a javelin thrower?

Art Hill: The javelin is a different muscle, man — what they actually do is recruit baseball pitchers to throw javelin. The arm speed and leg speed necessary for that is outstanding, and that traditional strong, big-brute thrower who's good at discus and shot put is not going to throw a javelin.

Tom Rowland: But you don't seem like the big, strong brute — you seem more agile. I don't know what you were in college — a lot of college athletes, when you stop lifting as much and stop eating the way you were, all of a sudden people shrink up. You see some of these ex-NFL guys today and think, woah, that guy looks smaller than a regular guy — because they're eating so much protein and lifting so much weight, and then all that stops. You take an offensive lineman, and later they're six-two, one-ninety-five, one-eighty-five even, and they're thin. And you were an offensive-lineman-sized guy with another two hundred pounds on you, but it does happen. So what was your size in college?

Art Hill: In college I was six-one, two-seventy-five.

Tom Rowland: What?

Art Hill: Yeah, six-one, two-seventy-five — I always say with abs, but I didn't have abs.

Tom Rowland: Dang, you look like Francis Lugano.

Art Hill: Right, really, really fast. So now I'm six-one, two-fifty, but the shape is largely unchanged — I don't have the big muscles. Even in college, I got up to about two-ninety at one point.

Tom Rowland: Wow — was that mostly for football, or does it translate into the throwing sports too?

Art Hill: That was football. As a matter of fact, our track coach was very hard on us, because for throwing, we had to be really agile and flexible, so they had us not do as much bench press as our football coaches and trainers wanted, and do a lot more Olympic lifts. That was my personal journey with that. But the joke for some of the college athletes coming out of graduation was, you're either going to gain fifty pounds or lose fifty pounds — nobody stayed the same, very few stay the same. To your point, it's hard to maintain that five-thousand-calorie-a-day diet and workout as your age gets up, so it's really tough to maintain. My wife definitely reminds me of what I used to be.

Tom Rowland: But still, at two-fifty, man, you've still got some size.

Art Hill: Yeah.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. When you were two-ninety-five and Olympic lifting with a coach daily, with a five-thousand-or-more-calorie diet, what kind of numbers were you hitting on your snatch and clean and jerk?

Art Hill: I don't remember what my snatch and clean were — I remember my deadlift was, like, five hundred something, so it wasn't a crazy number. My bench press was three-seventy-five. Speed was a thing for us — I always wanted to break a four-nine-forty, I wanted that so bad, but I was right at five flat and couldn't really get there for speed. That's why I played defensive lineman — you have to be fast and agile, so our footwork and hand speed were the most important thing, and that's how we were able to beat the offensive linemen — we were just faster with our hands and feet than they were, and could run around them using a myriad of techniques. But yeah, those are the numbers I remember — it's been a long time.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. So what do you do now to stay in shape?

Art Hill: Not enough, not enough, not enough. Right now it's a lot of sitting at a computer and doing this. But that's why I do love fishing — when I get the chance, it's full-on, full-bore, a three-day tournament, pre-fishing — that's my exercise. Other than that, we go for walks with the kid around the block, walk the dogs, run if I can — just trying to stay active in between working.

Tom Rowland: It doesn't take that much, man — it's really more about consistency, more than anything else. Like the days when you don't think you have time, you get in fifteen, twenty minutes somewhere you weren't going to otherwise. But yeah, it's cool.

Career Path in Marketing

Tom Rowland: Well, that's cool, man. And so then you get out, and your first job out of college is in the marketing space, or what?

Art Hill: Yeah, so my first job was actually at the world's first rock-and-roll theme park — it was called Hard Rock Park, and they came to my college to recruit interns to help build the theme park in Myrtle Beach. They came to our art class and said, look, we need graphic designers to help us build out our marketing pieces, our HR manuals, and all this stuff. They saw my work and saw that I did websites too, and were like, oh, you can actually code and do creative as well as the graphics — and I was like, yeah. So they hired me as a paid intern instead of an unpaid intern, and we were off to the races from there. It went from zero to three thousand people at grand opening, and we got to meet celebrities and all this other stuff. It was really, really cool right out of college, being thrust into the limelight, so to speak.

Tom Rowland: And were you responsible for all their graphic design and artwork, or was that already created and you just manipulated it the way they wanted?

Art Hill: Both. Early on, it was really created from scratch, but as part of the Hard Rock brand identity, they had their brand attributes and assets they could use — my job was to turn it into a theme park, to use it as their theme park. I'd work with the creative team at the time to develop all that brand messaging and look and consistency for the marketing pieces, as well as a lot of the in-park creative. Restaurants had to be branded, roller coasters had to be branded, even down to the sign at the water fountain — those fun, surprise-and-delight moments all needed work.

Tom Rowland: That's cool, man.

Art Hill: That's cool — very, very busy.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. And then what made you move away from that?

Art Hill: It was just the evolution — with Myrtle Beach, it was a very tourist-driven market, and 2008 happened, and this really grandiose, big financial empire just went bankrupt overnight. After that, I went to Wilmington and worked for a shop there, and we did DreamWorks iPad apps — storybook apps for the iPad, Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon in 3D, the Penguins of Madagascar book. And then I went to a bunch of different agencies in Charlotte, working on a myriad of things — PGA golf tournaments, McDonald's, Disney on Ice, a lot of big corporate entities.

Tom Rowland: Wow — a lot of experience. Why do you think there are so many pancake houses in Myrtle Beach? You ever notice that?

Art Hill: I'll give you the answer — it's because the nightlife was all there, that's all it was. The golfers would come in for the golf, the family people would come in for the family, and the nightlife — outside of Tampa Bay, Myrtle Beach had a lot of strip clubs, and that nightlife was really important, and then, of course, people would just stay up and go to breakfast.

Tom Rowland: See, now you can judge a city without having to see the nightlife — you can judge it by how many breakfast places there are. So I pull into Myrtle Beach, and I'm like, you know what, I love pancakes, I kind of like this place — that's all I see, I'm thinking, look at this, you could get pancakes right there, one right across the street from another one, and one down there, and another one down there — I bet I wonder who has the best pancakes here. I didn't make the connection between the nightlife and the pancake house numbers, but now it makes more sense.

Art Hill's Podcast — Maritime Moment

Tom Rowland: Well, listen, man, that's it — this has been awesome. I appreciate you fielding all the questions I have about digital marketing, because there's more every single day. But what about your podcast? How's that going for you?

Art Hill: That's going good — we have a partnership with Mega Yacht Media, which is Lisa Overing, and that partnership is really good, but it's hard to align our schedules to do the podcast and bring on guests, so we're only up to, like, seven or eight episodes. The last person we had was Sly Navarro — he's a man from a fishing standpoint — but basically it's Maritime Moment, and with that, we really interview a lot of yachting and boating enthusiasts and give them an outlet to engage with each other through the podcast. Because right when COVID hit, we didn't have a way of communicating with the yachting industry, since so many of them were overseas, so we actually created Maritime Moment as a way to keep in touch with our tribe, our business industry.

Tom Rowland: When you're talking to your customers, how important is a podcast for someone's strategy and content?

Art Hill: I tell them it's not for everybody, but if you have the chops, or if you have the bandwidth, you absolutely should do it. Because, back to the Alexas of the world, that voice technology is only going to grow, and people are busy — they can consume the podcast while they're working or doing something else. They might not be able to watch the video on YouTube, but they can listen to it in a podcast on Spotify or Stitcher or whatever it is. So that communication helps with that overall awareness of who you are and what you're trying to accomplish. I really try to push everybody into a podcast, because that's another pillar episode that we can then chop content from — quotes, video — and put it out as content.

Tom Rowland: Cool. Alright, man, that's cool. Well, I appreciate all your input — let everybody know how to follow you, see what you're up to, and maybe engage with your company if they need some of the services we talked about, which probably everybody does at some point.

Art Hill: Yeah, they can find me at Rogue Marine Advisors on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn — you name it, look for Rogue Marine Advisors. And as far as the podcast, Maritime Moment is coming to Waypoint TV very soon. So yeah, we're real happy to help anyone.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, man, well that's awesome — we're happy to have you on Waypoint. That podcast network is growing super fast over there, and there are so many new shows coming on every day, so it's really cool. But anyway, alright, Art — good catching up with you, man, and we'll talk to you soon.

Art Hill: Thanks, Tom. Alright, buddy.

Tom Rowland: Talk to you later, see you.