22 APRIL 2018 • FOGHORN Navigating your risks, day and night. As the owner of a passenger vessel you face tough decisions every day, from hiring qualified crew to making sure your vessel is in prime condition. At Aon, we spend day and night thinking about your maritime risks so buying insurance doesn’t have to be another tough decision. We work with you to develop creative approaches and customized solutions that deliver more efficiencies, improved profitability and greater value. For more information, please call 1.800.730.7053 or visit passengervessel.com/member-resources.html#insurance Risk. Reinsurance. Human Resources. Navigating your Aon Risk Solutions Marine sending them out to the same database, you may struggle to get a massive response. Your database grows in several ways. With every new booking or res- ervation you get, they’ll get added to your database. People who subscribe to you via a blog or social media will also get added, as will any potential leads. But you can also grow your database by participating in a giveaway. While a giveaway on your own site hosted by you may encourage people on the fence to make a purchase, a way to get an entirely new pool of contacts is to work with like-minded partners who have similar demographics as you. Sites like DojoMojo, a professional giveaway platform, will help match you with a handful of likeminded partners all participating in the same giveaway. It’s up to you to choose the partners that work best for you, and while DojoMojo has some demographic in- formation for each participant, it’s best to contact your potential partners directly to make sure that their target clientele is similar enough to yours. As people sign up to participate in the giveaway, you collect their email addresses; and often, you can ask people to sign up to your social media to increase their chances. At the end of the giveaway, you give a free gift to the winner, but you’ve now collected thousands of new emails and social followers to whom you can commu- nicate your product. Use the drip feed campaign outlined above to introduce these new subscribers to your brand in a slow but meaningful way. 4. Keyword Blogs Keywords are, just that, key. You’ve heard it before. You may think you have to include every misspelling or variant of each keyword you want to rank on Google for, but this is no longer the case (Google automatically knows that a person searching for “ferrys frm Seatle” actually means “ferries from Seattle” and will display appropriate results). Use a program such as Google Analytics to do a keyword gap analysis. Unless you have a bit of technical marketing knowledge, it may be better to outsource this. The idea of a keyword gap analysis (comparing to competitors) is to identify areas (i.e. relevant keywords) where you are lacking but your competitors are ranking. After you have your list of keywords, use that, along with any other relevant information you may have (i.e. how difficult it is to rank for that keyword, or how high the com- petition is) and narrow down your list of keywords to a manageable chunk (under 50 keywords). Next, start creating blog posts, web pages, or “target pages” (pages created that do not appear on any drop down menus, etc. on your website; only found by people searching for selected keywords. These keywords usually MARKETING