Dive Industry Marketing
Every year, a team from OCG Creative exhibits at the DEMA Show. DEMA stands for Diving Equipment & Marketing Association, and this year’s show will be our 9th. Scuba diving industry marketing is a natural fit for us. Much of our team is made up of divers, and I am personally a technical diving instructor, rebreather diver and professional underwater photographer and videographer going back more decades than I want to admit.
Marketing for the diving industry is particularly challenging for agencies. The specialized nature of diving, scuba travel and equipment make it challenging for non-divers to speak effectively to the diving audience.
Add to that, diving is a highly visual experience, so imaging is key—especially for diving destinations, and dive resorts in particular. Marketing a dive resort is virtually impossible without lots of photos. Most good photographers can provide excellent images of dive resorts topside, but what divers really care about is what’s beneath the waves.
Underwater Imaging for Marketing
Underwater photography is challenging to say the least. Light behaves very differently underwater than it does on land. Equipment challenges are ever present, and much of our ability to capture the diving experience depends on the underwater photographer’s diving skills.
In the next three to four weeks, I will log my 5,000th dive. That’s a lot of dives for a diver that’s effectively landlocked. Locally, we dive Lake Tahoe frequently, so cold and deep water is typical. We have the ability to capture images as deep as 330 feet using trimix and rebreathers.
We shoot all over the world, bringing back images for equipment manufacturers, dive boat operators, tourism bureaus, retailers and dive resorts. We consider diver resort marketing something of a specialty.
Dive Resort Marketing
Capturing the experience, both above and below the waterline, is essential to helping a dive resort attract divers and maximize bookings. We accomplish that by highlight the dive resort as many ways as possible. This includes photography, of course, as well as videography. We arrive onsite prepared to photograph the resort itself, as well as its staff and visiting divers.
We film testimonials and candid moments, diving and dining—anything we hope will provide a sense of what the experience will be like for those planning a dive vacation.
Additionally, we are FAA Part 107 certified drone pilots. This give us the ability to provide aerial views and spectacular resort fly-through videos that can’t be captured any other way.
To ensure safety, we have a fleet of drones ranging from large sensor imaging drones, to FPV and tiny cinewhoop style drones. We carry a $1M drone liability policy, but we’ve never had a done accident of any kind.
Finally, we also shoot 360 degree virtual tours and have the ability to take our 360 cameras underwater. Nothing provides a sense of space like a virtual tour. We have the ability to capture 360 degree views at incredibly high resolutions, although most website and digital marketing requirements favor load speed over ridiculously high pixel counts. Most of our 360 virtual tours are shot using HDR (high dynamic range) technology.
Scuba Diving Industry Web Design
At our core, we are a web design agency. We can engineer anything, but we put most of our effort into the elements website visitors care about most. That starts with using actual photos of your dive resort, dive boat, products, etc. We will use stock if we are desperate, but stock photography can’t tell your story, even if the images are good. There is just no substitute for high quality, real photos.
After images, we prioritize predictable layouts (user experience, U.I.) and website speed. This is especially important for mobile device web design. Website visitors expect you website to work a certain way, and mobile bandwidth is often limited. There’s no point building a lot of fancy animation if your website visitors can’t load it.
We have a lot of experience with functional requirements for diving industry websites. This includes e-commerce, online bookings, database technology and digital imaging. There are very few web design technologies that we don’t work with routinely. We also fix broken websites, so if you’re experiencing problems that have been difficult to resolve, definitely give us a ring.
SEO for the Scuba Diving Industry
If there is a single critical element for promoting your dive business, SEO is it. Simply put, you have to be prominent in online searches to compete. Not just your location, company or resort name, you need to be among the top search results for Googlers at the early stages of their online research.
That means achieving top rankings for broad, highly competitive search terms. As an example, divers often start their vacation planning using phrases like, “best places to scuba dive,” or “scuba diving vacations.” Keywords like these are a long way from your resort name, yet it is essential to get your location into consideration as early as possible when a diver is just starting to plan.
SEO for scuba diving means being visible and influential throughout all phases of the buying journey. It also means utilizing every possible means to increase prominence. We detail that in this article about structured data and schema markup. I can’t overstate how critical it is to ensure that schema is properly coded on every individual page of your website.
DEMA Show 2024
If you will be attending the DEMA Show in Las Vegas, please drop by booth 6143 to say hi. We’ll be giving away some cool stuff and we would love a chance to meet you in person.
