Beach Bumming and Marketing

This past week, I was blessed to be on vacation with my family. Every year we take a trip to the Gulf Shores, and every year I struggle to put down the phone and computer and focus on my family instead of what I am leaving behind at the office. For the most part, I manage to turn the work volume down and spend quality time with my family — but I also give myself time to think and reflect on work and marketing.

This year, as I was enjoying some of the best weather we have had in years, I was struck by a few things that the beach was teaching me about marketing. So I thought I would share these thoughts from a beach bumming marketer.

Beach Bumming (Like Effective Marketing) Takes Planning

Grab a towel, a cold drink and maybe a good book and some warm sand. Sounds simple, right? Well, not if you have two young children like I do.

Getting to the beach is a lot like taking a trip to the moon. There is sunscreen to be applied (then wiped out of eyes), toys to be wrangled, floatation devices to be securely fastened to those that can’t swim, beach chairs to be dragged through the sand, towels to be laid out, and sunglasses and an umbrella to be erected to help us avoid the sun that we drove 13 hours to enjoy.

Once on the beach, there is no time for bumming around. Rather it is like a scene from Baywatch as I scan the beach, making sure my kids aren’t swimming too deeply, hugging a jellyfish or eating sand.

If there is to be any bumming, it must be strategically planned. Everything we want to take to the beach needs to be packed securely and efficiently, and activities have to be planned that will keep the kids safe and close by so I can watch them while relaxing. If there is no planning, utter chaos is inevitably the result.

That seems to be the same with many of the clients that we work with. Everyone wants something (like how I wanted to relax on the beach), but they have not defined what exactly they want or how they expect their marketing efforts to get them there.

Effective marketing requires planning. It involves knowing who your target market is, where they are and how you can move closer to them. It is not simply about having a website, Facebook page or blog. Rather it is about knowing how to strategically leverage those components to create conversions.

Planning is work. It isn’t always easy and it certainly isn’t exciting, but the companies that want to see a good ROI from their marketing and really rise above the competition plan meticulously.

You Can’t Stop the Tide — But You Can Leverage It

I love watching the tide come in and out; for some reason I am fascinated by all of that water being affected by something thousands of miles away. For me, the tide is a thing of wonder and awe… not so much for my kids.

For my kids, the tide is something that only exists to destroy the sandcastle they built yesterday or wash away the drawings they made. For them it not understood or appreciated.

I think that’s how marketing is for a lot of businesses. Everyone knows the buzz words like SEO, content marketing, pay-per-click, conversion rate optimization, responsive design, mobile optimized, etc., but not everyone really understands each concept and how they can be used to form a holistic marketing strategy. Like a kid building a sandcastle in a tidal zone, businesses often invest marketing resources into these strategies only for their efforts to be washed away.

I may be in awe of the tide (and my kids may hate it), but there are also those that truly know how to leverage the tide. Everyday as the tide began to shift, I noticed a fisherman walking down the beach, scanning the water. As a fisherman myself, I stopped him to chat. I wanted to know specifically what he was looking for when picking his spot. What he told me was that as the tide moves in or out, it creates these areas just off the beach of calm, deeper water. It is at the very edges of those “holes” that the larger fish hang out and wait as the tide and waves push smaller fish to them.

Good marketing isn’t just about knowing where the tidal line is and building a sandcastle that is safe — it is about studying and learning how to leverage the tide for success. Marketing is an ever-changing game. It requires agility. Your target audience doesn’t stay in the same place forever. As technology advances, everything changes. What worked last year isn’t guaranteed to work this year. With this in mind, businesses need to watch for the changes, the ebbs and flows of the tide, and know how to use them for success.



Vacations are great. They allow us to spend time with those we care about, relax a bit and turn down the volume on life. They are also good because at times we see things in a new light. We can see how a day at the beach is akin to marketing in that in order to be successful planning is needed. We can also learn that something like the tide, which can’t be stopped, doesn’t have be merely looked on with wonder or scorn, but rather can be leveraged, just like the ever-changing marketing landscape.