How to Get More Boat Building Leads in 2025

Kasra Dash: If you are a boat builder and you are looking for a consistent flow of inquiries, this video is for you. Myself and James, we've worked with a load of different boat builders throughout the UK, so we know exactly what works and also what doesn't work when it comes to a marketing strategy. And in this video, we're going to be breaking down all of the different marketing strategies that you can do for your boat building company. So, James, take it away. James Dooley: So step number one, what I'd be looking to do to grow is a Google business profile. If you already have one, I'd be making certain that I would be reaching out to all my existing clients to try to get me as many five-star reviews as possible. It's a great way of Google business profile to generate more leads. There's obviously getting citations and doing Google business profile posts and uploading photos on there. So that's definitely step one that I would be doing to try to generate more local leads. Kasra Dash: So step number two, this is kind of to bolster onto your actual Google business profile is I would be creating dedicated service pages for each of your individual services as SEO optimised pages on your website. Now, the good thing is when you start doing that, it's also going to help first of all rank your actual SEO optimised page, but there's also more likelihood of your Google business profile ranking and showing up for those keywords as well. So you're indirectly going to get more phone calls as well. James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And if you are looking for more local leads, another option that you could be doing is PPC lead generation. That's pay-per-click within Google or within Bing where you're trying to target the bottom of the funnel keywords that can try to generate you some more inquiries. The difficult part to this is you need to make certain you do team up with a good pay-per-click agency because there is click fraud and there's also needing to build up a negative keyword list. So it's not people applying for jobs like a careers kind of job. So PPC can work well but in the wrong hands you can waste a lot of money but it's another way of generating local leads. Kasra Dash: Yeah. And then after that you've also got meta ads as well. So like Facebook, Instagram where the next time when somebody goes on Facebook they might be scrolling, they might see your ad. Now there's a few different ways that you can set up Facebook ads. You've obviously got option A which is lead forms which is really easy to do. They don't even leave the Facebook platform, like they never click onto your actual website. Now, the issue with lead forms is that the quality might not be great, but you can obviously add more questions in to try and up that quality of the actual lead. Then you've also got conversion ads as well where they actually get sent through to your website and then they fill out the contact form to you or on your website as well. So you've got a couple different options there that you can do. James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And then another way to grow more local leads could be organic social media. So posting regularly on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, on Pinterest, on Instagram. There's lots of different platforms out there that you can be trying to get there. Reddit's quite big nowadays and Quora is quite big if people have got questions and you can answer it. So organic social media is another great way to be generating more local leads for your business. Kasra Dash: With organic social media, I would say that it's more of like a volumes game. So you want to try and make certain that you're constantly uploading whether it's for example a daily schedule or a weekly schedule. You might say, “Okay, I want to try and upload five videos a week.” And you should just try and stick to that, especially when it comes to algorithms like YouTube and Twitter and stuff. James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, what's your thoughts on using any sort of AI agents if they can try to team up with someone to use like N8N to kind of automate and schedule posts on social media? What's your thoughts on that of trying to leverage artificial intelligence? It's all the rage nowadays for trying to generate more leads. Would you try to team up with an AI consultant to set that up? Kasra Dash: Yeah. So, I mean, you can definitely go down that route where you're setting up AI agents to potentially crop up some videos and autopublish to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and stuff. But another thing that I would also be focusing on is AI search. So a lot of people have started to move away from Google. Not everyone because there's billions of people still using it every single day. But there are slowly people starting to search in engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok and if your brand isn't actually showing up in any of those you will have a little bit of an issue showing up and generating leads on those search engines as well. So that's another thing that I would be focusing on as a company. James Dooley: Yeah. And also, if you're looking for more business leads in the local area, something else that I would definitely be looking to do is team up with some of the trades people websites. So you've got certain ones like Check a Trade, you've got Bark, you've got Builder Builder, you've got Trust the Trader, you've got Rated People. All these different platforms can generate you more local leads. What I would say is making certain you're tracking your KPIs to see what return on investment you're getting. You should be tracking not only the cost per lead but the cost per acquisition and how much that is getting you on a return on investment. But trades people websites like those platforms can work very well. Kasra Dash: Yeah. So with lead generation companies I would almost say that every single lead generation company you want to try and do your due diligence. So make certain that if you are in a specific niche that lead generation company has actually generated leads in that industry before. I would also maybe even have a strategy call with them and say okay this is my budget this is how many leads I ideally want etc to make certain that your actual KPIs do align with that lead generation company. You also want to make certain what type of leads are they. Are they exclusive leads, are the leads only going through to yourself or are they shared leads which is what a lot of other lead generation tools and companies do like for example Bark and Check a Trade. Whenever we have spoken to company owners that have used those services, that's one of their biggest pain points where they say, “Yeah, it's a shared lead and it's kind of a rat race down to the bottom of who's the cheapest basically.” So that's a couple of things I would be asking lead generation companies before partnering up with them. James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, if anyone is interested in generating more local leads, I strongly recommend heading over to fatrank.com where we have a commission-based lead generation service. That means you only pay a finders fee on converted jobs. You've nothing to pay on the pay per lead. You have nothing to pay until you get paid, until you convert that job on a pay-per-sale basis and you've completed the job and been paid. That's when you only have to pay fatrank.com. So head on over to fatrank.com to see whether you qualify. But I want to expand a little bit further. So what is your thoughts on inbound lead generation versus outbound lead generation? Kasra Dash: So, I always prefer inbound. The conversion rate of not just getting the lead, but the lead actually converting into a paying customer into money coming into your business bank account is a lot higher. The last stat that I saw for that was something like 16.1 percent end up converting into a paying customer as opposed to 1.4 percent when it's an outbound lead. James Dooley: Yeah, that's pretty crazy. That's like a 12. Well yeah, it's 10 to 12 times more conversion. Like it's crazy how much more conversion that is. You need to do a lot of volume for outbound whether it's cold calling or cold email or LinkedIn Sales Navigator and stuff like that. And sometimes you just need a lot more staff to do it as well. People sometimes don't, they're looking at the cost going I want to generate free leads and they think they're generating free leads but there's still the cost of the email sending, the cost of the sales team trying to convert them and stuff like that. So yeah, I completely agree with you that inbound leads is so much better than outbound leads. But what's your thoughts then on some people who ask the question that want local leads and then they talk about are these real time leads. Is real time leads very important to get so as soon as they inquire it comes through to you straight away? Kasra Dash: Yeah, it's very important. I think the last stat that we saw internally was if you are able to get a real time lead it converts 60 percent higher. I think 63 percent higher. And when we came and got the KPIs down it was like trying to respond within under a minute and it was like we used to think five minutes was good and then when people respond in under a minute, so as soon as the inquiry comes in, can you either ring them or email them back saying thanks a lot for the inquiry and then get more information. I'm not saying that every company needs to respond in under a minute. There are certain things that we obviously look at at Fat Rank when we're looking to partner up with businesses. That's one of the things that a lot of businesses fall short on where they might be away for five days on holiday and they don't have somebody to pick up the leads and we're still providing the leads. So there's all these little different nuances that we look at when we are partnering up with companies. But the best thing that I would recommend to anyone that's looking to scale their business, that's looking to get a consistent flow of high quality leads is just fill out the form at Fat Rank. The team will tell you if you're the right fit or if you're not, and we'll also tell you and give you feedback why you're not the right fit and what you should do as your next steps. Kasra Dash: So I hope you like all the different lead generation strategies put in place for boat building. If you are a boat building company and you are looking for more inquiries, make sure you're heading over to fatrank.com, fill in the form and hopefully we can start to generate you some more leads for building or rebuilding and maintaining boats.