Pisces Sportfishing operate in an extremely competitive market for tourist sport-fishing in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. A key objective for the business is to secure client bookings before they arrive in the town where they can be sold to by concierges and other competing charter companies.

We had already developed their in-house bookings system so making that web based was the critical next step. Pisces also operate several other businesses and they wanted to centralise all of the content management on to one single platform.

Strategy

The main challenge was to reach the right market and then to differentiate the business from the other charter companies in Los Cabos (there are over 60) by portraying a stable, professional company that would do anything necessary to ensure their clients would have the “perfect” day out. The target market was American tourists so the focus was in ranking highly on Google for key words and phrases in the US cities with direct flights to Los Cabos: New York, Houston, Los Angeles etc. We developed an organic SEO strategy to focus on those markets and, when the user landed on the site, to bring them back repeatedly until they booked. The Weekly Fishing Reports were a major driver for this and we built a massive archive of these from the previous blog system operated by Pisces. Fishermen are always keen to look back at past weeks and so this became a focus for traffic for us.

Execution

We began by building a “story” for a day on the water to lead the users through the website to the final buy point. This involved testing various formats and styles with numerous changes until we were sure we were funnelling users to the point where they could book online. Traffic and user feedback was invaluable at this stage.

54% of traffic came from mobile devices so the site had to be fully responsive. Another critical differentiator was that we developed a reservation system that allowed multiple day trips spread across different boats and longer time periods to be rolled into one single booking. The competing websites in Los Cabos offering on-line bookings could onlmanage single day trips on single boats – with our system, clients were able to book complex multi-days (around 28% of bookings are multi-trips).

This is a complicated scenario and the ability to book that kind of charter; manage all the individual fishing licenses; organise the catering and crews; roll it all up into a single invoice and even accept multiple payments by a variety of payment methods is a completely unique solution to Pisces.

After launch, we noticed that a significant number of users would get as far as the book online pages and then back off and simply fill in an inquiry form. Enquiry forms were emailed to an agent to then follow up on, however Pisces management had very little visibility of the process once the email was received. That led us to make modifications to the website which a) improved the online sales conversion and b) funnelled any users that still decided to complete the form into a CRM-style Lead Tracking system which we also developed. This gave visibility and control to Pisces management and has improved conversions dramatically.

Effectiveness

In the first year of launch (2016) Pisces took over $1m in online sales – that represented almost 25% of their gross revenues for the entire charter business in that year. In addition to that, by using the CRM Lead-Tracking, they increased their agent’s conversions of web inquiry forms from under 15% to over 36% which has added over $175,000 to their sales in the last 6 months alone.

Online sales are currently growing at 11% per annum and a major project is now underway with us to integrate their villa rental business into the charter business in order to offer complete packages to visitors and drive even more sales. We have agreed an estimate with Pisces’ CEO that their ROI in year 1 was 909%.

Real Business Impact

• Online bookings and lead tracking has transformed the business.

• Increased profits with over $1M in online sales generated in first year.

• Ongoing support from Big Red Digital means revenue continues to increase each year.

• The Pisces Group now has an active, dynamic digital impact which gives them the edge on local competitors.

• Expansion into social networks.

• Plans to further expand business online.