Yacht tubs
Social Media Campaigns // Google Ads Campaigns // Search Engine Marketing // Consulting
Tourism marketing thrives on bold ideas. Few are bolder than Yacht Tubs – Portland’s floating fleet of self-drive boats with built-in hot tubs. Unique? Absolutely. But in a crowded tourism scene, standing out takes more than a clever concept. It takes keen marketing strategy, storytelling, and smart ad spend. That’s where Von Mack came in.
Since late 2024, our team has fueled Yacht Tubs with scroll-stopping social content, precision Google Ads, and a creative funnel that transformed curiosity into bookings.
The result meant viral buzz, stronger CTRs than industry benchmarks, and a return on ad spend that made waves.
The Challenge
Launching Yacht Tubs meant introducing a totally new concept to travelers and locals alike. And that came with just a few obstacles:
Low awareness: “Hot tub on a boat” wasn’t a known tourism product.
High CPCs: Portland tourism keywords are competitive and expensive.
Seasonality: With short summers, the window for peak bookings was tight.
Small but mighty budget: Every dollar had to pull weight against big-spend competitors.
The Strategy
We built a social-to-search funnel that amplified ROI by ensuring Google Ads reached warmed-up, high-intent audiences. Social campaigns raised awareness, built buzz, and nurtured audiences long before they hit Google. Throughout organic and paid social, we used a video-first, experiment-driven strategy turned organic into a testing ground — and paid into a scaling machine.
Social Media: Setting Foothold with Organic Content and Paid Campaigns
We fully understood that this was a quirky, niche concept, and we needed to raise brand awareness across Portland. The goal quickly became to cut through the noise of the city’s crowded tourism scrollscape and cement Yacht Tubs as a must-do experience.
We detailed our strategy for social campaigns into the following:
Start with an “organic first” lead, amping up video: Content was devised to harness video creative in order to stop scrolls and spark shares. #TeamVonMack launched with playful, authentic videos showcasing Yacht Tubs’ novelty.
Test & amplify: Top-performing organic posts were boosted into paid campaigns, ensuring only proven creatives got budget. Best-performing, high-engagement content, specifically, was popped into paid campaigns for top-of-funnel awareness.
Audience targeting: Campaigns honed in on the idea of “a hot tub boat sells itself.” Top of funnel (TOFU) campaigns were set to target discovery campaigns around bachelorettes, birthdays, and Portland lifestyle moments. Paid scaled reach and kept the funnel full.
Community buzz: Organic engagement and user-generated content layered credibility and FOMO. Playful, trend-driven content nurtured interest mid-funnel, showcasing the “hot tub on a boat” magic.
Social Media Strategy Results
- 2.43M impressions across platforms in 7 months (+428%)
- Instagram: 2.12M impressions (+370%) and +1,478% likes growth
- Facebook: +114% interaction growth, with content shares doubling
- TikTok: ~1K followers gained almost immediately after launch
- Top organic posts: Reached 50K+ impressions creating viral-style reach with minimal ad spend
Using Google Ads Campaigns to Drive Through Sales to the Finish Line
Portland’s tourism search landscape is no cheap playground. The area is expensive for digital marketing, with cost-per-clicks often topping $2 to $4+ and big-name competitors throwing down hefty budgets. To make waves without sinking spend, Yacht Tubs needed a strategy built on laser-focused targeting and smart keyword precision instead of brute-force bidding.
To do this, we centered our Google Ads campaigns around the following:
Keyword Precision: We focused on long-tail keywords instead of broad, costly terms, layering in-market & affinity audiences as modifiers on long-tail searches like “unique Portland experiences” and “hot tub boat rental.”
Smart Exclusions: We aggressively filtered irrelevant traffic to control costs. Comprehensive negative keyword lists, branded term exclusions, and ongoing refinements were filtered out to eliminate wasted spend.
Audience Layering: Campaigns retargeted social engagers with search ads to close the loop.
Manual Bid Adjustments: CPC was optimized daily to keep spend efficient. Data-driven tweaks were made on data driven by conversion patterns, demographics (age, gender, income), and geographics.
Google Ads Campaigns Results
- ROAS: 20.80x (benchmark 4–8x)
- 28¢ CPC = 5–10x more efficient than competitors (benchmark $1.50–$3.00)
- 29% CTR = ultra-qualified, engaged traffic (benchmark 3–5%)
- Expensive keywords became profit centers, fueling sustainable growth
Key Takeaways
Yacht Tubs showed us that in tourism marketing, every dollar works harder when you let data insights lead the way. Testing creative in the wild before putting spend behind it meant that only the most scroll-stopping posts were amplified, turning guesswork into data-driven confidence. From there, the funnel came alive: social content sparked curiosity and built desire, while search captured that intent at the exact moment travelers were ready to book. The two channels weren’t just working side by side. Instead, they were fueling each other, creating a loop of awareness and conversion that made the campaigns impossible to ignore.
We also learned that non-traditional experiences like Yacht Tubs succeed when their story is framed around moments, not just features. Selling a “boat with a hot tub” doesn’t land nearly as well as showing it as the ultimate backdrop for birthdays, bachelorettes, and epic weekends with friends. That framing, paired with disciplined efficiency, like trimming wasted spend with negative keywords and keeping creative cycles tight, proved you don’t need a massive budget to dominate a competitive market.
The result was a marketing framework that any tourism brand can use: frame the value, stay efficient, and let every tactic feed the bigger picture.
