With Take Me Fishing’s campaign to Find Your Best Self on the Water, we set out to create awareness among diverse new audiences, and to motivate participation — explicitly helping women uncover the life-changing benefits of fishing and boating. Looking back on 2023, our results demonstrate how we accomplished exactly that.
Our ambitious, national, integrated marketing campaign was rooted in extensive research that showed a clear opportunity to reach women as a gateway to remarkable growth in fishing and boating participation. Women are doing most family activity planning, and they are driving 85% of consumer-spending decisions. Southwick Associates found that the average female angler in the United States spends $962 annually on sportfishing gear and services. This means a 10% increase in women’s fishing participation could provide an additional $1 billion in revenue to the sportfishing industry.
The Find Your Best Self campaign strategy was developed from research that Ipsos conducted in 2022, which revealed that women who fish are happier and healthier. The campaign, conceived and developed by a women-led team, featured female anglers experiencing the benefits of fishing and boating firsthand through ads; public service announcements; print, digital and social media extensions; integrated media partnerships; influencer partnerships; and earned media activations.
We ensured that the Find Your Best Self on the Water campaign would accurately and inclusively depict women in fishing, inspiring more females to feel comfortable trying this life-enhancing activity. This is a critical piece of the campaign, as lack of representation is intimidating and prohibitive for at least one in every four female anglers. Women of color tend to agree even more with this statement.
The Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation’s 2023 consumer-facing marketing campaign confronted these barriers. It inspired women nationwide to challenge themselves to try something new, to help them find their best selves while supporting a more inclusive fishing and boating community.
With our Find Your Best Self campaign, we achieved impressive reach and engagement through paid, influencer and earned media, with nearly 3 billion impressions. This figure jumps to 3.01 billion if we include co-viewing audience reach through the Disney partnership, including kids and families watching our content together as a family. The campaign featured visually solid content, with videos reaching a 91% video completion rate, exceeding the industry average of 70%. These results show us that our video content was consistently relevant to our audiences, and that interest in our content maintained sky-high levels throughout the campaign.
These impressions aren’t just passive viewers. We see the campaign increasing viewers’ intent to fish year-over-year. Some 80% say they are “very” or “somewhat” likely to fish in the next 24 months. This is a significant four-point increase from 2022, and is tracking with pre-Covid intent behavior. This enthusiasm also translates to boating, where we’re seeing intent to fish from a boat increase to 66%, also up from 2022.
The campaign focused on our primary audience, active outdoor women. These women have three strong independent indicators of their likelihood to fish: Take Me Fishing brand logo recall; having fished as children; and being parents of young children. Strategic, paid social targeting allowed us to reach this audience efficiently, with 84.9 million impressions across key social platforms. We saw a notable uptick in the usage of female-specific fishing and boating hashtags in social conversations. From the lowest point in 2022 to the highest point in 2023, we observed a 384% surge in conversations across these platforms.
With its continued popularity, TikTok was our most efficient platform, with more than 35 million views of our content. These efforts contributed to significant growth across all Take Me Fishing social media accounts, with a year-over-year organic increase of 25,000 new followers we will continue to engage as members of our social community.
Perhaps most important, our efforts on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok led to a 15.9% increase in our specifically female audience during the summer months. This result demonstrates our content’s authenticity, relatability and value — and the desire to follow us to stay involved and learn more.
Exceptional growth occurred on our owned channels as well. Views of the Find Your Best Self home page jumped to 235,000 (compared with the Get on Board page, which generated fewer than 50,000 page views during the same timeframe). Finally, our PSA further amplifies our paid media campaign, generating an additional $14 million in value for us, above and beyond our paid market buy.
The Take Me Fishing website also continues to bring in millions of consumers and drive them to state agency websites to learn more about resources where they live. We saw a 17% year-over-year increase in organic and referral traffic to Take Me Fishing’s website.
We also had another fantastic year for public relations and media relations in consumer and trade media. Articles authored by RBFF leadership were published in the leading trade media outlets within the fishing and boating industries. The Find Your Best Self Campaign generated unique earned media with articles that featured key recruitment messages. These articles reached new target audiences considering fishing and boating, getting us one step closer to the consumer journey.
Our industry partners help create outlets for consumers to take the next step and get involved. We’ve been thrilled to see a surge in women’s fishing and boating programs that help support our national campaign at the local level. From Yamaha’s new Women Run the Water program to the MarineMax Women on Water educational programming, our partners are breaking barriers alongside us. Strong specialty communities are being built with the Virginia Fly Fishing and Wine Festivals’ events called Beyond the Cast: Women’s Fly-Fishing Symposium, and United Women on the Fly. Volvo Penta invited the RBFF to share its message at a media event in Cape Cod, Mass., for a group of regional women influencers and writers.
Our focus remains on recruiting new participants in fishing and boating, while employing strategic connection opportunities to retain them. Our job as an industry is to ensure that retention efforts are coordinated, connected and efficient. In the years to come, the RBFF is committed to centering women’s experiences, representing female anglers and boaters across our communications, and detailing the benefits of fishing and boating for women. We will continue to partner with diverse creators to encourage the discovery of fishing and boating benefits.
We also want to collaborate with partner agencies to build a connected retention and outreach strategy while curating a directory of national community groups for women, specifically women of color. In addition, we want to expand our directory for community groups, to encourage the discovery of fishing and boating.
By continuing to show that the water is open to everyone, we are increasing female participation in fishing and boating to achieve 15% growth overall. We must continue to define fishing and boating as an open and welcoming sport to women. Our key message and rallying cry will remain: Find your best self on the water.
Stephanie Vatalaro is senior vice president of marketing and communications at the Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation.
This article was originally published in the March 2024 issue.
