Fishing On Facebook – Websites.ca Talk Ep. 47

Sean Corbett:
Hello everybody, it’s Sean Corbett here at Websites.ca marketing. For this month’s episode I brought on a Canadian small business owner that’s using social media in a really, really thoughtful way. So super excited to welcome Lance Underwood of Quadra Island Fisheries. Lance, thanks for being here.

Lance Underwood:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Sean Corbett:
Cool. Well, I guess before we get into some of the interesting stuff that you guys are doing online, I was hoping you could tell the listeners just a little bit about your own background and also about the company itself.

Lance Underwood:
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s, I mean, there’s a bit of a backstory to it for sure. I actually grew up commercial fishing and started my life in the fishing industry off in Alaska and then ended up in British Columbia. My wife and I didn’t really cross paths till a little bit later in my fishing career, but I started running boats in Canada and then eventually bought my first boat, I don’t know, well over a decade ago, and specialized in fishing, dungeness crab and BC spot prawns. And a lot of people don’t really realize the volatility of the industry, like our prices fluctuate wildly, and the factors in the market are usually kind of determined by foreign interests. So with shellfish, particularly prawns, Chinese and Japanese interest in the products. So our company was essentially just a commercial fishing company. All we did was go out on the boats, harvest the seafood and sell large quantities to other big wholesale buyers, and they would take the product, ship it overseas, Japan, China, Europe, the US.
And in 2020 when Covid hit, we ran into the problem of sushi restaurants, which were the main buyers of our BC spot prawns shutting their doors and there being zero market demand. And so in 2020 we went fishing into that season with no idea what we were getting paid for our product. About halfway through the season, we found out that we were going to average about $4 a pound for our spot prawns, which is super problematic because our expenses to go fishing are usually somewhere in the 150 to $200,000 range for a six week fishing season. And so we basically discovered we’re not going to get paid much for this product. We have to figure out a way to survive and make money. And so after bouncing a lot of ideas off my wife, she said, you know what? Let’s sell ’em ourselves. And so we thought, okay, well we’ll give this a try.
So all the rest of the prawns that we landed during the 2020 season, we had custom processed and frozen, which we had to pay for. And we just started driving around British Columbia and selling spot prawns out of our truck. And we started to get a bit of a following. And so we decided why not try live crab too? Because one of our boats crab fish; I crab fished with the one boat. And so we started putting frozen spot prawns and live crab in our truck and we had kind of a following and it sort of spread word of mouth. And then we realized that we had something big, but we needed to figure out how to inform people. And that’s where we got into the social media side of things. So that’s kind of the background of the company. I’m just a career commercial fisherman that turned into a salesman slash marketer slash a whole bunch of other stuff that I never thought I would be. And it’s worked out definitely in our favor. It saved our business during Covid and ultimately it’s allowing us to grow into something else, which has been really cool. It’s been a really fun path to be on.

Sean Corbett:
Well, it’s been fun to watch you online as well, so that’s interesting. I didn’t realize that you went from basically wholesale to direct to consumer. Are you doing, have you completely gone to the direct to consumer now or are you still doing some wholesale in there as well?

Lance Underwood:
So we generally, we’ve greatly expanded since Covid. During Covid, I had one boat and I fished crab and prawns on that one boat. Now I’ve got two boats that prawn fish, a crabber, and then a boat that fishes for tuna and then halibut and black cod as well. So I am still fishing and I pretty much manage the business through my phone, which is, it’s insane being a kid that was born in the eighties, being able to reach people across the globe through my phone and market my seafood, organize sales and everything through my phone is wild. We still sell a pretty big chunk of our product into a wholesale market. So a lot of our product is going international. I couldn’t tell you the exact percentage, but our main products that we move that are our biggest sellers would be the crab and the prawns. So every year we find ourselves in a position where we can sell more and more of the product that we catch direct to consumer.
Currently, the volume that we catch, these are pretty big fisheries, right? We’re talking tens of thousands of pounds of prawns and hundreds of thousands of pounds of crab in a year. And so for us to have that market domestically, it’s a bit tricky. We couldn’t actually sell all that yet, but the goal is to eventually be in a place where we are, we’re not relying on export markets anymore. We can simply sell everything direct to the consumer in Canada and being as it comes from the fishermen, that we can give it to people at a more affordable price too.

Sean Corbett:
Nice. So you mentioned there that you were driving from town to town, you saw that things were picking up. Maybe you could just talk me through a little bit about the transition to going and doing a lot of it online. Did either you or your wife have any background in digital marketing or was it just a common sense thing you were kind of going through trial and error?

Lance Underwood:
Well, so I mean, I went to university and I tried about a million different things and realized that I was meant to be on the ocean. My wife has been commercial fishing nearly as long as I have, and she’s a manual osteopath, massage therapist, a reiki master. None of us are actually marketing experts. And for us, it’s been trial and error for sure. It’s been us learning how to do it as we go. Neither of us really knew what we were doing. We had some concept of how to work the social media, but it was definitely a learning process all the way from the ground up, figuring out how to get the name out there, how to market our products, establish our brand and work with that. So no, we have zero background in it other than now we’ve been doing it full time for almost four years. I wouldn’t say we’re experts, but I’d say we’ve got a pretty good grasp on it at this point. We’re still trying to figure out algorithms and all that kind of stuff, but if you pay attention, anybody can do it.

Sean Corbett:
Nice. And correct me if I’m wrong, I noticed you would follow you predominantly on Facebook. Would you say that’s your main platform that you use?

Lance Underwood:
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s really interesting and I think anybody that follows social media platforms will recognize that for whatever reason, it’s easier to gain followers on Facebook. I feel like Facebook is maybe slightly more user-friendly to a wider array of people. We are really working on our Instagram presence and trying to get more content out there and figure out how to grow our audience on Instagram, but Facebook is absolutely our number one way of reaching people for sure.

Sean Corbett:
No, I know you don’t have to give away all your secrets on this recording, but maybe you could just tell us a little bit about, you said growth on Facebook, which is really interesting because I know a lot of organic posts on Facebook, A lot of business owners come to me and they basically say, I do a post, it gets a reach of 20 people, man, I just don’t know what to do. And usually I think the answer that a lot of marketers will say is, well, okay, you’re going to have to devote some money to an ad campaign, and then the question becomes, well, what’s the best way to deploy that? Now I know I glossed over one thing when I said all, which is that a lot of businesses will attempt one or two posts and stop, whereas you guys have been very consistent, and I know you do live updates and all this kind of thing, so we can come back and talk about that consistency in a sec. But I was hoping you could talk us through just how you’ve approached ads spend, if you have done that at all, and what your strategy is for that.

Lance Underwood:
Well, I think first and well, I mean that’s a pretty multifaceted sort of question, so I’ll try to tackle it bit by bit and then we can sort of expand on it. But as far as the marketing side goes, you do have to be willing to spend money. More importantly, you have to be willing to spend time, and my wife was a huge proponent of that. Consistency is key. You might get 20 views on one video, you might get 200 views on another video. Certain things are going to capture people’s attention differently. And consistency is absolutely key in capturing people’s attention, keeping them interested. And that I think is your starting point, is making sure that you’re posting often don’t post random nonsense, post something with some legitimate content. I think keep people interested in what you’re doing. Second, you have to be willing to spend some money and like meta, however you want to put it, meta Facebook, Instagram, whether you’re doing a post on Facebook or whether you’re doing a post on Instagram, you do have to be willing to spend some money.
Everybody I think is going to have sort of different parameters depending on what their audience is. Our audience is both broad but very specific at the same time. We send our seafood all over BC and Alberta, but every week we targeted different area. So when I go online and I’m getting ready to advertise for specific deliveries, then I target specific locations. And so it’s very different for me because of what our business does. Our businesses is a lot different than say somebody who’s strictly doing online sales. We’re doing online sales, but we’re also delivering directly to the consumer all over Western Canada. So my tactics are going to be a little bit different than somebody else’s tactics, maybe trying to reach a broader audience, maybe even across Canada. So you just basically have to figure out who your audience is and then dial in the parameters on your ads if you’re going to do ads, and that really helps out a lot. Yeah,

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, for

Lance Underwood:
Sure. You definitely have to.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, that’s an interesting point we could dive a little bit deeper on then. So again, if I’m understanding you correctly, and to give a backstory to our audience a little bit, and how I heard of you guys actually is you deliver to my every now and again, and I saw a Facebook post one day and I think maybe I even missed it, so I just made a mental note, I have to follow these guys for the next time they’re in the area. So it made sense to me, okay, if you’re delivering in Penticton and CL or whatever, it makes sense, you would select that for the ad location. Absolutely. Now from there, do you basically let the content do the talking and essentially you’re doing a post, Hey, if you want fresh seafood from there, when you’re hitting that broad audience and let’s say Kelon or app Penticton, sort of the ad copy does everything else, or are you filtering further?

Lance Underwood:
So for myself, there’s options. If you’re going to pay for advertising, there’s a lot of different options you can choose. I figured out works well for me. So basically I just target an area and then I look at what I spend on advertising as like, okay, if I’m going to spend $500 this week on advertising, how much extra fish do I have to sell to cover that? And you have to keep that in perspective. So for me, I’ll target an audience. I do a very wide age range and I target people just based on location only. There’s other parameters you can choose. You can people who follow you and people that follow them, which is also a ton of people. I haven’t really played around with that too much. And you can also choose to target people who have certain interests as well. But generally our photos that we put up are, I’d say they catch your eye, right?
Not everybody sees live crab every single day. You got to picture a live crab up there. Not everybody sees some giant bearded dude holding a crab pot or slinging a tuna fish on the boat or then there’s my wife too. I put pictures of my wife and I up there. Not everybody sees some beautiful woman covered in grime, prawn fishing, our ads, I think the content that we throw out there, it catches the eye and I think it gains clicks. And I think ultimately that’s the key is you’re going to spend the money, really think about your approach and what you’re going to put out there and how you’re going to catch people’s attention. That’s number one. I find that a lot of people, myself included, can have a short attention span. So you got to have something that’s going to catch their attention, and I think our content does most of the talking. And then obviously once we gain followers, once we’ve got somebody actually following our page and interested in what we’re doing, then keeping the engagement and having them become loyal to your brand is the next most important stat.

Sean Corbett:
Yeah, and I definitely have a follow-up question on that, but I’m so glad that you mentioned that because well, number one, there’s no trick or tactic behind what you just said. I mean, you guys do have a unique business. Those are pictures of your products. And you’re right, you don’t see a lot of them online. You brought yourselves into it as, let’s call it characters or whatever featured person and in the ad, whereas you’d be surprised, a lot of the business owners I talked to who struggle with this stuff, they never want to put their own face in the ad for some reason they think it’s not professional or whatever. They want to copy what giant corporations do that they haven’t built up a brand that even can compete with those corporations. And then the copying aspect of it, you hit on another big thing. When you copy what other people are doing, you don’t stand out because the whole feed looks the same. So it’s so interesting that you didn’t have to sit down and reverse engineer, like, we’re going to trick people with this hack. You just showed your business and almost by definition it stands out because it’s unique.

Lance Underwood:
Absolutely, a hundred percent. I don’t want to brag, but I’m really proud of our company and I’m really proud of the amount of effort that my wife has put in. And she’s pretty smart when it comes to this stuff. I think I’m a pretty savvy guy too, but she’s taught me a lot about this and she’s been very dedicated to the social media much as I have. I mean, we’re kind of both the face of the company, but she’s the same way. We have other businesses as well, and I know she likes to keep her personal life separate from her business, and I get that that’s just her personality. For me, my personality, I really like to connect with people and I particularly like to connect with people on a personal level when it comes to our business. And so for me, that works. I can understand why people might not want to do that, but you also have to factor in what you’re selling as opposed to what we’re selling for us, we’re selling food security.
We want people to be able to afford Canadian seafood. We’re selling a direct relationship with where your food comes from and the people that produce it. So for me, I feel like I don’t have a choice but to really put myself out there and offer myself up as being part of the business. And I think that depending on what your business is, I think that putting yourself out there and sort of developing some sort of a relationship with your consumer is really important. We started off, I started a company Facebook page. I invited my friends and then it just started to grow and we just surpassed 20,000 followers on our Facebook page, which just absolutely bogles my mind. I mean, I look at a lot of other seafood companies and what they’re doing, and like you said, you can’t copy a big corporation. You’re not a big corporation.
You’re not offering what a big corporation would offer. You look at what we’re doing and it’s so different from that. But you look at some of the biggest seafood producers in Canada, and they might have 5,000 followers on their Facebook page, it’s because they do not have the personal relationship with what they’re doing and the product that they’re offering up to people. So yeah, that’s a huge, very multifaceted thing. And I think, yeah, for us, the personal aspect really works and I think people really appreciate that. So I think that yeah, people need to be ready to put themselves out there and offer reps something unique, be true to themselves and their brand and what they’re doing, what people respect. I mean, we’re living in 2023, it feels like everything under the sun’s already been thought of. So being original can be difficult, but you have to try be authentic, and I think that’s super key when you’re building a business, especially through social media.

Sean Corbett:
A hundred percent, for sure. Now, that kind of dovetails into my last major question in your answer there, you gave a couple what I would call basically from a marketing perspective, a couple key topics. So you mentioned food security, you mentioned showing where you’re sourcing from and all that kind of stuff. If I approached it from a marketing point of view, I would think, okay, well we want to do X amount of content every month on each of these topics and explore them. I’m just going from sort of a meta point of view to give the audience an idea of where we’re coming from. Now, when I looked at one of your latest updates, you did a really informative live video, I think it was a week or two weeks ago, about how pricing in the industry works. And again, as soon as I saw that, I just thought, man, this is so helpful and interesting, and I wondered if, do you have a content schedule or certain topics you definitely want to talk about, or is this just stuff that happens naturally responding to customer questions? It just happens to be topical. How much of it is planned and how much of it is just, Hey, we need to record something today. What should I talk about?

Lance Underwood:
Well, I had like to say that I plan things a lot better than I do, but the reality is I’m getting to the point where I’m like, okay, post something every day, post some sort of an update every day. Give the people who follow us something to read and give them something to be interested in. But for me, like I said, connection to my customers is really, really important. And so when I read the comments, I mean, that’s the thing about our business is we’re doing a lot, but when you contact us via Facebook, email, phone call, I’m the dude that answers. I’m the one that’s seeing firsthand what people are saying. And I think about that. I mean, I got a million things going on all the time, especially running fish boats and being at sea, but being at sea, I have a lot of time to think and I’m always trying to figure out how to address customer concerns or ideas or thoughts.
So a lot of my responses are just from paying attention. One of the guys I used to work for when I first started running boats in Canada, I was going prawn fishing. I was going run a prom boat, and I was like, I’ve never even seen a spot prawn. And he said to me, just pay attention. You’ll do just fine. And that stuck with me my whole life. If you pay attention to what’s going on, you pay attention to what your customers are saying, you’ll do just fine. And so that’s where I do a lot of the live videos is I take a lot of the content that my consumers, my customers are adding into the equation and I address it. And the pricing thing’s big people do not understand what drives the markets or why the prices are what they are, why they fluctuate so much. That’s a thing that I feel like I need to address on a regular basis to keep people in the know. And I think that’s a good thing to do is explain yourself.
People aren’t going to believe in what you’re doing if they don’t understand it. So that’s a big part of why I do the live videos. And I mean, it’s not the same as when it used to be me and my wife out on the truck all the time where we actually got to meet people face to face because I’m not on the truck all the time anymore. I feel like I have to do the lives, I have to talk to the people, and I have to address any questions. I don’t get to do it face-to-face anymore. And I think that anybody who’s running a business online, you absolutely need to find a way to engage the customers and figure out what they’re saying and what their needs are.

Sean Corbett:
For sure. And you’re using social media the way it actually is meant. It’s not a one-way conversation. You are letting that feedback come in, then playing off new content. Then from that new content, more feedback will come in and it’s a nice holistic circle there. Lance, it’s been really awesome to talk to you. I could probably talk to you for many more hours, but obviously you have to get back to it as well. So maybe you could just wrap up by telling the people where can they find you, what’s your process if they want to order some seafood from you and all that kind of stuff?

Lance Underwood:
Yeah, for sure. So if you want to find us, you can check out our website, which is www.quadraislandfisheries.com. That’s a way to see what our product list is, our pricing. There’s information on there about us and our company, about our products. If you want to follow us on a day-to-day basis, Facebook’s a really great way. I definitely spend a lot of time on Facebook making posts. So again, go on Facebook search Quadra Island Fisheries. You’ll see a picture pop up of my wife and I, and again on Instagram as well, Quadra Island Fisheries, search us out and follow our adventures. It’s pretty, it can get pretty wild sometimes being at sea. We try to put up some interesting content. And yeah, if you follow us, you’ll get updates on where we’re going. Generally, we try to deliver to each location that we service once every six weeks or so. And so if you follow us on Facebook and you see that we’re going to be in your area, just click on the link to our website. You can go on and order seafood from us and our main truck driver, Paul, who’s an awesome dude, he’ll come to your area and drop off seafood for you. So pretty simple, and it’s pretty tasty.

Sean Corbett:
That sounds great. Thanks Lance. And yeah, we’ll definitely put a link in the show notes. Anyone who’s listening, go follow Lance and Quadra online right now. Definitely on Facebook. And I know you said you’re building up the Instagram as well, so thank you very much again for being here today.

Lance Underwood:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It was fun talking.