Hats off to reporter Mark Cohen!
Q. Take us back. How did you save your company?
A. I just started thinking more about the way I use the
Internet. Most of the time when I type in a search, I’m looking for an
answer to a specific question. The problem in my industry, and a lot of
industries, is you don’t get a lot of great search results because most
businesses don’t want to give answers; they want to talk about their
company. So I realized that if I was willing to answer all these
questions that people have about fiberglass pools, we might have a
chance to pull this out.
Q. What was the first question you answered?
A. The question I was always asked within the first two
minutes of talking to customers was, How much does a fiberglass pool
cost? Pool installers are like mattress or car dealers — we hate talking
about how much a pool costs until we have you in person because there
are so many options and accessories we want to sell you. As a result,
pool companies never mention price on their Web sites. But I said, I
don’t care what the question is, we’re going to answer it.
Q. Did you actually tell people the price of a pool?
A. No — because I couldn’t. But see, that’s the magic
behind this. Google’s search engine doesn’t really care if we answer the
question. It’s just looking for companies that are willing to address
the question. So I said in that article,
there are a ton of options, so it depends, the price can range anywhere
from $20,000 to $200,000 and a lot of our customers end up between
$40,000 and $80,000. And that was enough. Within about 24 hours of
writing that article, it was No. 1 for every fiberglass-pool,
cost-related phrase you could possibly type in. And because I have
analytics, so far to this day, I’ve been able to track a minimum of $1.7
million in sales to that one article.
Q. What was the next question?
A. People used to ask me all the time, “Marcus, I’ve
been hearing that fiberglass pools have all sorts of problems and
issues. So what are the problems and issues?” Of course, they’d been
talking to a concrete pool guy, but it doesn’t matter where they got it,
now they have the question. So we wrote an article about the problems with fiberglass pools
and specifically came right out and said: Here are the issues. Here are
the benefits. You decide. Now, when you go in and type anything about
fiberglass issues and problems, you’re going to see the River Pools Web
site and you’re going to think, “Oh my gosh, these guys are so honest.”
Q. Anything else?
A. In most industries, there comes a time in the sale
process where the customer turns to you and says, “O.K., I like you, but
who are some of the other good companies that do this?” Half the time
it’s a test, because people know who our competitors are because they
can find them in .5 seconds online. Most contractors avoid the question.
They say, “Oh, we don’t really have competition.” But because I was
asked that question so often, I decided to answer it. I wrote a blog post about the best swimming pool builders in Richmond, Va., one of our main service areas.
Q. Where were you on the list?
A. I wasn’t on it.
Q. You weren’t?
A. No, because the moment I put my name up there I
would lose all my credibility. But here’s the thing. Take the first
company on the list, Pla-Mor Pools, a top competitor of ours. If you type in, “Pla-Mor Pools reviews Richmond, Va.,” which of course people do all the time when they’re vetting a company, what comes up? Me!
You vet all my competitors, now I’m showing up for all their key words.
If you really want to understand the power of inbound marketing, it
comes down to this idea: I want to have the conversation at my house.
Q. Once you wrote a blog post, how much time did you spend promoting it on Twitter and Facebook?
A. I didn’t. Dude, that one article on price has never
been tweeted. It’s never been Facebooked. I’m not saying social media
doesn’t help, but it’s nowhere near what people think. The only metric
that really matters is total pages viewed. Here’s a statistic for you:
If somebody reads 30 pages of my River Pools Web site, and we go on a
sales appointment, they buy 80 percent of the time. The industry average
for sales appointments is 10 percent. So, our whole marketing campaign
revolves around getting people to stick around and read our stuff,
because the longer they stay on our site, the greater the chance they’re
going to fall in love with our company.
Q. What do you say to business owners who say they don’t know what to blog about?
A. That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard, and I hear it
a lot. What they should be doing is just listening to every single
question they get and answering it. In my consulting business the first
thing we do is brainstorm what questions the company gets on a regular
basis. I’ve never had a company come up with less than 100 questions in
30 minutes.
Q. How do you suggest companies find time to do all of this blogging?
A. Most of the time, they can take the employees they
already have talking to customers and turn them into content producers.
If you have 25 salespeople, and each one of them writes one post a
month, your search is going to be through the roof because that’s a new
piece of content every day.
Q. How have your competitors responded to all of this?
A. They still don’t really get it. They’re nice about
it. I’ll have one of my best-pool-builder lists come out, and I’ll run
into them. And they’ll say, “Hey, man, thanks for including me in that
list. I’m not sure why you did it, but thanks.”
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