Pool Builder Marketing: The Complete Guide to Dominating the Competition
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The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
Designing an effective marketing strategy for your pool business isn’t easy. But the path to double-digit sales growth and sustainable return on marketing spend can be found right in this guide.
Sure, there are many moving parts that all need to be well-integrated and aligned, and it takes many years of experience to know which things are critical and which are not—but that’s no different than a normal day on the job site for you and your team. With a willingness to scrutinize your operations, and an embrace of a few key truths, true marketing ROI can be achieved—even in this crazy digital world.
In an effort to bring value in a short amount of time, let’s highlight three key points that every pool builder needs to understand if they are to reach marketing maturity.
The knowledge gap between contractors and customers is shrinking.
The research journey for your potential customers begins and ends online.
Your competitors are investing in increasingly sophisticated marketing strategies.
Said another way, the game is the same but the rules have changed. The good news is that, despite the changes, many of the fundamentals of marketing remain the same. What’s different is the toolbox with which leaders in the pool industry and marketers must familiarize themselves.
Today, a successful pool builder marketing plan tailors its content to the needs and interests of a highly focused customer base—one that is empowered by a wealth of knowledge around which successful contractors must work.
That knowledge base spells new challenges for pool builders, (as well professionals in the other legs of outdoor living such as landscape and hardscape contractors) but thanks to the availability of industry-specific digital marketing strategies, any business—no matter how big or small—can compete in the same space. For up-and-comers this means opportunity. For the established leaders, it means pressure and responsibility.
Let’s look at four basic tenets of pool builder marketing, and how you can adapt your marketing spends and strategies to meet the challenges of a shifting market.
The Changing Landscape in Pool Builder Marketing
Thanks to the internet, your customer base is more informed than ever. Gone are the days when you could simply blast the airwaves and billboards with your local pool company brand and rake in the leads. Today’s consumers can learn about the entire pool building process—from estimate to billing—before even speaking to a contractor. And with contractor reviews on major traffic hubs like Google My Business, Facebook, and Houzz, they can disqualify a service provider before even visiting the website.
And make no mistake: That empowerment only helps the marketplace. Recent analysis shows the pool construction market has grown at an annual rate of 1.5%, and its growth rate is expected to outpace that of the overall construction sector in coming years.
So what does that mean for your marketing strategy? It means your public presence must be, first and foremost, helpful. It must build trust and authority in the eyes of the discerning luxury consumer. It must also involve an array of platforms and devices, including search and social media, desktop and mobile. Finally, it must be strategic and integrated—capable of satisfying the interests of customers at every stage in their research journey.
Because customers are so well informed, the flexibility of a marketing program is more than just a strategy though—it’s an imperative. Content must be available to inform potential buyers, facilitate points of contact, and empower their purchase decisions. If it’s not, it doesn’t matter how amazing and cutting-edge the pools you design and build actually are, your ideal customers will have no way of finding you. Content is how you create a signal—how you cast a line that prospective customers can pick up on their own.
Moreover, pool builders have to grapple with increasingly fierce competition. The swimming pool construction industry is now an $9.5 billion market and pool builders are vying for customers that are both informed and involved. With so many service providers to choose from, customers do not have to settle for a subpar experience. Their familiarity with digital, on-demand services in other markets—be it custom home-hunting or ride-sharing—engenders similar expectations in yours.
Aligning Marketing to the Customer’s Pool Buying Journey.
The Pool Builder Marketing System™ by HALSTEAD.
So the market is growing and your average customer is more engaged, more informed than ever. These challenges arrive on top of what is already a challenging sales environment. Think about a typical homeowner who’s interested in buying a pool. What’s the most glass-half-empty way of looking at that decision?
“A massive, once-in-a-lifetime kind of purchase with copious feature sets, complex design options, and long-term implications.”
How do you work with and overcome that level of worry? More importantly, how do you craft a marketing strategy that can address a spectrum of concerns while also engaging and assisting customers at each leg in their journey?
The answer is an integrated digital marketing system—a proven strategy that empowers both you and your customers, and brings their business to you.
TRAFFIC AND AWARENESS
Consider the earliest stage in the customer’s journey: awareness. How do you get customers to find your business and visit your website while they are in the early stages of their research? Remember, at this point, they are looking to understand whether a pool is even what they want. They may only know of their higher level desire, perhaps a goal of entertaining more often and having a place their teenage kids can enjoy. So the name of the game here is again, helping the consumer with useful information.
But how do you get that great information in front of them at the right time? One way is through search; that includes both organic search with search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search with Google Ads. The second major way is by leveraging social media; again with paid and organic efforts. Paid Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn Ads targeting exactly the right locations and consumer demographics is a great source of driving traffic and awareness. Posting a dynamic rotation of new content on those social channels is a great way to round out the effort.
DRIVING ENGAGEMENT
Once you are driving awareness and traffic, the next step is engagement. Makes senes, right? All the traffic in the world is useless if you aren’t getting people to engage with your business. As the consumer is researching her options for a solution for entertaining, she’s starting to understand that a new pool may be the right choice. So because your marketing is reaching her on Google and showing up in her social newsfeeds, she finds your content and pictures helpful and clicks on them often. She visits your website and social accounts as a result, and BAM! We’ve got engagement. What happens next in the retargeting phase is pure magic.
RETARGET AND NURTURE
Next, you’ll need to zoom in—to move further down the marketing “funnel,” so to speak, and nurture those engaged “leads”. Why the the air quotes around leads? Because these prospects likely haven’t made contact with your company yet. So they are called a lead in marketing talk, but we still need to nurture them into an MQL, or marketing qualified lead. MQLs are what your sales reps (or you as the owner if you are selling in the field) care about most.
How do we nurture? One word—retargeting. This means providing more specific advertisements and targeted content for the prospects who have already engaged with your brand. Having the right metrics and analytics to target that audience, it should go without saying, is a prerequisite for success. So at this stage, the prospect wants to see content and ads that are relevant to where she is in her journey—and with proper digital marketing, that’s just what she’ll get. Retargeting campaigns on Facebook and Instagram Ads work to drive her closer to the point where she feels like reaching out to your business.
CONVERT THE LEAD
After retargeting and nurturing campaigns have been active for a while, and the prospect has continued to engage with more messages (ads, content, blogs, posts,etc) from your brand, it’s time to close the lead. Using properly designed landing pages, and ads with contact us call-to-actions, we drive the lead to make contact with you. This stage is the first point of direct contact with the audience you’ve been cultivating. It comes in the form of direct phone calls, website form submissions, and even booked calls to your sales reps’ calendars. The idea is to bring the customer into your world so that you can have and, hopefully, maintain a sales conversation. This is the point at which the customer’s knowledge ends and yours begins—where you can step in to provide answers to questions and help turn their vision into a reality. You get to work your magical sales process to drive home the deal.
NURTURE, CLOSE, DELIVER
Now you lead has officially entered the sales process. Now it’s the job of both the sales and marketing teams to provide solutions, not sales gimmicks, and to deliver on all the hype she’s experienced thus far. This part is the hard part. But sales doesn’t operate in a vacuum in the digital world. Sales and marketing are a team.
Some things to consider with sales. The time your customer is spending engaging with your sales team is a great time to enter them into ad and email funnels specific to their current experiences. For instance, once a prospect books a prequalifying phone call with a sales rep (the first actual request they make to speak with someone), enter them into a funnel to receive 3 emails over the next 2 weeks - or over a period of time that is consistent with your sales process. These emails can do wonders to build loyalty and trust with your brand. Jam-pack them with client testimonials, guides on selecting design styles, case studies, and just-plain-helpful information that will help them be better prepared for the road ahead. Be sure to include information on your sales process—remember, consumers purchasing luxury projects are often planners and professionals who appreciate a roadmap for what’s to come. Along with the helpful email content, start showing them ads in their Facebook and Instagram newsfeeds that reinforce the same, helpful messaging.
With sales and marketing working together, your close rates will improve and you will single out and win more clients that are ideal for your business goals. Close those sales, deliver that thoughtful design, and get to work delivering a great client experience.
DRIVE RERERRALS
The final stage comes after the project is delivered, when you attempt to turn a former customer into an advocate (or cheerleader) for your brand. A combination of user reviews, surveys, social media posts, and word-of-mouth fuel helps elevate your brand and stand above the competition. How about delivering a polished cover table book of the backyard transformation? Or maybe a video they can share on their social media accounts and in their Local Mom Facebook groups. The gestures turn past customers into cheerleaders which means your word-of-mouth gets juiced ever more. But we aren’t talking about just any word-of-mouth here. We are talking about encouraging referrals from the RIGHT kind of past customers which leads to more of those kinds of projects in the future.
But instead of thinking about these last stage efforts in the drive referrals phase as a way to simply increase referrals, think about them strategically and properly in terms of your marketing ROI.
Many pool builders fail to realize that when calculating accurate MarketingROI, it is critical to attribute referrals of an initial sale that came from X marketing spend back to that X spend. Said another way, if you get project #1 from a paid Facebook Ads campaign, and then when you complete that project the customer referrals you to the Project #2, the sales revenue from Project #2 must be attributed to that same Facebook Ads campaign. That’s the magic of proper marketing for pool builders that do great work—it scales and scales.
The Components of a Proven Pool Builder Marketing System.
By now, we’ve recapped some key changes that digital has brought and will continue to bring to the world of pool building, outlined a process of mapping marketing efforts to the buyer’s journey, and detailed a series of important marketing-related results that leading builders work to achieve. But how exactly do we get to those results? What are the key foundational components or “pillars” necessary to start seeing a return on your investment? Let’s dive into those now, beginning with the power of a local brand.
BRAND BUILDING FOR POOL BUILDERS
Think of your brand as the voice, image, messaging, and overall public—and internal—vibe of your company. Together, these ingredients need to align, as well as appeal to your desired customer base to make sure you’re speaking to the right people in the right places.
The foundational nature of branding makes it a good launch-point to review your overall marketing strategy. Take a look at your logos, taglines, and messaging. What about trucks, team uniforms, and project case studies? All of these visual components need to be cutting-edge, eye-catching, and consistent across all consumer touch points.
Everything you build from this point on stems from your brand strategy, so now is the time to audit everything from your service offerings to your personnel. If you are not 100% confident in what your business can bring to the market, you need to figure out why.
Great marketing that deeply resonates with the consumer can get you really far, but if the foundation for the house is compromised, it’s only a matter of time before it crumbles. Assuming your product-market fit is validated, and you believe in the product you deliver, it’s often helpful to just take a step back and ensure the messaging and the look and feel of your company still aligns perfectly to those foundational items.
But what does “look and feel” really mean…tactically speaking? Brand—as it pertains to a locally-focused pool design/build— boils down to a few key things. The first is the logo. Does it convey luxury and quality? Does it feel fresh & clean? Does it stand up (or out) when compared to your new competition? Often times, if the answer is not a strong yes to these questions, it means it’s time to clean things up a bit. That doesn’t always mean a total redo..at all. A few really strategically thought-out changes can go a long way to modernizing a logo.
Secondly, local brand is about messaging. What are you really saying to the consumers that check you out? Is your messaging consistent, to the point, and aligned with how you really feel as a company? Is it what you would say to the consumer if you had them right in front of you? Brand copywriting can make such a huge difference in the way potential consumers see your company. Again, this comes down to really digging deep into what you likely already know—what does your target consumer really value, what do they appreciate most about what you deliver? These points need to be addressed and captured in your brand messaging. In other words, if you had to sum up what you offer that your competition doesn’t in 2 sentences, what would those sentences be? That’s messaging. And when combined with your logo it makes for a strong foundation for your brand. Layer on your uniforms, project portfolio presentation, equipment and truck wraps, point of sale material, and a few little things like your email signatures, and you’ve got…brand!
WEBSITE DESIGN
Your website is the centerpiece of your online marketing strategy. It is the command center and conversion point through which the public accesses your brand. It’s the first place they go to learn about you—often from their mobile phone.
Your website is where you collect and analyze critical data about the people you’re trying to reach, where you go to learn about which of your marketing efforts are working and which are not. And, of course, it’s where your customers go to learn about your service offerings. All that inbound data provides feedback that, if used properly, will allow you to direct resources toward future marketing spends and efforts.
On the user end, your site should be highly visual. You already know that customers are lured in by stunning presentations of your craft—the projects you’ve completed, the dream builds you’ve designed, the elaborate outdoor living spaces you’ve perfected after years in the business. Any prospective customer who finds their way onto your site will want to see that up-front and center. We will cover more about content in the next component, since without it, you really have no marketing. But let’s dive into a few other goals for your website.
In addition to clearly bringing your core offerings to focus, your site needs to convey trust and authority. A swimming pool project, and the larger landscape and outdoor living spaces that surround and complete the pool itself, makes for a very large investment. It’s a purchase that can very often easily exceed $200k, easily making the project one of the largest purchases your customers will ever make in their lives. Sure, there are the builders who strictly build pools for the gazillionaires of the world, but even then, the cost of the pool often scales up quickly relative to the rest of their expenses.
So how do you get a consumer to trust you as an authoritative pool professional? With professional copywriting written for the professional, successful, wealthy reader that you are likely trying to appeal to. You build trust with validated reviews and testimonials brought to the site from other platforms. You show the scale and scope of work that aligns to what they are looking to purchase for their home. And you package it all in a way that is professional and user-friendly.
Notice we are past the point here of talking about “mobile-friendly.” That’s right. We are declaring that it’s time to most past talking about sites that “look good on iPhones.” If you are still battling with those issues when it comes to you website, you are really far behind and need to take drastic measures. For the rest of the pool builders out there—the ones that we work with at HALSTEAD—we are spending time on improving user experience, building case studies that push the industry forward, and meeting the luxury consumer where they are—with high expectations when it comes to online experiences.
CONTENT MARKETING
For a reason that is still shocking and unexplainable to us, content is one of the most overlooked components of a healthy marketing machine for many pool builders. Looking across even the industry’s award-winning pool builders, there’s a glaring shortage of stunning photo and video content—the kind of visual storytelling that helps customers easily imagine the pool of their dreams.
You can blog all day about Unilock vs. stamped concrete for a pool surround, or why heat pumps are more efficient than tankless heaters—and that’s all very important—but at the end of the day, people want to feel the results of what you do. This is an emotional purchase. They want to see your finished product—and not just a few before-and-after photos. They want videos of your process, social media posts clearly exposing your team’s practices, video diaries from the job site, and more. All that provides evidence of your professionalism, your expertise, and your brand. It’s about trust—and in the end, trust wins.
Many of the stats from online tests estimate that product videos can increase purchases by over 100%. But video is a complicated beast.
As with most things, you need to develop a strategy that’s unique to the spaces and platforms where video lives—be it YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, or your website. It also needs to be adjusted for the industry it serves. Are video stats for e-commerce companies selling $50 dresses relevant to your $450k backyard design/build project? Certainly not. But do the principle often transfer? Yes they do. But at the end of the day, industry-specific knowledge, experience, and data offers a huge leg up. Smart video content for the pool industry is shot with repurposing in mind: The idea is to be able to re-edit, remix, excerpt, and convert across multiple consumer touch points. Remember that infographic earlier in this article? Right, the goal is to make video that spans that journey.
But that’s just video and images. Then, of course, there’s written content—the copy that informs, draws in, and empowers your audience. You might be surprised to learn copywriting on paid ads is often the single most defining factor in successful metrics.
We have found that in order to increase the production of content that sells more pools in the industry, we need to first demystify the unclear term “content.”
So here it goes—content refers simply to photos, videos, and words.
Photos and videos of your projects, the building and designing process that makes them happen, the stories behind those projects, the stories of your customers, of your journey as an owner or pool professional, the stories of your team, and knowledge in the form of articles and videos that helps consumers make more informed purchase decisions when it comes to creating the backyard of their dreams.
SOCIAL MEDIA: PAID ADS AND POSTING
All that content—the pictures, videos, and words outlined above—serves as the fuel for your pool builder marketing engine. And a major cylinder in that engine is social media.
To say that social platforms are powerful—for pool builders, largely Facebook and Instagram—could quite possibly be the world’s largest understatement. Based on the shear number of users on these platforms alone, any strategic businessman would deem them an extremely valuable tool for the quest of meeting sales goals. Factor in the targeting capabilities available to paid advertisers, and you’ve got yourself a core element of the industry’s leading pros.
But the platform doesn’t change the approach. What you’re selling is not some inert fiberglass pool model, but the experience—the joy that your outdoor living spaces brings to your customers’ lives. With that foundation in place, you’re ready to jump into social media which is broken into two categories—paid and organic.
Paid social refers to running paid advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Ads that use the Facebook Ads to show content to a very specific set of people at a very specific time. Paid social is far and away one of the most powerful spends for pool builders due to the combination of targeting and creative.
Let’s face it. Getting “leads” is really pretty easy. Most agencies that are actually doing work can drive “leads.” Driving quality, targeted leads is a totally different story. The pool builders we work with don’t want hundreds of homeowners that are looking for a cheap pool calling and emailing them all day long. They have a very clear vision of their ideal customer and they want a marketing strategy—and partner—that can help them target that audience specifically. That’s where paid Facebook and Instagram Ads come in. Want to reach only homeowners in your target service areas, who are top 2% earners for the area, drive certain car brands, send their kids to private school, and who are interested in outdoor entertaining? Then you should be investing in paid social.
We have a belief at HALSTEAD that if every pool business owner actually knew what was possible with paid Facebook and Instagram Ads, and at what cost results would come at, then every one of those pool business owner would be running ads all day every day.
Organic social, on the other hand, refers to the practice of logging on to your business social accounts like Facebook or Instagram, and creating a post—adding an image or video, adding your text, and posting. With this effort, there is no ad spend behind the post—it’s organic.This content costs nothing but time and effort, and the rewards depend, in large part, on the platform algorithms. For example, as Facebook has gotten more and more crowded, the ability to reach even your followers—let alone others—has diminished to less than 4% in may cases. The same has been happening, albeit more slowly, on Instagram and LinkedIn.
That does not mean organic social content is a waste of time, but rather that your organic social presence should be viewed as a brand strategy balanced by a healthy dose of paid social advertising. It’s an extension of your website and is a great way to offer consumers a deep, behind-the-scenes look at your company’s capabilities.
SEARCH: SEO AND GOOGLE ADS
Consumers looking to research, and eventually purchase, a new swimming pool, start their journey by heading to Google almost every single time. It’s backed by the data, plain and simple.
Search marketing is broken down into two categories. Not unlike social media, search can be organic in the form of search engine optimization, and paid—in the form of paid Google Ads. Both have their place and both service a purpose.
Let’s start with the holy grail —SEO. The best leads come from organic search traffic, and organic search traffic comes from doing proper SEO. These organic leads are far and away the most high-performing, pre-qualified leads you’re likely to find, as they represent the people who visit your site with intent in mind. These are the people who have discovered your website through specific search terms that your strategy has so diligently homed in on. You really cannot overstate the importance of organic traffic.
SEO done right, however, is not cheap—and it shouldn’t be. The amount of knowledge required to actually drive search rankings month after month, especially in markets with steep online competition, is impressive. Moreover, the result of a job well done is game changing. Built on fresh content, organic search drives warm, prequalified leads lauded by many firm owners as second to only a referral.
They are certainly of higher quality than those from Google Ads, known as paid search. But when paid search is used in close tandem with SEO, it’s a valuable element.
But don’t do what many pool builders do and live and die by Google Ads alone. So many companies spend thousands and thousands of dollars a month on PPC, with little to no other complementing strategies in place. That’s a race to the bottom—not only to the bottom of the budget barrel, but to the bottom of the lead quality bucket as well.
Paid search should be used in conjunction with SEO. What does this balance look like? On the organic side, SEO keywords and service locations are being tracked in software, allowing you to know exactly where your website ranks for critical keyword combinations—i.e. you rank spot 11 (top of second page) for “pool builder Sacramento” or spot 22 (top of third page) for “swimming pool Seattle.”
While you are working those SEO keywords, driving them to the top of rankings over time, you can use Google Ads to buy top of page rankings for really important phrases that aren’t yet ranking organically.
REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
As easily as first page Google rankings can drive business growth, poor online reviews can destroy it. A 2018 survey by Bright Local found 57% of consumers ignore businesses that have less than four stars. Since then, this consumer trust of, and reliance on, platform reviews has only strengthened. Today, for many young people, an online review is roughly as trustworthy as a personal recommendation. That’s right, those precious offline word-of-mouth referrals that power service businesses everywhere each year have now been reshaped into online reviews.
Need another reason to drive reputation management to the top of your to-do list? Reviews are a core part of the Google local search algorithm. Those with more positive reviews on Google often beat out better companies with less—plain and simple. So if ranking for “pool builder near me” or “Pool builder San Antonio” is important to you, then reviews must be as well.
But we don’t find that it’s “not important” to pool builders. Most pool builders, or speciality contractors in any segment, agree that a healthy online reputation is essential to attracting new opportunities and closing sales. And they also uunderstan that this is especially true when it comes to luxury, higher-priced items like new swimming pools and outdoor living areas.
Yet when you dive into the online profiles of the over 15k pool builders all across the country, the lions share of them lack substantially in the category of online reviews. Why is this? What stops pool builders from driving reviews consistently? We’ve boiled it down to a lack of process and, in turn, a lack of persistence.
Although it should go without saying, we need to begin the review solutions part of this section by saying this: The most important way to drive positive reviews is to do good work. But then good work is the foundation on which all good marketing sits atop, isn’t it? We think so.
Okay, on to solutions. In order to win at the game of reviews, you must systematize your process. Using apps and tools to automate this effort for our clients, we help them reach out to past customers via email, asking, and then reminding them up to 3 times, to leave a review. We do this consistently on their behalf. The emails are well-branded, straight to the point, and work to drive those customers with good feedback signals directly to Google, Houzz, and Facebook so they can post their review. If any in the bunch click negative feedback signals in the email, they are directed to explain their feelings to you via email. This helps to give leadership a chance to fix bad experiences without the review first getting published.
Again, this isn’t rocket science here—its just a matter of process and consistency. With a good automated process in place, each customer is added to the portal as you complete their project and they are entered into the email funnel kindly asking them to tell the world how happy they are with their new pool.
BONUS TIP: At the start of the effort, it’s a great idea to upload a list of all your past customer names and emails. Enter them into a funnel asking for reviews! This will give you a chance to extract any low hanging fruit from customers who didn’t post a review previously.
RETARGETING AND AUTOMATION
Regardless of how visitors arrive at your site—be it through paid Facebook and Instagram Ads or organic search—statistically speaking, they’re not likely to hang around. To get them to return and really consider your company for their pool project slotted for 8 months from now, you need to invest in effective retargeting campaigns—that is, tracking your visitors across the web and targeting them with additional ads and outreach.
Through marketing automation, many of those potential customers can be reached via a central CRM app and corresponding email marketing efforts, automated follow-ups, and retargeting campaigns across social platforms Feeding this machine-within-a-machine is the customer data you’ve, hopefully, cultivated over years in the business. This is where the real ROI for your original marketing spend can be seen.
Remember how we talked about how your content strategy needs to speak to customers at any stage in their journey? Well, marketing automation is how you deliver that content. Automated workflows allow you to choose which lead sees which bit of content, all while scaling to the size and scope of your operation. Automation is no longer the exclusive domain of enterprise-level budgets—it’s well within reach and budget or regional pool builders.
SALES ENABLEMENT
Luxury consumers do not want to (and should not have to) wait around for you to find the time for them. A successful pool builder marketing strategy syncs with sales and enables your sales team by empowering the customer. Online appointment booking automation allows customers to schedule appointments on their own time, giving your sales team the chance to prequalify the lead with a simple phone call that “automatically” lands on the rep’s calendar.
Before even picking up the phone for the conversation, your sales team member already has the information he or she needs to be successful right in the booking, filled out by the prospect directly. With dual calendar invites, and text message reminders, you can reduce the chance of no-shows. At every stage in the intake process, you have additional opportunities for content—places to show off your offerings and answer any questions the prospect may have. Contractors utilizing a digital sales process are really winning in terms of efficiency and close rates, but also by providing a great customer experience.
Stabilizing your marketing spend and effort.
Wherever you are in the stage of your business, it serves well to remember: Just because you’re busy now does not mean you’ll be busy tomorrow. To achieve stability, then, requires a stable marketing effort—a strategy that is proactive, rather than reactive. That’s the idea behind a solid pool builder marketing plan—the kind that we use to deliver predictable results for clients.
Stability means understanding what a healthy marketing strategy is and what it is not. It is not a system for lead generation, but rather a system for curating an audience that, in turn, drives the type of leads you want. It is not about satisfying an immediate need, but rather protecting your investment and positioning your business for sustained growth. Said a great way, “marketing is not medicine—it is food.”
Unfortunately, this is something that many pool builders have yet to grasp. They approach marketing as if it were medicine—something to dose an ailing business with when the leads are scarce. The problem with that mindset is that, by the time you’re even aware that the leads are drying up, it’s already too late. You’ll find yourself plugging leaks—prioritizing the budget, cutting costs, taking on low-yield projects, and all along, relinquishing any hold on the stability needed to scale your enterprise.
LONG-TERM VISION WINS
It can be an interesting time for pool builders when there is finally a steady flow of work. For years and years as the business is growing, marketing has always been about playing catch up, about “how do we get more leads tomorrow?” But when the business matures, often it’s hard for the owners and leadership to change that mentality.
Maybe you’re unsure about investing in marketing when you have so much business that you need to turn people away. Well, someone out there is an upstart competitor with a smaller operation who is investing in marketing, and soon enough their growth pattern is outpacing yours. It’s so easy to get blindsided by these kinds of competitors when you’ve become complacent.
Reinvesting in marketing helps fuel and maintain your leadership position in your market while promoting stability in your business. Over time, that investment yields dividends in the form of things like branding alone. Your brand becomes synonymous with market leadership and quality, thereby generating additional opportunities, revenue streams, and word-of-mouth referrals. This feedback loop secures your position and makes the barrier for newcomers much higher.
STABILITY ACHIEVES SELECTIVITY
Continued, stable marketing allows pool builders to be more selective, to filter out all but the most promising projects. When you can afford to be selective, you can focus on ideal clients—for example, those customers with enough budget to afford the exact pool that you consider your speciality. Imagine that, building the exact kinds of projects you want to, all day long.
And it scales on itself.
More ideal clients also means more ideal referrals. Which is a huge change for many pool builders. Referral leads often come from customers in the same network or style of work. So to scale your business or to take it in a different direction, you need to take control of the kind of pools you are building. The only way to reach that point of selectivity is through constant marketing.
THE PERKS OF EXCLUSIVITY
In addition to cultivating a better portfolio and just all around elevated quality of business, achieving selectivity also positions you to build an air of exclusivity around your pool brand. It puts you in a position to actually turn away prospects, which puts the control in your hands. You know why? Because turning someone away makes them want you more—plain and simple. Many pool builder are concerned about this stage, worrying about fostering a bad reputation for having a limited schedule. From a general good-business and marketing standpoint, however, we say you should always strive to be oversubscribed. There are strategies and tactics for managing this overflow of work, where it is communicated in a respectful, logical manner, and often the pool builders we work with are surprised to see how long customers will wait to have the builder they really want and trust—which, of course, is the pool builder who does great work and…never stops marketing.
Eventually, the kind of exclusivity that comes from stable marketing allows you to drive your rates up and ensure better profit margins. People are willing to pay more for a company that is in-demand.
THE TALENT JOURNEY
Proactive, stabile marketing also positions you to attract better talent. Because you have the ability to be selective with the projects you take on, over time the company curates a portfolio that is attractive to the best professionals looking for an exciting career. Think about it, it’s only natural—the best talent gravitates towards the best companies. And with those higher margins based on your increased demand, you can afford to bring on and nurture that best-in-class talent. And the cycle continues—better projects, better margins, better talent, better projects, better margins…ok, you get the point.
TO SCALE OR NOT TO SCALE
So, the next question from the pool builders we chat with is “what do you do with more work than you can handle?”
It’s a valid concern, and one that we think boils down to two main solution choices. Deciding which one is best for you is a very personal decision that is as much intertwined with your personal life goals as it is a business decision.
No matter which choice you decide is best for your future, the first thing to do if you’ve reached the point in your pool business where you are forced to face this decision is to…CELEBRATE! Yes, congratulations on reaching a milestone few businesses actually reach. You have achieved a major milestone!
Now for the two options. Essentially, the choice comes down to whether or not you wish to scale and grow the size of your pool business.
If you are happy with the size of your company—your revenue, your team size, your quality of live, etc—then you should choose to ‘Prune and Optimize’ your business. With more than enough work, you can become extremely selective of the jobs you want to take, and decline the rest. Once you have settled into that exact job type and size that you want all day long, you then optimize your business for doing those projects all the time. Look at your equipment, your team size, your processes—are they perfectly aligned to this ‘new you’? If not, make the changes to create a well-oiled machine based on your new project focus. The other key element to the Prune and Optimize approach is how you will communicate your company to potential clients. For those projects you really want to take on, it’s critical to train your sales team to reinforce that you’re worth the wait. When done properly, many more then you think will be content to wait knowing they will receive a superior end result.
For those owners who have a goal of growing the company, you approach the problem of “more work than you can handle” from a very different mindset. You want to pivot and change quickly to position your firm to handle this new increased volume. You will still be selective about the projects you take on to a degree, so you will still be positioned to attract the key talent you need to scale. Recruiting will no longer be a seasonal effort for you—you will have an always-on approach to team building. You will look to optimize and restructure crews, combining or separating where needed to make your operation more efficient. You will look to systematize and productize, working to streamline your offerings (ie. maybe not all of your projects need to be unique—think pre-designed spaces.) Something else you may consider is to select trusted vendor partners and subcontract out certain non-core offerings. This will free up even more of your time and resources, allowing you to take on more of your ideal in-house work.