Swimming Pool Advertising Ideas [Case Study]

Pool Marketing Ideas for Swimming Pools Businesses Backed By Results

Before you even start coming up with digital marketing strategies, you need to set your foundation. This means creating a strong branding and marketing strategy that aligns with your swimming pool maintenance business goals and mission. This is where nearly every ads and marketing agency goes wrong when coming up with pool marketing ideas for their swimming-pool advertisements.

They create pool marketing campaigns without understanding your brand, product or service, and customer. This is why many swimming pool businesses have negative experiences with pool marketing agencies and freelancers.

If you are generating traffic, but the traffic is not converting into new sales for your pool business, then the traffic is worthless. One of the main reasons traffic does not convert is because you are not generating traffic from your ideal customer with the right message while giving them an offer they cannot resist. In this article, we show you how to create a branding and pool marketing strategy step by step.

Then how to use this branding and pool marketing strategy to develop advertising ideas that increase your revenue and market share.

Whenever our team starts a pool marketing SEO campaign for one of our pools clients, the first step is a brand strategy and customer journey. Creating the brand strategy or brand development is the long term strategic planning to achieve your long term goals that ultimately result in your customers choosing and preferring your brand over competitors.

The customer journey or buying process is where you define your customer’s behaviours, thoughts, actions, and beliefs as they enter the market for your product or service.

The brand strategy is crucial for defining your audience, their current thoughts and behaviors, why your customers should believe you, your brand personality, and your desired thoughts and behaviors of your customer. The customer journey is crucial for capturing your customers’ attention at each stage of their journey, so you are top of mind when they are ready to make a purchase.

If you go straight to coming up with ideas before creating a brand strategy, you will not understand which ideas are best for achieving your goals. On the other hand, if you skip creating the customer journey, your ideas will not resonate with your target audience. As a result, you will convert fewer customers and incur higher costs for your ads.

We have created a brand and pool marketing strategy for your business. We are nearly ready to begin coming up with ideas. Before we create ideas for your pool marketing, there are a few more steps in between.

1. Are you selling B2B, B2C, or both?

Understanding your customer is crucial to choosing the best ideas for your pool marketing that most efficiently achieve your business goals. Pool swimming businesses may be selling direct to customers, other businesses, or both.

You may have multiple different types of customers if you are selling to B2B and B2C. That means you need to create two separate brand strategies and customer journeys for each customer, along with separate marketing materials for each audience.

2. Is what you are selling an impulse or considered purchase?

Defining the type of purchase is very important for success in your marketing. An impulse purchase is typically a lower value product or service with a short sales cycle that customers impulsively purchase without much thought.

For instance, pool noodles or a squirt gun could be a customer’s impulsive purchase without much thought. Since pool noodles and squirt guns are low-cost items that will not have a permanent effect on the buyer’s life regardless of whether they purchase them or not.

On the other hand, purchasing the design and development of an in-ground pool is a considered purchase.

Your customer will give a long amount of thought and consideration to the process since it costs more money and is a more permanent decision that affects their life long term, which means a longer sales cycle before making a purchase.

3. How long is the sales cycle?

Defining the length of time that your customer takes from the beginning of their journey to the end is crucial to the success of your marketing and ads campaigns. For instance, you may start an ads campaign that generates lots of quality traffic from your ideal customer, but it is not converting. The reason why is that your customer may not be ready to make a purchase yet.

In this case, your ads should be spent on generating traffic and then capturing that traffic to feed your customers marketing content until they are at the purchasing stage of their customer journey. Think of this as getting your traffic to sign up for your email lists, re-targeting ads, Facebook groups, discord chats, and consistent direct mail campaigns for long periods.

If you are a pools business, you may sell many different products and services that each have different sales cycles. Your ads and marketing should be customized depending on the sales cycle length for each pool product or service that you offer.

4. Creating Your Unique Selling Proposition

Your USP or Unique Selling Proposition is a concept developed by Ted Bates, one of the founders of modern advertising used in pool marketing. The USP is based on an answer to your customer’s unique needs from your competition. To create a strong USP, you need to look at all of your competitors’ USPs and develop something unique that strongly resonates with your customers’ needs. 

Creating a strong unique selling proposition could make your company stand out. Considering the majority of pool builders provide the same offering. Check out these pool builder USPs from a search for “pool builders in florida” on Google.

How do these Unique Selling Propositions communicate unique value based on your ideal customers’ needs that no other swim pool builders claim to provide?

The answer is they do not. There is nothing unique about these USPs. There is a tremendous opportunity for your pool business to stand out and pull customers away from the competition.

Now we are ready to choose the best ways to promote and advertise your pool company to your customers. Choose pool company marketing strategies that efficiently achieve both your short term and long term goals in your pool marketing. Do not make the mistake of strictly focusing on short term pools marketing.

The short term is great for getting your pools business going fast but could quickly add up with expensive customer acquisition costs that eat away at your profit over time. Long term pools marketing strategies may take time to get going, but they could have some of the lowest customer acquisition costs with the greatest return on investment over time. This means less money spent on pools marketing and more profit in your swimming pools company pocket.

Paid media is any marketing that cost money to run. Earned media is any marketing that cannot be bought and is earned for free. Think of paid media. Think of print advertising, radio advertising, billboard advertising, paid social media advertising, pay per click advertising on Google, display ads on websites, and tv advertising.

When you think of earned media, think of free traffic from Google using SEO, free social media traffic to your website, free public relations posts in the news or media, people reviewing your products or services without being paid to do so, and word of mouth marketing. 

Paid media is excellent for the short term because you immediately receive the attention that converts into revenue for your business. Over time marketing costs become more expensive, and what used to work stops working, so you continuously have to spend more money to adjust your marketing.

Earned media is expensive in the short term with little results to show but over time, earned media becomes the most cost-effective form of marketing for your business. Earned media is often the highest converting revenue stream with the greatest ROI over time.

Taking an omnichannel approach to marketing means that your paid, owned, and earned media work together. This may look like creating an advertisement on social media that gets people searching on Google, where your website shows up number 1.

Then these customers convert into new customers for your business instead of using your pools marketing together to bring up the best results. Focusing on one channel would be strictly driving traffic through paid media that convert into new customers for your business. 

We recommend taking an omnichannel approach to achieve your business goals most effectively with the greatest ROI at the lowest cost.

Swimming Pool Advertising Ideas for Paid Media

Here are some ideas that you could use for your swimming pool business.

1. Pool Service Mailers

When sending direct mail, think about where your customer is in their customer journey. You could segment your list to reach your customer at different stages in their customer journey. 

For instance, if you have pool service leads that booked a call with your pool service business but did not convert. Then these customers may be at the stage where they are considering their options. You could send them personalized direct mail to help them consider choosing your swimming pool business over any others and stay top of mind when they are ready to choose.

2. Digital Paid Advertising Using Social Media

Paid advertising on social media is great for capturing your customer’s attention where they spend the most of it. However, your customers may be spending most of their time on social media. It is important to think about where they are in their customer journey and sales cycle. People use social media mainly for entertainment and to connect with friends, not to buy products or services.

If you target them with a hard sell ad idea about your business that is not native looking to the platform, then you are throwing your money in the trash. When creating a paid social media strategy, use your customer journey. Help your customers realize they have a problem entertainingly.

For instance, you could boost a video post that shows a family getting ready to go into the pool only to find it all nasty with algae due to a leak. However, your pool service business could come to save the day dressed as superheroes cleaning their pool and fixing the leak so the family could enjoy their day.

Then you could offer free a pool checkup or pool cleaning as a call to action so the viewers of your ad could avoid having an algae-filled pool as an offer. 

This works because people on social media want to be entertained, not sold to, and you are providing a no brainer offer for free. The offer gets your ideal customers in the door, and once they are in the door, you could close them on your products or services. 

The downside is that over time, people will grow tired of seeing the same ad, and your costs will increase while your conversions go down. This means you have to continuously spend more to change up and optimize your ads to keep them effective.

3. Pay Per Click Advertising Your Swimming Pool Cleaning Business

Pay per click advertising works great for capturing your customer at every stage in their customer journey. Every keyword or search term that your ideal customer searches on Google have different intent which corresponds with their journey.

This means your customer may be searching, “What to do if my pool is leaking?” at this stage in their journey, they are not ready to purchase anything. Your customer intends to search for more information, so tailor your pool marketing to reach them at that stage. Once on your website, you could help move them to the next stage.

Pay per click advertising is very effective for increasing revenue from your ideal customers searching to buy what you are selling now. The only downside is that terms where your ideal customers are ready to buy now tend to be the most competitive and, have a very high cost per click.

This means your profit and ROI go down over time. If your business needs immediate leads and revenue in the short term, start here, but a transition to spending more on an earned media strategy over time to reduce costs and increase ROI.

Pool Marketing Ideas, Tips and Strategies for Earned Media…

Here are some marketing ideas and tips for your swimming pool service, pool cleaning business, and swimming pool manufacturers.

1. How to Get Pool Customers and Pool Service Leads Using SEO

SEO is the only form of marketing that increases your ROI over time while lowering your customer acquisition costs. No matter where your customer is in their customer journey, you could reach them on Google Search for free. 

The majority of people searching on Google choose to click the organic results over paid because they trust results that cannot be bought.

Check out the data for the keyword “pool builder near me” in the United States:

There are 702 clicks a month 49% (344 clicks) of those are organic in comparison to only 9% (63 clicks)  that go to paid and then 33% (232 clicks) result in no click at all. If you are a pool business owner or marketer who only spends on paid search you are missing out big time investing in SEO. The no clicks are opportunity for your business to improve your meta titles and descriptions to increase the desire for the searcher to click your result.

Master Search Marketing to Increase Your Revenue and Market Share

The downside of SEO is that it takes a long time to master search marketing and generate results since Google’s algorithm has over 1,000 ranking factors which make it challenging to know what works and what does not work, which is why you should hire an SEO agency or content marketing master that constantly tests to know what works and does not work on Google. 

The other issue is that many SEO agencies and freelancers are over-focused on the technical side of SEO. They ignore your business goals, brand, and marketing strategy, which is why many businesses generate SEO traffic that does not convert into revenue. Choose an SEO agency or freelancer that takes the time to understand your business goals, brand, and marketing strategy before optimizing your SEO.

If you want to take your business market share to the next level while lowering your customer acquisition costs and increasing revenue, reach out for a free consultation.

2. How to Grow a Pool Service Business Using Public Relations

Public relations is a long term strategy that works best for communicating your brand positively to your ideal customers. You could organize a food drive in your local community sponsored by your brand.

You could sponsor a local high school swim team to provide them jerseys with your swimming pool cleaning business logo on them. Over time your business will begin to be recognized within the local community in a positive light, and people will want to support a company that helps them. 

Keep in mind your ideal customer and choose a public relations strategy that aligns with where your customer spends their attention.

3. Organic Social Media Marketing

Organic social media marketing is similar to SEO in that it takes time to experience fantastic results for your pool maintenance swimming business. The difference is the users’ intent when marketing social media compared to Google Search and the reach you have on each platform. Organic SEO online marketing service provides a large amount of visibility to your brand, with around 80% to 90% of all clicks going to organic compared to paid advertising. On the other hand, most social media platforms have a puny 2% to 5% organic reach for your business compared to a 95% to 98% paid reach using social advertising.

That does not mean your swimming pools business should give up on creating social media content in your pool service marketing strategy. The best platforms to spend your attention on social media are evergreen and up and coming.

For instance, YouTube is both a search engine and a social media. The organic reach on YouTube is very high. Your pool service company ideal customers use YouTube to be entertained and learn more about products and services that solve their problems. YouTube is an example of an evergreen platform that is here to stay with a strong organic reach that you could take advantage of to enhance your reputation social-media marketing and increase marketing business sales without using content marketing ads. 

On the other hand, TikTok is an excellent example of an up and coming platform with a strong organic reach. Since TikTok wants to pull users away from other platforms, they provide a very strong organic reach to content creators so that they will use their platform over the other platforms. However, TikTok is mainly an entertainment platform, so you need to create entertaining content and fit the platform natively. 

Using the marketing strategies laid out in this article, we worked with Nereids Aquatic Coaching in Australia on an SEO link building campaign and created $3.6 million in lifetime value revenue increases over 2.5 years of working together. 

I hope you got value out of this article! If you have any questions about the ideas mentioned here or need help, book a call below.