Today I want to share the case study that started the inbound marketing commitment for me. Though I’ve written about this case study before, it’s definitely worth revisiting. If you haven’t read the article before, I highly recommend it.
THE RIVER POOLS AND SPAS STORY
Marcus Sherdian and the River Pools and Spas case study highlight what’s great about inbound marketing. Marcus (who is a personal friend) is a world-renowed inbound marketing expert today, but he wasn’t when River Pools was faced with the very real possibility of shutting their doors and filing bankruptcy.
With his back literally to the door, Marcus (who doesn’t know the word quit) decided to go 100% in with blogging and inbound marketing. He absorded everything he could on inbound and decided to use his blog to answer every single customer question he and his partners were ever asked.
THE RESULTS
Blogging and inbound marketing not only saved his business, it’s made his business one of the most successful pool installation companies in the world. Oh – and his business is based in rural Virginia. How’s that for taking on the big competitors?
One of my favorite parts of this case study is how Marcus decided to answer the biggest questions clients had: the questions of cost and price.
When I first met Marcus in person 2 years ago, one single blog post that discussed the cost of a fiberglass pool had resulted in $1.2 MILLION in trackable sales. This means, through the HubSpot software we use, Marcus could concretely track over a million dollars in pool sales to that single blog post.
But what’s even better is this. Even though he first wrote the blog post in 2009, the post STILL bring in leads and sales. To date, that 1 post has brought in near $3.0 MILLION in sales. Remember, that doesn’t include other posts on his site, that’s just one single post.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Notice that great content, once it’s produced, keeps working for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And that’s the beauty of doing this work, the work many of your competitors aren’t willing to do.
Create great content that answers your users’ questions and it will serve you and your customers well for the long run.
HOMEWORK
So what questions do you have about blogging? What’s keeping you from committing 100%? Hopefully after reading these case studies and our eBook, you’ll realize if you want to win online today, providing useful, educational content to your customers is a must.
So are you in?
In our next posts we will start sharing tips and advice for getting your content engine going so 2014 is your best year in business yet!
