Drive traffic with Twitter
There are many social media networking platforms available, e.g. LinkedIn, Tumblr, Digg and Flickr, to name a few. Those in the pool and spa industry who are thinking about implementing a successful social media marketing initiative must make sure they select the appropriate platforms, as some are no longer worth the amount of time they were even a year ago.
MySpace, for example, once the darling of teenagers and college students talking about their latest trip to the mall, is now on the express train to irrelevance—particularly for pool and spa companies. Its audience always skewed extremely young to begin with, and that meant the website attracted too few homeowners to make it a worthwhile marketing medium.
Twitter, on the other hand, is fast becoming an influential force on the Internet. However, its limitations are a 140-character maximum on each post, which begs the question, “How much can an online marketer really accomplish on Twitter?”
To get an idea of how long a 140-character line is, look at the sentence above. It cannot be posted because it is 152 characters (with spaces). Now, that is not to say Twitter will not work, as it is great to ‘tweet’ and acquire a following and audience; however, it has yet to prove that it can drive enough pool and spa leads to justify investing a whole lot of time into it.
If you plan on using Twitter, focus narrowly on using it in two specific ways:
- Target members and followers in your specific marketing territory. You do not need to market to anyone outside your territory; it is better to focus on users who are in your geographical area.
- Announce changes and updates to your company’s website. Ultimately, Twitter is best used to drive traffic to your site. If you can announce a new ‘before and after’ for a recent pool installation, or a new sale/discount offer, you will use your limited characters to drive viewers to your site, where you can expand on your post.
Cultivate an audience with Facebook
Facebook can be the perfect complement for a home improvement company. Whether it is for weekly maintenance, retail sales or a one-off service call, a pool/spa company comes into contact with its customer base quite frequently and has a steady, ongoing relationship with them. This is the perfect type of audience to develop using Facebook.
Thanks to the existing relationship, a pool/spa company can be straightforward and ask their customers to ‘friend’ the company. Once customers accept ‘friend requests,’ the company has an online channel to contact them via status updates and e-mails for marketing purposes.
The first way to market to your new Facebook friends is to update your status with information about your store, products and services. Creating a status update is effortless; they can be as simple as a quick note on an in-store sale, or a warning that pool season is winding down and pool owners should schedule their closing before it is too late.
Professionals can also send direct messages to clients via Facebook e-mail. Customers who are difficult to reach by phone and not returning messages may feel differently when contacted via Facebook.
The key is thoughtful consistency. Updating your existing customer base on new products, sales, in-store specials or new maintenance services is fair game. Usually, this would be done via a status update, which allows your Facebook friends to see what your company is up to. E-mail is a more aggressive tactic, but when used judiciously, it can be a great tool to drive sales.
BonaVista LeisureScapes’ utilization of Facebook marketing provides a perfect example. The Toronto-based swimming pool builder has a simple profile page, which contains an image of their storefront, 15 different photo albums containing images of finished projects and various merchandise, and close to 100 ‘friends.’ Presumably, most of these friends are the company’s customers, and have agreed to let BonaVista into their virtual lives.
Via status updates, the company has continually kept customers informed about ‘No tax’ promotions on hot tubs, contests such as ‘Free water care products for a year’ and inventory clearance specials.
None of these updates take an extraordinary amount of time to write or support, but it does take diligence. Remembering to update your status twice a week can be tough to do during the busy season; however, the effort can result in phone calls and even prompt users to ask questions online, which all of your other customers can see.
