River Pools & Spas

River Pools & Spas is a swimming pool building and maintenance company. Marcus Sheridan, the owner of the company started marketing the product through traditional modes of marketing like Radio and Television advertisement during 2001. Owing to the increasing costs of these modes, Sheridan had spent about $200,000 per year on all marketing initiatives between 2007 and 2009.

Only after 2009, Sheridan ventured into online marketing platform like blogging and Social media as he felt the need of sharing the information to the prospects in a more descriptive manner and at the same time, trying to have more lead conversions. Initially, he started online marketing using paid tools to draw traffic to his blogs in which he shared information about various swimming pools and their cost and maintenance. But, soon the cost of online marketing started soaring high. The introduction of other marketing tools and its competitors foraying into the same ground made his efforts less rewarding. Sheridan, then started working on quality content for his blog and focussing on organic traffic instead of paid traffic which would retain the visitors for longer period than earlier.

This resulted in an increase in the organic traffic. Sheridan used other features of Inbound Marketing like C-T-A button, search bar, more site links for inbound traffic of highly credible websites, long tailed keywords and posting regular blog updates on the social media accounts. This eventually helped River Pools & Spas to attract more organic traffic and as a result in over a year and a half, River Pools’ blog had 467 blog subscribers, approximately 45,000 monthly blog page views, and between 300 and 500 views for each blog article. Long-tail keyword search also boosted search traffic. For “fiberglass pools problems” and “fiberglass pool prices,” River Pools website received over 1,000 organic search visits in two weeks.

By 2010, RPS had the most popular blog in the pool industry and had installed 600 pools. It somehow sustained the economic downturn during that time, while 50% of its competitors went out of business. It became one of the largest pool companies in the US and the number one pool company in the country specializing in fiber glass.

On a whole, the case provides a clear picture of the basic steps of Inbound Marketing technique, which can be followed for optimizing and increasing the online traffic for a business and to focus on converting maximum possible leads.