Marketing Tips for Pool Pros

As a pool maintenance business, what you want to spend your days doing is going out on jobs and working on pools. That is your bread and butter, and it’s where you make your money. Of course, you can only go out to work on pools when you have jobs booked, and that’s where marketing comes into the picture. You’ll need to successfully market your services to potential clients, so you can fill up your schedule and keep the revenue flowing month after month.

 To help you improve your marketing efforts and book out as many appointments as possible, we have collected some basic marketing tips below. With a little time and effort – and a modest investment – you can implement this advice and hopefully grow your business. As with all marketing endeavors, it’s important to monitor how these methods work so you can adjust as you go and lean into the ones that are yielding the biggest returns. Let’s get started!

Pound the Pavement

Taking an old-school approach to marketing – especially if you are in the early days of your business – can be effective for pool maintenance companies. That means simply getting out, walking around, introducing yourself to people and explaining what you have to offer. This could mean going door to door in certain areas, or it could mean attending things like conventions where plenty of pool owners will be gathered in the same place.

If you are going to take this traditional approach to marketing, one thing to keep in mind is that you need to have a selling proposition ready to go when meeting new prospects. You don’t want to blend in with the crowd as just another pool maintenance company. Instead, you need to find some way to stand out, whether it is a special offer, the equipment you use, experience in the field, or something else. Spend time thinking about what it is that makes you different and then make that a point of emphasis when trying to close deals.

Pick the Right Targets

It’s quite obvious that you should be selling to people who own pools – someone who doesn’t own a pool isn’t going to have much of a need for a pool maintenance company. But even within that demographic, you need to make sure you are selling to the right subset of pool owners to make it more likely that you’ll find new customers. Specifically, you need to find people who are interested in hiring a maintenance team instead of caring for their pool as a DIY job.

Also, don’t forget about the possibility of servicing commercial accounts. Nearly every hotel has a pool, and those all need to be cleaned and maintained properly. Plenty of other facilities have pools as well, just make sure you have the capacity to take on these kinds of bigger projects before you spend your time and effort pitching services to a commercial client. There is only so much time in each day and you don’t want to waste any of it trying to track down business from a client who wouldn’t be a good fit anyway.

Offer a First-Time Discount

This is a classic tip because it is such an effective way to get your foot in the door with new customers. Come up with a standard offer that you provide to all new customers that will allow them to try out your services for a very low cost. For example, maybe their first pool cleaning is 50%, or whatever you think you can afford to offer. When people take you up on this offer, you might not make a lot on that first service, but you can think of it as an audition – if you do a great job and impress from start to finish, booking repeat business with those customers at full price should be pretty easy.

Keep Up with the Times

While we already mentioned how there is a place in pool maintenance marketing for old-school tactics, you also don’t want to get stuck so far in the past that you fail to use digital methods to find new customers. As a starting point, that means creating a basic website that has information about your services and a phone number to contact you directly. Even if you use it for nothing else, you want that website to be live online, so prospective customers can find it if they have questions about your company. The presence of a clean, professional website on the web is going to lend your business an additional air of professionalism that would be missing otherwise.

A good website is a starting point, but you may also decide to venture into running ads online as a way of capturing more leads. This method has the potential for huge growth, but there is also plenty of competition. Consider working with an online ad agency, at least at the start, so you can control your ad spending and test out different strategies.

Rewards for Referrals

Finally, as you do start to grow your list of customers, create a rewards program for people who refer new customers to your business. This is a common practice in many service industries because it works so well. People who own pools tend to know other people who own pools, and you want to give them a reason to praise your work. Just a simple discount on an upcoming service, or even a gift card to a local restaurant, could be more than enough to encourage your happy customers to spread the word.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel when marketing a pool maintenance business. Plenty of basic, straightforward marketing strategies can be effective in this space, so it’s just a matter of trying them out and seeing what works for you. Over time, you can fine-tune these efforts to cut down on your marketing spending while still keeping the pipeline full. Good luck!