Justin Champion - Inbound Content

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Copyright 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Champion, Justin, 1986- author.

Title: Inbound content : a step-by-step guide to doing content marketing the inbound way / Justin Champion.

Description: Hoboken : Wiley, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018000766 (print) | LCCN 2018005631 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119488972 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119488965 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781119488958 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Marketing. | Relationship marketing. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Marketing / General.

Classification: LCC HF5415 (ebook) | LCC HF5415 .C482433 2018 (print) | DDC 658.8/02--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000766

Create value before you try to extract it.

Dharmesh Shah

I must be frank: I have a love/hate relationship with the phrase content marketing.

Why?

Well, let's start with the hate part.

As a small business owner and entrepreneur, I learned an important reality many years ago: If you want to get something approved in business, you call it sales. If you want to get it rejected, or at least tabled for another day, you call it marketing.

Yes, it's the truth. And if you've been in the business world for any period of time, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

No CEO is ever going to wake up one morning and say, I want to be the best content marketer in the world. Not going to happen.

But once someone gets past the marketing speak and truly understands what content marketing is, then there's so much to love. The fact is, I owe all my business success today to the principles of content marketing. But to understand where I'm coming from, you need to know where it all began.

In 2001, fresh out of college, I started a swimming pool company with my two dear friends, Jim Spiess and Jason Hughes. Those early years were quite difficult, but we managed. Over time, we started to figure out who we were and how to be successful. But just when I thought we were finally going to make headway, 2008 happened, and everything changed.

You remember that year, don't you?

In what seemed like an overnight turn of events, the U.S. economy collapsed. Banks were foreclosing. The stock market plummeted. And with it, consumer confidence tanked. The economic collapse of 2008 was brutal for the entire swimming pool industry. Many contractors had to close their doors. Others were forced to make drastic cuts to stay afloat.

River Pools and Spas was by no means immune to this pain. In fact, by January of 2009, my company was staring bankruptcy square in the face. But, as is often the case with trials and tribulation, this incredibly hard period proved to be a godsend. It forced me to finally look around and accept what I already knew: Buyers had changed.

Yes, the Internet had become the ultimate educational source for most consumers. Yet we at River Pools had not yet responded to this digital shift.

It was during this difficult time that I started to throw myself into learning about using the Internet to build my business. I read such phrases as inbound marketing, content marketing, blogging, and many others. But the more I learned about all of this technical jargon, the more my simple pool guy mind interpreted everything back to this simple point:

Marcus, if you obsess over the questions your prospects and customers ask every single day, and you're willing to address those questions honestly, transparently, and consistently on your website through text and video, you just might save your business.

Yes, it was really that simple for me.

I knew our new goal would come down to our ability to teach and communicate with today's digital buyer in a way that would (hopefully) garner trust, traffic, leads, and sales. And, as you might have already guessed, this is exactly what happened.

Over the next two years, despite the difficult economy, somehow we survived as a company.

Not only did we survive, we thrived.

When we became prolific teachers on our website, the traffic and leads started to take off. And as things worked, I became more and more bold.

On our website we addressed any question you could possibly think of with respect to a fiberglass pool, most of which had never been addressed by other swimming pool companies. Whether the question was good, bad, or ugly, we were going to address it, without bias, and with the reader or viewer in mind.

Well, to make a long story short, River Pools landed back on solid ground. And when I say solid, I mean really solid. In fact, by 2016, we averaged 600,000 visitors a month to our website, making it the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world.

Not only did this explosion in traffic and leads catapult us to be the largest installer of fiberglass pools in the United States, it ended up creating an interesting problemwe were getting leads from all over the country, leads that we couldn't service because they were out of our area.

It was at this point we took all the revenue we had built since our digital shift and invested it back into the business, building a manufacturing facility for fiberglass swimming pools.

In 2017, just over a year later, we built roughly 200 fiberglass swimming poolssomething unheard of for such a young manufacturer. And within the next 7 to 10 years I expect us to be the largest manufacturer of fiberglass pools in the United States.