Jay Baer - Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype

I was officially scared to death. It was November 2008. The stock market was in a terrible nose dive. Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama debated what should be done about failing banks and financial institutions. To say the U.S. economy was in a tailspin would be an understatement, and consumer confidence was suddenly, almost overnight, shaken to the core.

Within days of the market collapse I had four customers withdraw their deposits. More would follow in the coming weeks. What had appeared to be a healthy late spring and winter for my business was becoming a nightmare.

I was a pool guy, as homeowners often call us. Along with my two business partners I had owned River Pools and Spas in Warsaw, Virginia, since 2001. We started with a beat-up pickup truck, three guys, and a dream. By 2008 we had become a formidable in-ground swimming pool construction company with more than seventy fiberglass pool installations a year in Virginia and Maryland.

Going into 2008 I was oozing with confidence. Our brand was expanding, and we were pushing growth as hard as we possibly could. Finally, after years of physical, mental, and emotional sacrifice we were going to experience the fruits of our labors. But no amount of sacrifice or experience could have prepared us for the economic collapse. The faucet that had been flowing wide open during the previous decade suddenly refused to allow even a drop to fall.

By January 2009, our company was on the brink of complete financial ruin. The phone simply wasnt ringing. It stood to reason; one thing consumers rarely do in the worst economic times since the 1930s is sit around the dinner table and decide to purchase a swimming pool. Even in the rare circumstances when there were interested customers, banks had made luxury-lending nearly impossible with the tightening of credit and the evaporation of home equity due to the collapse of the real estate market. We had almost no projects for the foreseeable future. Our credit lines were maxed out, our sixteen employees were sitting at home with nothing to do, and our bank accounts were overdrawn for three consecutive weeks.

I was depressed, scared, and out of ideas. I found myself turning to the one place we seem to go to find the answers were looking forthe Internet. Since I certainly wasnt installing pools, I had plenty of time to research new marketing and business concepts; as I did, concepts like blogging, inbound marketing, content marketing, and social media kept coming up again and again and again.

Like most of us I had an inherent sense that business and marketing were shifting to the web, but, as a not particularly computer-savvy guy, it wasnt something that had ever seemed applicable to my business. But, Id never been more ready to try something new. Unless we figured out a way to generate more leads and sales without spending money on advertising, we were going to close our doors, and my business partners and I would lose our homes.

It was time to sink or swim.

What I discovered first, and what will become exceptionally clear in this book, is that consumers of all types expect to find answers on the Internet now, and companies that can best provide that information garner trust and sales and loyalty. Success flows to organizations that inform, not organizations that promote. Its a fundamental change in how I think about business, and youll think differently, too, after reading Youtility.

My new plan for River Pools and Spas was simple: I decided to act like a swimming pool consumer instead of a swimming pool installer. I applied this methodology in two ways that changed my company and my life.

First, I brainstormed every single question Id ever received from a prospect or customer. Since I had been selling swimming pools for about eight years at the time, this list quickly grew to hundreds of questions. Then I answered every single one of those questions with its own blog post, adding hundreds of new pages to my website (www.riverpoolsandspas.com) in the process. Id already answered these questions face-to-face, on the telephone, and through e-mail, so I knew the answers; Id just never considered putting them on a blog.

It wasnt easy. I wasnt much of a writer, and I was already working sixty or more hours a week doing whatever I could to keep our company alive. But, late at night, when my wife and four young kids were asleep, Id sit at the kitchen table and write. Each post took about an hour, and, unlike most companies that think the word blog means brag, I never made the articles a River Pools advertisement. Instead, I simply answered the questions as honestly and frankly as I could.

I added new posts to the website every week, and it became immediately obvious that they were having an impact on my business. We were getting more website visitors, mostly because Google was providing links to the new posts when consumers searched for information about the same issues I was addressing. This increase in traffic also generated significant new leads, connecting River Pools and Spas to potential customers who otherwise might never have known about us. The website, never a big part of our business, suddenly became central to our operations.

I also started getting comments from prospects who took the time to write little notes in the contact us form on the site:

I love your website, Marcus, its so informative, I spent over an hour on there the other night!

Marcus, thank you for answering all of our questions, we cant tell you how much easier youve made this process!

Marcus, everywhere I look online for information about fiberglass pools I keep seeing your name!!

I had started the magical journey toward Youtility.

For years, sales appointments had been arduous for me. I would arrive at customers homes and find their knowledge about pools (types, costs, accessories, etc.) so poor that Id literally have to spend hours with them at their kitchen tables, teaching them all of this basic information, just to get to a point where we could start talking about what it was they wanted and how much it was all going to cost. But now the website had become a useful resource for these prospects, and I was finding many homeowners were incredibly informed