Marcus Sheridan owned a swimming pool company in Virginia named River Pools and Spas back in 2008. During the financial collapse of 2008, pool sales dried up virtually overnight. He had 60 employees and a mortgage. He was, by his own admission, weeks away from shutting down the business entirely. One night, he sat at his kitchen table and thought about what customers were actually searching for.
He grabbed a notebook and wrote down every question his pool customers had ever asked him: How much does a fiberglass pool cost? What are common problems with fiberglass pools? How does fiberglass hold up next to concrete? Who are the best pool companies in Virginia? Then he sat down, and he wrote. Blog posts. Long-form answers to every question on that list. Honest answers. For every few posts his competitors wrote about why you should buy a pool, he wrote one about why you shouldn’t. About maintenance. About cost. About conflicting opinions within the industry.
In three months, River Pools’s traffic grew 100%. Within years, RiverPools.com became, by Sheridan’s account to ZenPilot (zenpilot.com), the highest-traffic pool company website in the world. One article titled “ How much does a fiberglass pool cost? ” had generated over $3.5 million in sales revenue according to reporting by Social Media Examiner. By 2014, River Pools was pulling in $5.5 million a year in revenue while spending only $20k on marketing for the entire year. Sheridan has openly discussed these numbers on multiple occasions. An enterprise weeks away from bankruptcy became a case study used at marketing schools worldwide. And recently inspired a book written by the founder himself, They Ask You Answer.
And not one dollar came from paid advertising.
What Content Marketing Isn’t
When most people think of content marketing, they think of blogging. Corporate blog posts that no one reads about “Industry Trends” or “The State of the Industry”. Content marketing is not posting articles on your own website. Content marketing is not what you think.
True content marketing is providing people with answers. Answers to every question your target customer is asking. Search anything literally on Google. “How to start a blog”. “WordPress vs Joomla”. “What fruits are good for you”. Searchers are already there. They are already asking questions. Content marketing serves those questions with genuine answers.
Notice I said genuine. Content that doesn’t actually provide value to the reader is simply advertising dressed up as blogging. The only content you should publish is content your ideal customer would actively seek out.
Why Sheridan’s blog post about pool prices performed wasn’t because he was a great writer. He simply owned Google’s search results for a question thousands of people searched monthly because his answer was better than 100% of the alternatives. He had nowhere to go but up.
How Content Can Give You a Permanent Advantage
Think about how content differs from paid ads. What happens when you stop paying for ads? You stop getting customers. What happens when you stop publishing content? Nothing. Articles you write can continue to generate leads years from now without any additional effort from you. It’s difficult to understand how powerful that is until you’ve built something from content alone.
That dental practice that converts $20k/month from their blog? They could stop publishing tomorrow and keep ranking. Ten years from now, that blog could still be bringing in tens of thousands of dollars per month and paying for itself long ago.
A study conducted by Demand Metric, which has been cited by the Content Marketing Institute as well as numerous industry-specific studies, found that content marketing costs 62% LESS than traditional advertising methods while generating 3x as many leads. Companies that maintained active blogs saw an increase in monthly leads of 67% over companies that didn’t blog at all, according to the same study.
At $0 ad budget, your blog is your best shot at acquiring customers. Period.
Find the Question
So how do you get started? Think back to Sheridan. They ask you to answer. What questions are your ideal customers searching for right now? “How do I start a blog?” was SEOWhatever’s opening question. I spent weeks researching and trying to figure out what to blog about next.
Once you know the question, throw your assumptions out the window and offer the most complete, honest answer possible.
Your competition doesn’t want you to answer these questions because they’re easy. Quite the opposite. Sheridan thrives off of difficult questions about pool sales because his competitors refuse to provide honest answers to them.
Start with the questions no one else wants to answer. Pricing. Product comparisons. Drawbacks to your solution. Competitors avoid these topics like the plague because they believe providing this information will hurt their sales. It’s the exact reason those posts are valuable and why answering them provides so much value to your audience. If your competitors are afraid to provide an answer, nearly everyone searching that question will find you instead.
River Pools dominated Google when he answered the question “how much does a fiberglass pool cost” because no one else would. That page has generated $3.5 million. It took him an hour.
Figure out what your customers are asking and answer it before anyone else does.
