Chicago, IL

A Chicago pool feed sells against a lake house and a gas bill

A pool here is not bought the way a pool in Phoenix is bought. The season is short, the heater runs on gas, and the household weighing the spend often already has somewhere to be on a hot weekend, a few hours away with water at the end of the drive. Those are the arguments a Chicago feed has to win, and none of them fall to another aerial shot of blue water. The rest of the job is the work itself, because a machine reaching a bungalow yard comes down a rear alley under ComEd's wires and no builder in an open suburban market has that footage. What follows is how we would build a feed out of those facts for a company with a couple of crews and nobody whose whole job is marketing.

The wires over the alley decide the day the machine gets in

There is no driveway on a city lot, so the way into the yard runs under the same poles that feed the block.

A bungalow, two-flat or greystone yard is reached from the rear alley, and the alley is where the poles and the overhead conductors run. An excavator boom, a crane hook or a conveyor going over a garage roof all have to work under them.

So the dig date belongs partly to somebody else. The utility comes out, the span gets guarded or dropped, and the crew waits. Homeowners read a wait as a company that has lost control of its schedule unless somebody explained the constraint to them first.

Film it while it is happening. The pole, the guarded span, the spotter, the boom held low, the machine threading past a garage in Ravenswood or Bucktown. A builder who only works open lots in Naperville cannot produce that shot at all.

Say plainly what the pause is for. A homeowner who watched you explain a guarded line in January does not panic in June when their own job stops for one, and does not go looking for a second opinion while it does.

The pool that gets built here in February is under a roof

A short outdoor season creates a product line builders in warm markets never touch, and almost none of it exists on video.

Indoor pools, small pools with a swim current, and a spa that runs through a Chicago January are real work in this market. A house in Lincoln Park with a lower level, an Elmhurst addition designed around water, a spa on a covered rear deck in Andersonville.

The questions those buyers ask are different and nobody is answering them. What the room has to do about humidity, where the air handling goes, what the glass does in February, why the deck material is not the one you would use outside.

Film the room rather than the water. A wide shot of finished indoor water tells a viewer nothing, because it looks like a hotel. The mechanical space behind it, the ceiling, the vents and the door detail tell them you have built one.

It also gives the account something honest to publish in the months the ground is closed, instead of dressing an old backyard up as a new one.

The competition for a Chicago backyard is a place in Michigan

The family weighing a pool here is usually weighing it against somewhere else to be when it finally gets hot.

Plenty of households in Lincoln Park, Oak Park and Evanston already spend summer weekends at a place in Michigan or Wisconsin. Your bid is not up against another builder's bid. It is up against the drive.

The content that moves those people is not the party. It is the ordinary Tuesday, when somebody swims at six, dinner happens outside, and nobody spends the evening in a car.

So film the ordinary hours. Weekday evening light, an adult doing laps before work, a cover coming off in the time it takes to make coffee rather than a whole weekend being organized around getting somewhere.

The same argument reaches the households that already own the second place, because the city weekends are the ones they currently write off. Nobody has ever made a video for them.

Answer the gas bill before a buyer goes looking for the answer

Every buyer here runs the arithmetic privately, most of them run it badly, and what they find online was written for a market with no winter.

Two questions decide the sale and neither one gets asked out loud. How many weeks is a pool in Cook County actually usable, and what does it cost to heat during them.

Answer from your own jobs. Show a heater working through a cold week in May, a cover holding overnight heat, a spa still running in November, and explain in plain words what drives a bill from Peoples Gas or ComEd when a heater fights a Chicago night.

Covers, heaters and how a yard is laid out are the difference between water that works for a few weeks and water that works for a season. A short series on that beats another finished poolscape, and it is the series nobody in this market has bothered to make.

Some viewers will decide against a pool because you were straight with them, which is a good outcome. A builder working a window this short cannot afford a spring full of buyers who believed they were getting Florida.

The parts of this that have nothing to do with Chicago, like who should be holding the camera and what should never be typed into a comment, we have written down once at /industries/pool-construction/social-media.

Questions we actually get

A pool in Chicago sounds like a luxury nobody uses. How do we answer that on camera?: Head on, with your own work instead of an argument. The honest version is that an unheated season here is short, a heated one is longer, and a household that wants water in October is buying a cover and a spa as much as a pool. Show the yard in May and again in September, show what a cold week in June actually did, and let people run their own arithmetic. Anyone who talks themselves out of it after watching that was going to cancel in the spring anyway, and the ones who stay have already settled the objection your salesperson usually has to argue with in person.
Our buyers keep comparing a pool to a weekend place in Michigan. Do we take that on?: Yes, and gently, because the people you are talking to like the lake house. Do not argue against it. Argue about the ordinary week instead, which is the part the second place does not cover. A Wednesday in July, a swim before work, friends who arrive without packing a car. Show a yard being used on a weekday evening rather than at a party. Households in Wicker Park and Logan Square who have already priced a place up north are the most qualified buyers you have, because they have proved they will spend money on somewhere to be in the summer.
Should we film the day the crew is waiting on the utility?: Film what the wait is for, not the standing around. A guarded span over an alley, a spotter, a boom held low: a Chicago dig has constraints an open lot does not, and showing one is proof of experience rather than an excuse. Publish it months before anybody's job needs it. A homeowner who understands that a city dig waits on the utility before it waits on anything else will forgive a paused week. One who hears it for the first time while their yard sits open will not.
Is indoor pool content worth making when we build one or two a year?: Usually yes, because the audience is small and nobody is serving it. Somebody planning water inside a house in Lincoln Park or a new build in Elmhurst has almost nothing to watch that was not filmed in a hotel. Two or three careful videos about the room, the humidity and the mechanical space keep turning up in that person's research for years. The work is substantial and the content ages slowly, which is a better use of a February than reposting last summer's backyards.
What goes in the feed in February when nothing is being dug?: The parts of the job that happen indoors and the questions the month itself creates. February is when the coldest weeks land on a gas bill, so it is the right time for honest heating and cover content. It is also design season, when a shape changes because of a setback or a tree that has to stay, and when indoor and spa work is actually happening. Anything that pretends a crew is digging in a Chicago February will be read as a repost by exactly the people you want to impress.

What is different here

Residential pool safety requirements sit in state law, but the permitting path, setback rules and barrier inspection practice are administered locally, so what a homeowner actually experiences varies by municipality. Safety features are a legal requirement rather than an upsell, which is worth reflecting in how a quote page is written.

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Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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Tell us what you are working with and we will say what we would do first, and what we would leave alone. A real answer, not a pitch deck.