Morgul Marketing

    Social media for pool builders working in plain view on North Texas clay

    A pool going in behind a new house in Prosper or Frisco has nothing hiding it. Young trees, low fences, and second floor windows on three sides looking straight down into an open hole that stays open through steel and inspection. The ground it is cut into moves with the weather, so the detailing at the deck is the thing local buyers examine and the thing a neighbor has already warned them about. And this metro has been door knocked by out of state crews after every hail line for years, which means an unfamiliar company starts out as a suspect. All three change what a pool builder here should be putting on an account.

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    An open hole on a bare subdivision street is visible from every window

    In new neighborhoods there is nothing to screen the work, and the street watches the part of the job that looks unsafe.

    Newer subdivisions in Prosper, McKinney and Frisco have young trees and low fences. An excavation sits in plain view from second floor windows on three sides, and it stays open through steel and inspection.

    Neighbors with small children notice. What they ask each other is whether it is secured at night. What they do not ask you is why there is standing water in it after a storm.

    Answer before anybody has to ask. A short clip of the temporary fencing, the pump running the rainwater out, and the state of the site when the crew leaves on Friday does more on a street full of prospects than another photograph of finished water.

    Do it on every job in those neighborhoods, because the audience changes each time. A street built in one year fills with households at the same stage of life, and the yard you are working in is the one all of them are looking at.

    The joint at the deck is what a North Texas buyer looks for in your photographs

    Expansive clay has trained homeowners here to inspect the edges of a pool rather than the water.

    Soil across the Metroplex shrinks through a dry summer and swells when the rain returns, and the movement shows up where a deck meets coping and where concrete meets the house.

    So the buyer scrolling your gallery is studying a strip most builders crop out. They have been told a story about somebody's separated coping in Plano or Richardson, and they are checking whether your work looks like the story.

    Film the detailing while it is open. Steel, the bond beam, the expansion joint before it is filled, how the deck is separated from the shell, what goes in under a cantilever. It is unglamorous and it is the most specific proof you own.

    Older neighborhoods hand you the same footage from the other direction. A renovation in Lakewood or Oak Cliff where the old deck came off shows what was underneath it, and that view exists for about a day before the new pour covers it again.

    Nobody can tell a Dallas homeowner what the pump will cost to run

    The rate belongs to a retail provider the household chose and can leave, while the meter and the wires belong to somebody else entirely.

    Texas homeowners buy electricity from a retail provider and take delivery from the transmission and distribution utility, so two companies are already involved before anyone mentions a pump.

    The efficiency content every pool company in the country publishes does not survive that arrangement. A claim about what a variable speed pump saves rests on a rate you do not know, a plan the customer may switch out of, and a bill you have never seen.

    So publish the half you own. Run time at each speed, what the pump is actually doing at each, what changes with a bigger filter or a longer plumbing run. A homeowner in Southlake or Garland can hold their own rate against that in a minute, and the answer is theirs rather than yours.

    It also keeps you out of the rebate conversation, which shifts by provider and by year and lives in the customer's own account rather than in your caption.

    A metro that has been door knocked for years checks whether you existed last year

    Hail brings crews from out of state into every trade here, so an unfamiliar company carries a burden of proof it never earned.

    After a hail line crosses the Metroplex, restoration operators arrive, work a season and go. Households in Collin County and Tarrant County have watched that cycle repeat, and it has taught them to be careful with a company they have not heard of before.

    An account answers that better than any claim can, because it is dated. Jobs from three seasons back, the same crew, the same suburbs, going further back than the last storm. What persuades is not the newest post, it is that there is a record behind it.

    So do not clear the account down to its best work. An archive that starts this year looks exactly like the thing buyers here have learned to avoid, and the ordinary jobs are what make the good ones believable.

    The rest of it, from answering a public complaint to how often to publish while the crews are buried, is general to this trade and sits on our national pool builder page.

    Questions we get

    A neighbor asked whether the open hole is safe overnight. What should we show?
    Show the site the way it looks after the crew leaves. Temporary fencing and how it is secured, the pump clearing rainwater, the spoil pile kept back from the edge, the yard on a Monday morning. On a street in Prosper or McKinney where every window looks into that yard, one short clip settles a question that would otherwise get asked at three different fences.
    Can we say a variable speed pump will lower a customer's bill?
    Not with a number, and not in this market. The rate belongs to a retail provider the homeowner chose and can change, so the same pump produces a different answer on two identical houses. Publish run time at each speed and what the equipment is doing, and let the customer put their own rate against it. It reads as more honest and it is the only version you can stand behind.
    Should we really photograph expansion joints? They look like flaws.
    They look like flaws to you and like evidence to a buyer here. North Texas homeowners have heard about separated coping and moving decks, and the strip you want to crop is the strip they enlarge. Film the joint before it is filled, show how the deck is kept off the shell, and let the detail carry the argument that the finished photograph cannot.
    Our new build yards are bare and the finished photographs look empty.
    Say so rather than hiding it. A yard in a Frisco or Prosper subdivision has new sod, young trees and a builder grade fence, and the buyer looking at it lives in the same kind of yard. Shoot the water, the deck detail and the equipment, then go back a season later for a second set once the landscape has filled in and post the two together.
    Out of state companies knocked on our client's door after the last storm. How do we look different from them?
    By being older than the last hail line in public. Keep the archive intact instead of pruning it to the best jobs, so a homeowner in Tarrant County or Collin County can scroll back through several seasons and see the same crew in the same suburbs. A record with years behind it is the one claim a company that arrived in March cannot copy.

    Rules that affect your marketing

    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.

    Pool Construction & Renovation Social Media Strategy & Execution elsewhere

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

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