Building Local Mega Branding

Partnering with a digital marketing agency to collaboratively build a local powerhouse

There aren’t many homeowners in Arizona who haven’t heard of California Pools & Landscape. When we began working with this award-winning business, it had a very strong local presence, built over several decades in Arizona. It was a true example of a legacy company with long-time standing, a good reputation, and a top-tier rating from the Better Business Bureau.

The Power of Partnership

Firstly, it is worth saying that building local mega branding has to be a collaborative effort. Even the greatest marketing firms can only work with what you give them. The substance matters. Thankfully, California Pools & Landscape is a business full of talented, driven individuals who regularly give time and thought to service, development, and strategy. Their internal efforts made them all-star partners, primed for greater success.

Moreover, the businesses that are most successful in this space are engaged partners. They encourage collaboration with their outsourced marketing team and their internal staff while building out their brand. California Pools & Landscape’s collaboration and communication with our team has allowed us to propel their brand to the place it is today. It has been amazing to grow together.

Digital Assets

One of the first tasks we faced when we started working with branding six years ago was the organization of its digital assets.

California Pools & Landscape had assets scattered across the internet that were often inconsistent.

This turns out to be a very common challenge for legacy companies—once you have been in business for years, various staff have came and went, or changed positions, and control over the management of these listings and assets can get lost in the shuffle.

When we began working together, we discovered that some of the listings around the internet—think Yelp, LinkedIn, Google Business—were outdated. Some had earlier versions of logos or missing information. We were able to step in and help them gain control of old listings and assets, remove what no longer served them, and align all of the content—bringing brand consistency across channels.

: Linkedin

: Twitter

: Yelp!

Website Redesign

An exciting part of our work together involved the website’s redesign. With the speed that technology moves, it’s not surprising that many businesses quickly find their websites dated and lacking the best possible technology and user experience.

We were able to rebrand, refresh the editorial content, optimize for mobile and completely redevelop the website, turning it into an internet destination. We created and implemented a conversion strategy that has proven hugely successful, and drove dynamic content while maintaining the integrity of the site’s speed and functionality. As the business has grown, they’ve brought on more internal team members, who now collaborate with our team to generate email content, improve their search engine optimization, run web campaigns, and produce and post social media and blog content.

Branding

Another key component of our overall strategy for California Pools was a top-to-bottom rebranding. We used our in-house design team to create a fresh new logo that maintained the brand recognition they had built up over the years. We then implemented that logo far and wide and made sure that it was consistently applied across all listings and channels. We also ensured the new branding kit was applied on their physical assets as well—storefronts, company vehicles, brochures, signage, and other printed material. This consistency ensures that the money a business invests in “freshening” their look is well deployed and gives clients a sense of confidence.

Twitter

Social Media

When we initially partnered with CPL, their social media following was much smaller than it is today—around several hundred followers. Today, they have around 12,000 followers, powered by a well-laid out social media strategy.

For example, their Facebook account has a global page, but also includes separate listings for each of their various locations. As such, we’re able to post to the global location and allow the site to auto-post to all the others.

There is consistent sharing of great content across all their channels including Google Business, which really boosts their ability to be found organically in Google Maps.

We also utilize Facebook lead generation, which drives ads to users who have already been to the business’ website.

Email campaigning

Like many businesses without an in-house marketing team, email campaigning was underdeveloped at California Pools in their earlier years. Using our in-house team, we created beautiful, hand-made campaigns for them over the years that have generated a huge subscriber following with heavy engagement. In fact, these campaigns are so effective that sometimes they struggle to keep up with leads and have actually asked us to pause campaigns for short periods because they generate so many phone calls!