Instead of buying ads, Marcus committed to publishing an article answering each of the 100+ real customer questions he'd brainstormed, on the company's own website.

“we're just going to take all the questions that we've been asking. We're going to answer them on their Web site.”

No other company in the fiberglass pool industry was willing to publish real pricing information online at the time, so River Pools' content became the only real answer available in Google's results for the industry's most commonly searched questions.

“Our company was the first company to talk about how much does an in-ground pool cost?”

Marcus published a post ranking the five best pool builders in his market by name and deliberately left his own company off the list, which pulled his site into Google results for every competitor's name.

On a conference panel, Marcus described his approach of writing down every customer question and answering it publicly, and watched the audience start writing the phrase down themselves in real time.

“I could immediately see like everybody in the audience was, they were just writing stuff down.”

The phrase distilled his whole strategy into something instantly memorable for a room of marketers already primed by early inbound-marketing ideas.

“that just landed”