How Big Blue Swim School Uses Data to Drive it’s Marketing Program

After completing a world-class competitive swimming career in 2008, U.S. national champion swimmer Chris DeJong embarked on a new venture creating Big Blue Swim School. DeJong’s passion for teaching water safety, coupled with his strong brand and marketing knowledge, helped the Illinois-based swim instruction franchise excel in the industry. Big Blue is currently one of the most exciting emerging brands in franchising and is well positioned to become the leader of the lucrative $3 billion swim school segment.

Big Blue Swim School appeals to savvy franchise entrepreneurs for many reasons, but its proven marketing program is top-notch as it sets partners up for success before the doors open. The brand’s corporate team implements a comprehensive local marketing campaign long before a school opens, and their efforts continue in perpetuity. Big Blue’s stacked team of marketing experts includes former PepsiCo exec-turned-Big Blue VP of Marketing Brooke Mallick, and DeJong, who understand what parents want when it comes to swim lessons.

“Big Blue acknowledges that marketing is much more than simply picking the right colors for the logo,” said DeJong. “It is essential to have an analytically inclined marketing team that manages SEO optimization, social media, organic lead generation and the internal validation journey. Successful marketing reaches potential customers with the right message at the right time. And when you do what you promise, which for us is providing the best swim school experience possible, you then turn active customers into brand enthusiasts.”

Big Blue’s corporate team has significant marketing experience, including decades of experience in franchising. This allowed the brand to implement a genuinely scientific method to local marketing for each pool, designed to work towards each franchise partner being more successful than those at other brands.

The Big Blue team handles all online and local lead generation for each new pool using the brand’s proprietary New Pool Opening (NPO) system. NPO support occurs four months prior to the grand opening through four months after. Ongoing marketing support includes the execution of a fully integrated, 360-degree local pool marketing playbook, help with national and local community marketing implementation, social media and content marketing management and much more.

Recently, Big Blue opened a new pool in Johns Creek, Georgia, which exceeded its post-COVID goal of customers and opened at over 125% of pre-opening enrollment thanks to  Big Blue’s community readiness pre-opening marketing plan. “The way that Big Blue swim school works with its franchise partner is that each new pool has an opening team, which includes a robust marketing team and community readiness team who manage everything from on the ground marketing to digital social media ads,” said Christy Kent, who works with Level 5 Capital Partners, the franchise partner of the new pool. “For example, we made an effort to join both the Johns Creek and North Bolt chamber of commerce, which helped us get in with the community, network with other businesses and create partnerships to spread the word about the pre-opening special.”

Big Blue optimized this strategy through implementing a non-traditional and non-linear view of the lifecycle of a customer, using data to serve each family over a long period of time, which ultimately drives a higher lifetime value of the customer.

“There are many data sources we can use to triangulate information about how our paid media and email campaigns are performing, and what we can do to drive more efficient and effective campaigns,” said Mallick. “But the most important tool we have at our disposal is our massive database of historical customer information from our proprietary enterprise system, LessonBuddy™. With that data, we better understand and leverage knowledge of past customer behavior to drive future results in a way that separates us from the competition.”

For example, Big Blue is able to leverage more than a decade of customer experience  to understand when families are most likely to try Big Blue for the first time, determine how long they will stay, when they are most likely to take a break, and when they are most likely to return.

“We know our customer trends based on our data so we can create and target marketing campaigns that feel relevant to a mom or dad considering Big Blue as a new or repeat customer,” said Mallick. “For example, we know that we can uniquely serve families with multiple kids and particularly older kids, so by leveraging our marketing tool kit, we  make sure they’re not seeing just images of cute babies in the pool. They see how our pools and services simplify the lives of busy, multi-kid families.”

When Big Blue opened its corporate pool in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood last year, the team selected the location using its data-driven real estate strategy, and the results were the strongest in its history, with more than 1,400 memberships sold prior to opening its doors for lessons.

“What we’ve seen with the North Center opening — and with the recent Johns Creek opening — is the critical nature of a multi-pronged, fully-integrated marketing campaign,” said Mallick. “Our North Center opening was a successful paid approach on Facebook, Instagram and Google, and a strong grassroots program with outreach to the community and a set of corresponding email campaigns. We successfully built upon that strategy for the Johns Creek opening and the integrated approach served us well, even as we hit speed bumps during our Johns Creek opening campaign due to the pandemic. We were able to use our data and past knowledge to quickly pivot the plan and successfully continue with the launch. The team learned a lot from the Johns Creek opening about being nimble and really leveraging the marketing tools at our disposal.”

Mallick notes that the brand has recently updated its website and data collection in LessonBuddy to follow up with customers who have left the website with “abandoned carts.”

“As North Center enters its second year, it joins the other Chicago stores in shifting emphasis on recapturing inactive customers, or customers who swam with us and left to take a break,” said Mallick. “We are using LessonBuddy data in conjunction with our marketing tools to serve up relevant, timely messages to inactive customers to get  them back to the pool extending their lifetime value.”

As Big Blue’s marketing efforts evolve to grow the brand, the team is always analyzing past efforts and trends to help drive new campaigns. “Our goal is to not only build out our performance marketing, driving for an additional sale or conversion, but also to strengthen our brand awareness,” Mallick said. “Opening in North Center, where we already had four existing pools in the area and a significant awareness of swim schools, looked different than introducing the Big Blue brand into Johns Creek as a brand new market. We will continue to learn what helps us build awareness and  strengthen brand loyalty as we expand to new markets and build out our library of content accordingly.”

Multi-unit franchise opportunities are available for qualified candidates looking for their next big opportunity, and veterans can receive a 10 percent discount on the $80,000 franchise fee. The total investment necessary to begin operation of a new Big Blue Swim School is $2,329,223 to $3,636,998 (refer to item 7 in FDD) To learn more or inquire about Big Blue Swim School, visit https://www.bigblueswimschool.com/franchising/.