Building Culligan’s Social Media Presence Across TikTok & YouTube

Our core approach involved building a two-part strategy that first proved social media worked for consumer water treatment with appointment-based sales, then expanded to YouTube for search traffic and sustained authority building.

The TikTok strategy focused on creating a social-to-appointments system for homeowners through integrated paid and organic content. We began with rapid content testing across educational themes, then used paid amplification to scale viral organic videos, followed by continuous improvement based on performance data. Our educational entertainment content included a “Problem Water” series addressing customer pain points through entertaining education, lab behind-the-scenes content showing scientific authority, myth-busting videos like “5 Myths About Water” that became viral templates generating 5.9M views, and customer problem-solving content in bite-sized, shareable formats.

The YouTube strategy in 2024 expanded our approach by treating the platform as both social media and search engine. We adapted TikTok content for YouTube Shorts to capture the browsing audience, created search-focused content that ranked on Google and YouTube searches for water-related queries, and developed educational long-form videos with detailed how-to content for specific water problems. The key insight was building content that people found whether they were browsing YouTube for entertainment or searching Google for water solutions.

Content Examples:

• “How to Remove Hard Water Stains” brought in 124K views (educational authority)
• “How Dirty Are Water Parks” saw 25K views (trending entertainment)
• “Is Boiled Water ACTUALLY Safe” earned 24K views (myth-busting content)
• “Still Water vs. Sparkling Water” brought in 20K views (comparison content)
• Water trivia content consistently generating 15K+ views each

We became Culligan’s social media team across a 2+ year partnership, building their presence from zero and proving social media could drive consumer appointments and installations. The partnership evolved from TikTok experimentation to comprehensive video content strategy across platforms.

During the TikTok foundation phase, we built everything from scratch, including audience research, content strategy, and tracking systems since no water company had done social media before. We worked as a unified paid and organic team with weekly reviews, gained access to Culligan labs and customer stories for authentic content creation, and built systems to track social media to appointment conversion. This foundation phase proved that entertainment content could drive real business results for consultation-based sales.

The YouTube expansion broadened our partnership to include search engine results and long-term authority building, taking on Culligan’s entire video content strategy.

Cross-Platform Performance:

• YouTube Search: 178K views from people actively searching for water solutions.
• Google Search Traffic: 96K views from Google driving traffic to YouTube content.
• Multi-Engine Visibility: Content ranking across Google, Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
• Search vs. Social: Higher watch times (1+ minute) on search traffic vs. social browsing.

The content system we built worked for both audiences: people browsing for entertainment and people searching for water solutions. This dual-purpose approach maximized the value of every piece of content while serving Culligan’s complex business model that requires both brand awareness and local appointment generation.