As a small business owner, you probably already know the unique challenges of running a plumbing business.
While other industries and trades can target a specific audience or rely on seasonal business, you have to target two separate markets throughout the year:
- The customer who has a plumbing emergency, such as a broken pipe, and needs to find a plumber ASAP.
- The customer who needs routine maintenance or a new installation.
The customer who needs your local services in a hurry will spend less time researching and comparing plumbing companies than the other.
To successfully grow your plumbing business, you’ll need to create marketing strategies that address both types of customers while remaining competitive in your market.
Before we begin, we must let you know on the front-end, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
But you can start small and still get great results.
Digital Marketing for plumbers: Where to begin?
The most effective place to start marketing your plumbing services is online. It’s easy to scale as your business grows, and you can reach a broad audience with less cost and effort than offline marketing (door-to-door, billboards, print advertisements).
In 2020, plumbing company marketing involved way more digital options than ever. By leveraging digital marketing, you can see the most significant impact on your business.
Some of the most common digital marketing services that we provide to our plumbing company clients are:
- Website Design
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Social Media Marketing
- Video Marketing
- Email Marketing
Even if you’re a new plumbing business with no digital marketing experience, you can get started without spending a lot on digital marketing services.
We’ll give you some actionable digital marketing strategies you can put into practice right now.
The 8 best strategies you can use right now to grow your plumbing business are:
- Claiming your Google Business listing
- Creating a plumbing website that converts
- Setting up a Facebook page
- Gathering and managing online reviews
- Use call-only ads
- Creating expert plumbing content
- Getting more leads with work requests.
- Using customer service as a marketing tool.
In this post, we will show you how these eight strategies can help you reach both the ’emergency market’ and the ‘looking-around market”, allowing you to grow your plumbing business as a whole.
Before we dive into these strategies, let’s lay down a solid foundation of plumber marketing fundamentals.
Plumber Marketing Fundamentals
It all starts with your brand.
When you sought out to create a successful plumbing business, you probably didn’t see yourself spending all day in an attic sweating copper pipe and all night analyzing a website and ad traffic.
But you probably know way more about digital marketing than you think.
Whether you know It or not, by this point, you’ve done a pretty fair bit of marketing already.
You’ve created your business name and logo. You’ve spread the word of your new business to your friends and family. You’ve asked all of your existing customers for referrals.
Guess what? These are all considered standard marketing practices.
Now, back to your brand.
To get the most return on investment for your marketing efforts, we suggest that you start at the beginning: your brand.
Your brand is more than just a memorable logo and a catchy tagline.
It’s the promise that you make to your customers. It’s what separates you from your competition and the reason that customers will choose you from all of the other dozen or so companies that will show up when they enter “plumber near me” into a Google search.
When establishing your plumbing company’s brand, ask yourself these three questions:
- What unique service or offering do we bring to the market? What makes our company unique? What do we specialize in or do differently than everyone else in our area? For example: “We offer around-the-clock emergency service in rural areas, or we have the fastest response time in our city.
- Who is the ideal customer that we are trying to reach?
- What are our company’s beliefs, and values, and how do we reflect them in our day-to-day operations?
Use your answers to the above questions as the basis for creating your tagline.
For example: If your plumbing company is committed to exceptional customer service and high-quality work, you could have a tagline like, “Once a customer, always a customer.”
Start with your website.
Your website will be the first interaction people will have with your brand, and it should serve as your always available online sales representative. However, having a website isn’t enough. Your website needs to be:
- Mobile-Friendly: Because over 64% of online searches for home services happen on mobile devices, your website has to look great and function on smartphones and tablets.
- Fast: If your website doesn’t load in under 3 seconds, you’re likely to lose a plumbing customer.
- Easy to Navigate: Your website’s visitors should be able to find what they need using one click and in one second. You can improve the user experience by having clear navigation, proper internal linking, and content that meets their needs.
For a plumbing website to be successful, it needs to have proper code that’s essential for SEO. It should have metadata like schema, properly optimized images with alt tags, title tags, meta tags, and more.
4 Easy Ways That You Can Make Your Website Better Right Now
- Make it mobile-friendly, preferably responsive.
- Make sure all telephone numbers are click-to-call
- Add a compelling call to action (CTA) on each page
- Consider adding chat features, or better – a chatbot.
- Have your web designer/developer markup your pages with plumber schema (JSON/LD)
- Check your website’s mobile speed and then have your web developer fix any deficiencies.
If you’re a plumber and don’t have a website, learn more about our plumber websites that produce leads.
If you have a website for your plumbing company, make sure it has the necessary items needed to generate sales leads.
Need some ideas for your website? Check out our list of top 100 plumbing websites for inspiration. If your company doesn’t have a website, check out our pay-per-month website program to help avoid resource-draining website development costs.
SEO for Plumbers – An Investment with Results
According to Google’s keyword planner, there are more than 246,000 searches every month for plumbers in the United States.
In other words, there are just shy of 3 million searches a year from people looking for a plumber, without taking into account other related searches like “plumber near me,” “24/7 plumbing company,” or others.
This is why one of the best ways that your plumbing company can get leads is through Search Engine Optimization and Local SEO.
If you’ve made it this far, chances are you’re a plumbing company owner looking for useful tips to help level up your website’s performance.
After creating a website, your priority should be to make it visible online using SEO (search engine optimization).
SEO is a process to make your web pages appear at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
As a plumber, this should be your top priority after you launch your website because:
- Over 93% of online experiences begin with a search, and 47% of web users will click one of the first three listings in search results pages. (source: Search Engine Journal)
- SEO is a long-term marketing strategy and takes time to see results.
- Your competition probably already invests in SEO, so you need to do the same to stay competitive.
- Search engine competition for plumbers is high, so by starting early, you’re positioning your company for better search results down the road.
According to a recent study released by Google, four out of five consumers search engines to find local information.
That’s why (if you’re a plumber) ranking on the first page of Google for your most important keywords can be the difference between prospective customers calling you or choosing your competitor.
Invest in SEO for Plumbers
One of the best ways to get plumbing leads is through Search Engine Optimization and Local SEO
If you’re reading this, you’re probably a plumber looking for useful tips to enhance your website performance. After creating a lead-generating website, the first priority is making it visible online with SEO (search engine optimization), which is the process of making your web pages show up higher on the search results page.
Search engine optimization for plumbers should be your top priority after your website because:
- 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, and 47% of people click on one of the first three listings in the search results page (Source)
- SEO is a long-term marketing investment and takes time to see results
- Competitors already invest in SEO, so they have a head start on you
- Competition on search engines for plumbers is high, so getting started now positions your company the best on search results in the future
In a study released by Google, four out of five consumers use search engines to find local information.
As a result, ranking on the first page of Google as a plumber for your most important keywords can be the difference between prospective customers calling you or calling your competitor.
3 Quick Ways to Improve Your Plumbing SEO Results
- Claim and optimize your GMB (Google My Business) page.
- Get reviews on your GMB page (and other online platforms).
- Optimize your website’s content for your local service area(s).
For Immediate Plumbing Leads, Invest In Pay Per Click Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) can help you be found on the first page of Google and deliver quick results in the process.
Two of the most significant benefits of PPC advertising are visibility that you can control and relevance.
Unlike traditional advertising for plumbers that tend to interrupt people, pay-per-click advertising only shows your ad to people who are actively searching for your services.
While there are different types of PPC ads, most of our plumbing contractor clients have seen the most results by using the Google Local Services AD program.
These online advertisements are pay-per-lead, which means that you only pay when someone calls you.
First, you register to become a verified and Google-guaranteed contractor, and then you receive plumbing leads by phone call.
What makes this better than typical pay-per-lead platforms is that with Google’s local services, you only pay for verified leads.
At the time of this article, most of our plumbing contractors’ leads are costing between $20 and $30.
Use Local SEO to Dominate Your City Market
Take a Hyper-Targeted Approach to Local Plumber Digital Marketing
According to Hubspot, the Google local pack appears in the top spot of 93% of searches with local intent. When businesses and homeowners are searching for a plumber close to them, Google’s local pack will show up almost every time.
Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to maximize your visibility in search engine results pages.
Optimizing your website is an essential part of any plumber’s digital marketing campaign.
You can optimize your plumbing website by:
- Claiming and optimizing your Google My Business (GMB) page
- Optimizing the heading tags (H1, H2, etc.) on your web pages for local search
- Optimizing your pages’ metadata (title tags and meta descriptions) for local search
- Optimizing your website’s content for local search
- Adding plumbing business schema (JSON/LD) markup to your website.
Need help creating or optimizing your GMB listing? We’re here to help. If you already have an optimized GMB listing, make sure to optimize it for “near me” searches for local SEO success.
Claiming and optimizing your business’s listing and profile on applicable online directories such as:
How’s your website stack up? Get a FREE local SEO audit and find out!
How to Optimize Your Plumbing Company’s Google My Business Profile
- Post regularly
- Make sure all business locations accounted for with connected GMB pages
- Have a consistent NAP (name-address-phone number)
- Have a large number of 4 and 5-star reviews
- Add your business’s categories
- Add your business’s description
- Add (and keep updated) your hours of operation
- If you offer online booking, add a “booking button” call to action
Email marketing for plumbers
Email marketing helps you nurture prospects down the marketing funnel while keeping you in touch with previous customers.
One of the easiest ways to get plumbing customers is by tapping into your existing customer base.
Keeping your business in front of both potential and existing customers should be your top priority as a plumbing company business owner.
Email marketing is relatively simple and should be an integral part of your digital marketing campaign(s).
Adding email marketing into your digital marketing plan will help you:
- Remain in touch with your customers
- Generate more sales by offering specials, coupons, and rebates
- Improve awareness of your brand
Video Marketing For Plumbers
Video Marketing Boosts your SEO & Establishes You as an authority in your community
Watching video content makes up one-third of all online activity.
That’s why every plumbing contractor should invest in at least one video for their website, and if you have the money in your marketing budget, you should invest in a video marketing campaign.
By adding video marketing to your plumbing digital marketing strategy, you can:
- Increase your website’s engagement
- Give your brand a persona and personality.
- Convey what makes your company unique to your website visitors.
Video Marketing Tips for Plumbers
- Try to keep your video under two minutes. Videos under two minutes have been shown to get more engagement with visitors.
The longer your video, the more the chance of losing your visitors’ interest. - Strategically locate videos on service pages. Landing pages with video content see an 80% higher conversion rate (phone calls and web form submissions) than those without video content.
- Add video on any relevant pages. Video content on your landing page will make it 53% more likely to appear on the first page of search rankings.
- Add video content to your blog posts. Blog posts with video content attract three times as many inbound links as those without video, which enhances your plumbing website’s SEO value. We’ve prepared 10 creative plumbing blog post ideas to help you get started.
Social Media for Plumbers
Find and engage with more plumbing customers and increase your brand awareness.
Social media is growing more and more every day and plays a critical role in how businesses interact with their customer base. But is it for all businesses?.
Be sure to read our article, “6 Steps to Social Media Success for Plumbers,” to learn how your plumbing business can boost your digital footprint.
You should leverage the power of social media to expand your plumbing company’s reach and improve your plumbing digital marketing campaign’s overall performance.
Whether you intend on being active on them or not, make sure to set up your profiles on the following platforms:
- Youtube
- GMB (Google My Business)
Make sure to incorporate your social media properties into your business’s branding assets, both digital and traditional such as:
- your website’s footer
- your printed marketing materials
- your digital marketing materials
- your email signatures
- your online directories
Get Online Reviews to Increase Plumbing Leads
5-star reviews can separate your plumbing business from your competition
Would you like to get more plumbing contracts? Focus on generating and plumbing 5-star reviews from your customers.
84% of people trust online reviews as much as they trust a personal recommendation.
54% of people will visit a website after reading positive reviews and make reviews of the new word-of-mouth referrals.
People looking for a plumber aren’t any different; they want to know that whoever comes to repair their pipes is trustworthy.
Think about it.
Who would you call in a high-stress situation such as a broken toilet or a burst pipe?
Would you call a plumber with an aggregate review rating of 2.3 stars and 5 reviews, or would you call a plumbing company with a 5.0-star rating with 150 reviews?
Plus, if a would-be customer finds your company in the Google local pack alongside your two biggest competitors, you definitely want your company to stand out.
A review platform can help you generate more reviews.
Should you not have the time to email or call every customer for a review, you can use any of the dozens of premium platforms to ask for a 5-star review.
Let Us Help You Grow Your Plumbing Business
Here at BlakSheep Creative, we help plumbers grow their business and yield measurable results from their plumber digital marketing campaigns.
Some say that we are plumbing digital marketing experts!
Contact us today to learn more about our plumber’s digital marketing solutions and how we can help you can grow your online presence.
