“The ability to sell is the number one skill in business.” – Rober Kiyosaki.
As a longtime apprentice and journeyman, the idea of starting a business is appealing for lots of plumbers who feel they have the skills to succeed independently.
Nonetheless, starting a business comes with its own set of demands and problems that extend far beyond the basic day-to-day life of plumbing.
For example, getting customers to flock to your business when they have established plumbers and large plumbing companies on standby can be challenging to break into.
Fortunately, with the help of digital marketing for plumbers, your new independent business can compete online and capture new customers who are always in demand.
In this guide, we’d like to address the unique needs and strategies your plumbing business can use to succeed online and grow its customer base.
What is Digital Marketing for Plumbers?
Plumber marketing is a strategy for plumbing contractors and business owners to grow their business by attracting new customers.
However, plumbing marketing comes with unique needs and challenges, which must be considered when discussing an online strategy.
- Lots of customers have established relationships with plumbers
- Many customers search for plumbers in emergencies
- Plumbers may have an established business or work independently as a contractor
For this reason, focusing many of our strategies on generating brand awareness, nurturing leads with reviews and specialized content, and delivering fast response through automation is key to the success of any plumbing business.
Overall, plumber marketing could encompass numerous strategies, including plumbing SEO services, newspaper ads, or even social media for plumbers.
For this guide, we’ll focus primarily on digital marketing for plumbers because it provides them with the best opportunity to reach customers in everyday situations and emergencies.
In fact, digital marketing for plumbers offers several advantages to plumbing businesses than traditional print and radio advertisements.
1. Generate Brand Awareness Through Multiple Online Channels
You’ll typically run into two types of customers looking for plumbers. Customer A has an established relationship with a plumber on standby and mostly isn’t seeking new business. On the flip side, Customer B is a new homeowner or unsatisfied with their current plumber and looking for cheaper and more efficient alternatives for their home or business.
To reach these customers, you’ll need to generate brand awareness for your plumbing business with a mix of different online strategies. For example, here are some channels to generate brand awareness, which we will discuss in the next section:
- Optimizing your Google My Business Listing for local searches
- Marketing your new website and brand on social media for new leads
- Getting your business discovered on directories like Angi and Home Advisor
By generating brand awareness, you could greatly increase your sales rate by getting more leads for your business.
2. Increase Leads Through a Mix of SEO and PPC Advertising
SEO and PPC work well together as complimentary pull and push strategies. Ideally, you will push your business directly in front of your targeted customers using PPC ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google Search.
In addition, many of these tools help you understand more of your customer base’s purchasing and search habits.
This information can then be leveraged to increase leads organically through SEO strategies that combine keyword research, content marketing, and local SEO to pull customers to your website through meeting customer needs on organic channels.
Once you increase brand awareness and leads to your website, you can leverage the strategies below to increase your sales rate.
3. Increase Sales with Content and Special Offers
Optimizing your website mid-funnel to track leads, talk to customers with Chat Bots, deliver relevant content, or entice sales with coupon offers are great ways to convert visitors to sales.
Best of all, you can use this information found in your Analytics or CRM to reach out to customers and try to entice a sale.
4. Compete in “Near Me” Searches
As mobile search shapes consumer habits, more and more people are using ‘near me’ searches on their mobile phones to find contractors, glance at their websites, and give them a call for service. Just check out the growth of “near me” searches on Google Trends below.
By optimizing your Google My Business listing, gaining positive reviews, and optimizing your website with local keywords, you could capture massive organic real estate by competing at the top of “near me” location results.
5. Leverage Reviews to Your Advantage
Finally, online reviews are truly the one factor that distinguishes your business from other home repair contractors.
Previous research has shown that 84% of online shoppers trust reviews like they trust a recommendation from a friend. So, in conjunction with personal recommendations and word-of-mouth advertising, online reviews are critical in showing the value of your business in an authentic sense.
With that in mind, let’s discuss nine proven strategies to get the phone ringing and increase sales using a mix of plumbing SEO services and other online strategies.
How to Promote Your Plumbing Business: 9 Expert Strategies
Awareness Stage
1. Optimize Your Website with Local SEO Keywords
Local keyword research is important on two levels:
- Businesses can compete in highly specific long-tail searches
- Businesses can compete in ‘near me’ searches
First, there are tons of opportunities, in terms of competition and search volume, when it comes to local long-tail searches.
Secondly, optimizing your website with local keywords, including your location, helps search engines index your website and display it for local searches.
To optimize your website for local keywords, research keywords using a free or premium keyword planner.
Search for relevant keywords with decent search volume and low competition to rank for. For example, the following terms provide specific location-based keywords with little competition:
To optimize your website for local keywords, you’ll need to optimize the following:
- The Title Tag of your Homepage and all Service Pages (ex. Business Name: Commercial Plumbing in North Austin, Tx.)
- Optimize the H1 Tag of Your Homepage to reflect your main service offering (e.g. Commercial Plumbing in Austin, Texas)
- Insert target keywords throughout the text of the page (At least 1-2% keyword density)
- Write actionable meta descriptions with target keywords that describe the web page and benefit readers
Segment keywords by intent when optimizing your website. For example, keywords like “fix a leaky pipe” may be relevant but searched by people looking for DIY solutions. However, you can use keywords like these to create highly thoughtful guides that solve problems and recommend professional assistance to help them.
Bonus Tip: Use Schema Markup and Location-based tags to help your website display for local searches.
2. Optimize Google My Business Listings
Google My Business and Google Maps are great tools to help your plumbing business get discovered in local keyword and ‘near me’ searches.
Go to this link to get started, and just follow some of the tips below to help your Google Listing gain traction:
- Double-check all name, address, and phone number (NAP) information
- Verify or claim your business on Google Maps
- Provide a detailed description of products and services
- Post announcements or special promotions
- Use high-resolution photos that showcase your work
- Provide Q & A sections
- Respond to customer reviews in a positive manner
3. Acquire Links on Local Directories
Local directories are a great source of referral traffic that also benefits from social proof. Unlike most of your marketing promises, getting listed #1 on a list of a New York magazine’s top plumbers provides all the social proof your customers need to hire you.
Reach out to all relevant local contractor and home services directories and blogs to get your business listed. Big names include Angi and Yellow Pages, although acquiring links from local magazines, blogs, and newspapers is equally, if not more, valuable.
Here are some strategies to follow:
- Ask for a link to your website for all brand or business mentions you find on the web
- Reach out to writers of existing directory pieces to consider linking or editing their article to include your business
- Reclaim all broken links to your website across the web
- Write a post on a relevant newspaper or blog to gain traction (no link value)
4. Invest in Online Ads for Reach and Research
As previously mentioned, PPC advertising is a great push strategy to put your business right in front of customers. However, online advertising is a little more sophisticated than that.
Tools like Facebook Meta enable plumbers to segment their audience based on highly-specific demographic and psychographic information, including:
- Location: What neighborhoods do they live in? Are they in my business service range?
- Demographics: What’s their age, gender, income, and do they own a house?
- Connections: What pages do they like? Are they friends with my customers?
- Interests: What are their interests? Do they like home improvement projects?
- Behavior: What businesses have they interacted with and purchased from in the past?
Some of these insights may be useless to plumbers, but targeting ads to people in your local area who own homes and have needed plumbing repair in the past is an excellent use of advertising money.
Additionally, these tools can help you gain more insight into the most pressing problems for customers.
For example, are people in your local area having difficulty with sump pumps and repairs due to natural flooding? You can figure this out using Meta and Google search volumes for keen insights.
Consideration/Interest Stage
5. Nurture Leads Mid-Funnel with Content
Once you have customers on your website or your business, how do you convert them to sales? First, you must display authority and then provide clear calls to action.
To showcase your authority and knowledge, be sure to create highly sophisticated content. This includes optimizing service pages to provide detailed information, including maintenance steps, pricing, and hours expected out of a project.
Additionally, a blog could be a helpful resource to provide how-to guides on plumbing repairs. While this step may seem counterintuitive, it builds trust with your audience and separates your brand as an authority.
Then, the next time a major repair is needed, your customers will know just who to call.
Finally, many leads are lost due to thin content and websites that look unprofessional. You can’t compete with established businesses in the digital age if your business is clunky, slow-loading, or thin with content.
6. Automate Customer Contact for Better Service
Personalization is a huge advantage that plumbers and all businesses can use to nurture leads and convert them to sales.
For example, a Chatbot can be a great resource to chat with customers directly via mobile to respond to them directly. Chatbots can also provide customers with business hours, contact information, or lead them to specific pages or forms with a call-to-action.
Chatbots are also great tools to respond to customers in a pinch when you can’t reach the phone.
Additionally, you could leverage a CRM to automatically respond to customers who abandon your website with emails or advertisements that provide coupon offers or direct customers to your contact page to complete a transaction.
Conversion/Sales
7. Automate Booking and Calls-to-Action
Once your customers are ready to contact your business and set up an appointment, you have to provide them with a clear path to do so. For example, many websites have big buttons for “Checkout” to help navigate customers toward sales before they change their minds.
A plumbing business could leverage some of the following CTAs to increase conversions and help fill their schedule:
- Provide a phone number with an HTML click to call link
- Provide a form to schedule an appointment and provide relevant details
- Set up an automated booking software that fills your schedule for you
Although plumbing appointments vary in time, you could greatly improve your scheduling and book more customers through automated software. You can even use forms and booking software to create a point of connection to follow up with a personalized phone call to verify appointment details or make scheduling adjustments if necessary.
8. Invest in Call-Tracking Software
Call-tracking software is a great way to monitor leads generated from traditional and digital marketing plumbing channels.
In addition, this software can be utilized to create a list of phone numbers and contacts to reach out to later with special promotions or to try to nurture lost sales.
Call-tracking software can also be used to help train staff on how to better respond to calls and secure sales that were previously lost.
9. Monitor Leads and Traffic with Analytics
Finally, it’s important to analyze your marketing spend and traffic channels to see which sources provide the best ROI. For example, you could leverage tools like Meta Business Suite, Google Ads, and Search Console to see how organic vs. paid channels stack up.
Additionally, a CRM or Business Intelligence Software provides a holistic view to monitoring traffic, leads, and calls generated from all of your marketing channels to determine which channels are bleeding market spend and which are fueling your business.
Using this information, refine your marketing strategy to reflect the data and leverage the tips above for better success.
Digital marketing for plumbers may come with its own unique set of challenges and considerations, but many of the strategies we use for local businesses apply to a service-based business.
Whether it’s researching local keywords or using Facebook Meta to understand your customers better, your business could greatly benefit from plumbing marketing services.
At ContentMender, we specialize in local content marketing and SEO services for plumbers to help them gain brand awareness in their local area, rank highly for local keyword searches, and grow their business by building trust and authority with their customers.
Fill out the form below to get started with online plumbing marketing services for your business; we will provide a free high-level audit of your current website.
