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Dear plumbers, you guys are real superheroes!
How?
Because you are the one who saves water and brings convenience to mankind.
You literally keep things flowing…eh! 😊
But like every business needs to be promoted, plumbers too need to do the same. Plumbing business is a well-known vertical, but the world is spoiled by choices and numbers.
There are simply so many plumbing businesses out there ranging from large & established ones to small & newly started ventures, that your potential customers could choose any one of them instead of you!
Well, welcome to the world of competitive business!
It’s a well-known fact that advertisement forms the face of any business and is a basic requirement. Without proper advertising, chances of your customers coming to know about you and your business are very few, no matter how good you are at it.
In this post, we’re going to help you understand how to market your plumbing business both online and offline with special emphasis on the online mode.
These plumbing marketing ideas should help you in chalking out some great plumbing marketing strategies for your business.
In the onset of digital mania, not every business was present online or had their footprints over the internet world however, from the year 2000, that model ceased to exist.
Rather, in the current times every business needs to be present online and more than desire, it has become a necessity.
By digital, it’s not just owning and running a website but it’s the requirement to be present across all online channels or platforms which people use. The tricky part comes with the ever-evolving scenarios of the social platforms. It’s not just Facebook that you need to master but also Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Instagram and what not.
This seems daunting, but the silver-lining is that now you get to tap on your potential user base on multiple platforms.
As a plumber or a plumbing business, if you are petrified by the idea of joining the online mode of doing business, then you need to hear this-
Also, as a heads-up, you don’t need to spend huge dollars promoting your business online or to become a Marketing Ninja yourself.
This post is intended to help you perform all those online activities by yourself.
Locked and loaded, now let’s fire it up!
It all starts from here. This is an essential building block for making your presence online. Your business website will act as your address and an important point of contact. Without a proper website your business is as good as anonymous!
However, having a website just for the namesake won’t bear the fruits you’re eager to taste. Here are some important pointers for your website:
Choose a domain name which is relevant to what you do or at least people should be able to guess what the site is about. You could have a domain name which is easy to remember and easily clicks on to users’ minds. At the same time, try not to make it very lengthy.
Good Example: www.newyork-plumbers.com
Bad Example: www.gcocommercialcleaning.com/betterbuildings
Which of these URLs are easy to remember?
I’m sure your answer is Option A.
In that light, it is really crucial to have easy-to-read URLs for all your pages. Avoid random system generated alphanumeric gibberish names for your pages.
Customers often lose confidence on the page they’re about to traverse.
Choose your web hosting company wisely. There is no point in saving some bucks at the cost of the hosting quality. After all of the hard work, you wouldn’t want to face issues with server downtime and an offline website.
With good hosting providers you can stay assured that they can manage your server load well and be always proactive in keeping your website up and running and support you whenever required.
This is the aesthetic part. Although subjective in nature, your website should look lean, simple, user friendly with good design and color combinations. You also must make the page structure of your website very easy to navigate i.e. organized.
Your users should never get confused with the page structure in your website. Just look at Amazon or Facebook and you’ll get to know what kind of designs they’ve deployed.
Question to you: Did you ever find yourself circling back and forth within a website unable to find some specific content? If ‘no’, then you’re just lucky and if you answered ‘yes’, then you know how stupid it appears and the pain you go through. It’s simply frustrating at times.
Well, this is the real meat here. Good content is the quintessential part of any website. Often people are seen to get really annoyed with a site with poor content even if the design was out-of-the-world!
By good content, I am referring to content which helps the users to understand your services better. Good content should help to ensure that your users get to find what they came here for.
This means:
In short, the only parameters are that your content should be clean, contextual, relevant, resourceful and refreshing. In no way your content can be plagiarized or misleading else your customers would come once and return never. Importantly, your content should be SEO optimized. And that’s our next touch point.
Recall your high school days.
What happens if you don’t respond to your roll call? You’re marked as absent. But you were there present in the class, right?
Something similar happens on Google too. If you don’t showcase your visibility on the first page, you are considered absent (in the eyes of your customers, at least)!
That’s where Search Engine Optimization comes to your rescue!
In the concept of SEO, people search with some keywords or some phrases on Google or Bing (search engines) and some websites (business sites) get listed on the results page.
The idea of SEO in the context of plumbing company marketing is that whenever people search with some keywords related to your business, your website should get listed on top of all the results right on the first page itself.
Well, that’s the ideal position to achieve but there is a lot of competition for even the last rank on the first results page.
Now, before you ask, keywords are the terms people use to find businesses like you.
For example, if you offer your services in New York, your keywords can be “Plumbers in New York”, “Plumbing service in New York”, etc.
Back to point, in the SEO world, ranking at the top most position is a challenging task but not impossible.
Here are some of the benefits of good rankings on Search Engine Result Page:
There are two broad types of SEO viz. On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.
Let’s say, you are planning to open a grocery store. What would be your first priority?
For me, it would be to ensure I have products in place, I would hire an attendee who can respond to clients immediately plus many more.
Similarly, when you are planning to jump into the online world, you need to optimize your online store (Website) too.
With on-page or on site SEO, your responsibility is to optimize elements within your website. Here are some of the points you can start with:
This is the part where you start promoting your website via other websites of www. Here you need to optimize the factors which are outside of your website and are externally done.
Here is some off-page activities you can start with:
Start building Backlinks:
Backlinks are like “vote of confidence” from one site to another. Therefore more backlinks imply more recommendations too.
But again, recommendations are worthy only when they come from the right person.
Similarly, your backlinks are valuable only if they are coming from reputed sites or even from not-so-reputed sites, but with relevant content.
Building links just for the sake of it won’t do any good to you, instead it can risk penalizing your site.
So no matter what you do, prioritize quality over quantity.
Start your own blog:
As you are in the business for a long time, you are aware of the problems your customers might be facing.
So it’s high time you start writing about it. Blog about your services, your customers problems or anything that can help your customers. This will build an authority for your brand.
Leave comments on top industry blogs:
There are many blogs out there who are already blogging in the same industry. You can start adding valuable comments to these blogs.
Wondering how it may help you? Let me explain!
But before you plan for it, please note that adding comments like “Great blog, thank you for sharing information” won’t be of any use to you.
Sounds interesting?
Start Guest posting:
Guest posting is the process of publishing an article to some other website. In this process, you will need to create a list of blogs relevant to your business. Make sure to include only those blogs which actually provide some value.
Once you have the list, you can start approaching them with some interesting topic ideas. The catch here is, you can add your website link in such articles.
Guest posting is one of the most effective techniques of getting high quality backlinks. Know more about the benefits of guest posting here.
Get your hold on Local SEO:
Since you’re a business operating within a certain geographic area, local SEO makes more sense. You can visit GoogleBusiness portal to register your business along with filling more information about your business such as your contact and address details, photos, reviews and hours of operations etc.
This is a crucial step as it could help you reach out to customers right within your locality who need your service. The search result below is fetched from the Google business website.
Wouldn’t you want your business on this page with your address on Google Map?
Noteworthy points with SEO are that:
Along with Google maps, there are many other websites, where you can list down your business. In SEO, this is called Business listing or Citations.
More on this in the later section.
While SEO is organic and free, SEM or Search Engine Marketing is the paid version of marketing encompassing paid search, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Display ads, Mobile marketing and Paid social media ads.
You can see the SEM ads on the Google search results page above.
Google AdWords is by far the most commonly used platform to do SEM for businesses. Other popular platforms being Yahoo ads and Bing Ads etc.
To do SEM for your plumbing marketing, once again you start with keyword research (because everything boils down to this) using tools like Google keyword planner and also explore more relevant keywords using Google Trends.
Once you identify and shortlist some of the keywords which are specific to your business and are not too broad, then decide on your geography where you want to show your ads. Targeting is important as you don’t want to pay Google for showing your ads to some other country, right?
Post that, do yourself a favor by studying other ads involving your keywords, basically, competitive study. Else, how would you create an ad copy in your next step which stands out from the whole bunch of similar ads?
Now, writing an ad copy for plumbing advertising is also a skilled job. Pro tip for ad writing is to get comfortable with adding humor to ads and to create an ad which cites a specific reason and then the promised solution. These ads are already making the rounds and the good thing is that your eyes won’t get bored of them.
So, that’s it. Go ahead and fix your budget and start bidding on the campaigns and get ready to see some traffic response.
Pitfall here is that unlike SEO, this strategy might also send some traffic which might not give you that dreamy conversion numbers every time, however, you’ll start getting results quicker than SEO. Just an FYI!
As a local business, it makes sense to get yourself registered on YellowPages and local business listing sites. This enhances your chance to get listed whenever a user starts searching for services that you provide. Some of the popular business sites where you should register your business are as follows:
If you want to make it big then you just can’t ignore social media presence. Create an account on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram etc. and be ready to interact and engage with users.
Once you’re able to identify the platform with most of your potential clients, start advertising for plumbers using the platform’s own advertising methods.
Facebook has similar geo-targeting and demographic targeting like Google AdWords for you to fine-tune and optimize your ads. Facebook even allows you to customize your audience targeting based on interests, behavior and connection apart from general demographics as mentioned above.A Facebook report states that about 140 million businesses use the platform and its related apps (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram). Also, it stated that around 58% of US citizens said that they were interested in a brand only after seeing it on Facebook.
The above data by Statista showed an incremental trend of social media marketing usage by US companies from 2013-2019.
Remember not to use such platforms just as an advertising tool rather consider it as a long-term engagement platform with your potential customers. So, share tips, address their concerns, share some videos of some DIY tricks and keep them engaged.
Have you ever come across ads such as below?
That’s right, the before and after pics. You could also share similar before and after pics of your work and share on such platforms. People love visuals. So just cash on it.
Remember sending direct mail at homes? This is the online version wherein your email ends up right in their email inbox.
But please note that email marketing can go wrong as well. Your email might end up in a spam folder. They could mark your email as spam as well! So, here are a few pointers to do email marketing in the proper way.
These are traditional methods of advertising a plumbing business, in fact, any business. These methods have been out there for more than a decade and we have all seen those multiple times in our lifetime.
When you start seeing houses in your neighborhood as green dollars waving at you, it’s business on your mind! So how do you wave them back?
Direct promotional mail.
Start your plumber advertising with a direct mail campaign in the locality and send relevant promotional mails to all the homes in the block.
One mail per home exposes your business to all the residents living in it, thus increasing your chance of getting recalled whenever there is a need.
Just pray that the home-dog doesn’t receive your mail first 😅
Old but gold!
You could use your vehicle to paint your business details like contact information, tagline or slogan along with your business name and what you’re specialized in i.e. your niche. While your vehicle moves, your business would also get advertised wherever you go.
That’s brand awareness & plumber marketing done right!
The idea is simple. More they get to see, the more they get to remember and recall.
However, ensure that you choose the right color combination (even for your business theme), right choice of font-size and family. Just make it easier for people to understand and register in their minds.
Logo and taglines help people to recall a business. If you don’t have either of these, you should create your company logo which is unique, relevant, self-explanatory, distinct and easy to recall.
Also, please avoid plagiarizing or modifying someone else’s logo or be ready to face a lawsuit.
With tools like Canva, you can create a logo within minutes. The best part, the tool is free.
For the tagline, try to make it catchy and easy to remember while maintaining relevance as well.
You could make it a little witty, humorous, relevant and crisp.
Watch out on the tone of the slogan to avoid indirectly belittling any competitor or placing borderline derogatory or condescending stuff. That’s not good for your business identity.
You can also send out a printed business brochure and promotional coupons to big apartments and offices in your locality. The coupons could help in attracting potential customers to your business and could also prove to be a long-lasting business relation.
However, your quality of service would decide the fate of these customers as only offers alone can’t keep the show running for you.
Printing your business ad in a local newspaper or magazine publication can also help you gain the required exposure for your business. Adding your business flyers inside those newspapers is also a method that could work for you.
You could also introduce offers specific to these channels to measure how much business are these pulling for you. Worth a try!
Good to have however, not everybody can afford to publish their plumbing business ads on these channels. Radios are still fine, and you could experiment at once, but TV ads might quote a price which might not suit your bills.
Also, I am not sure how many people sit with a pen and paper while tuning into a Radio station just to note down a business number unless it’s rhyming and very easy to remember.
So that was all about how you can market your plumbing business using both offline and online plumbing marketing ideas. Use all these methods as checklists for your business and you should be in a good shape.
However, always try to treat your customers just the way you want to get treated by someone. Bad service experience will defy all your marketing efforts. Give them a taste of real good customer service so that they can share their positive experience with others because word-of-mouth can do wonders as well.
Now if you excuse me I have to search for a plumber for my broken flush! Yeah, irony! Agreed.
Anyway, best of luck for your plumbing business. 😊
