Our Experts Giveaway Their Top 7 Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Plumbing Business

The wonderful thing about having a plumbing business is knowing that there is a demand for your service year-round. Wherever people live, there are pipes that are very important parts of their daily lives. Sometimes, something goes wrong with those pipes and they have to be fixed urgently. That said, as steady of a demand as there might be for plumbers, there’s always the opportunity to do better plumber marketing to get more plumbing customers!

Get More Plumbing Customers with Local Services Ads

Google Local Services are geared towards local small businesses that are willing to be rated and earn the trust and respect of local buyers. Through the Local Services platform, plumbers are able to purchase advertising inventory that is the best search engine real estate: the very top of search results.

This is especially helpful for mobile searches, which constitute upwards of 60% of all searches on the internet. That number is only likely to rise over time.

Local Services ads for plumbers get you affordable leads from people actually searching for your services.

First, you’ll need to apply. If you’re accepted, you’re going to need to set up a campaign with the proper budget. (Don’t know what your budget should be? Our Local Services team can help! Contact us online and ask us about our Local Services ads management services).

Get More Plumbing Customers Via Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising (PPC) gives plumbers the ability to bid on popular keywords and search terms homeowners use to find a plumbing company. Based on several factors like your ad copy, maximum bid for each keyword, and landing page score, your ad is then displayed to people searching for plumbers in your area.

There are many types of PPC advertising:

• Search ads: Search ads are the most common and important type of PPC marketing for plumbers. You will find them at the top and bottom of the search results and they will have a small logo that says “Ad” next to the results. It’s a way to jump to the front of competitors on search engines, ahead of all the organic results that took a lot of time and effort to be seen.
• Display ads: This advertising will show your ads across all Google partner websites. You can pick a particular target market or set of websites where your ads will be seen
• Remarketing ads: You know that funny feeling that a company is following you around everywhere you go online? That’s not accidental, it’s remarketing. An advertiser knows you’re interested in a product or service (because you visited their website before) and re-engages with you.
• Social media ads: Similar to display ads, you can target a specific audience, using the rich data of the social networks you could buy from, like Facebook, LinkedIn (for commercial plumbers), and Instagram. The right image is really key to a great social media PPC ad.

SEO for Plumbers: A Long-Term Play to Get More Plumbing Customers

Remember how PPC advertising can help you cut to the front of the line? Search engine optimization (SEO) done right means you don’t have to pay to cut to the front of the line. By ranking well organically, you are telling Google (and your potential customers) that you’re a reliable source of information on the topic they are searching for. This takes work.

If a website is hanging a shingle, SEO might be making that shingle glow with neon and be more easily found by those who want what you are offering. Done right, SEO for plumbers will help add a sustainable lead generation stream to your other marketing efforts.

Supplement Plumber SEO with Local SEO to Get More Plumbing Customers

If traditional SEO for plumbers is about making sure your website is being indexed and ranked on Google and Bing, local SEO for plumbers does what it says: focuses on your region and locality.

Some areas of focus include:

• Customer Reviews: There are many different websites where customers can share how happy (or unhappy) they are with your company. Generally speaking, the more positive reviews across numerous sites, the easier it is to rank on page one of Google and other search engines.
• Reputation Management: Sometimes those customer reviews aren’t glowing, but there’s still a chance for you to shine in how you respond. Customers are looking at your response almost as much as they are looking at the original review and if you share the necessary context for a given customer situation, that might close a sale just as well as a glowing review would.
• Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) citations: Ensure all of your online directory listings are 100% consistent across each platform, down to the finest details.

• Ranking in the Local Pack (“map listings”): This will depend first on the proximity of the searcher to your business, but you can help that along by making sure your primary business category is a match for your plumbing services and have hundreds of 5-star reviews across the web.
• Leveraging well-known online directories: Make sure your listing is accurate on directory sites like the Yelp, Angie’s List, and others. Believe it or not, people still search the Better Business Bureau (BBB) listings to find plumbers, so make sure that’s accurate too.
• Wearing a White Hat: No, it’s not Gandalf we’re talking about. “White Hat” refers to SEO agencies or individuals using plumber SEO best practices to get good results for their clients. Unsurprisingly, “Black Hat” is any practice that directly violates search engine best practices and can get a site penalized. One of the current “White Hat” practices that plumbers can use is to focus on “near me” keywords, as many are getting used to the idea of local searches. Make sure you have phrases like “plumber near me” or “water heater repair near me” optimized to take advantage of this new trend.

Build a Better Plumbing Website

Everything we’ve talked about so far won’t mean anything if by the time a customer finally lands on your site, they get turned off. Your website can be that final piece they need to do business with you. That means your website design for plumbers needs to be:

• Simple and cleanly designed: It needs to be just as visible and functional on desktop as on mobile. Remember that less is more and that you don’t need to tell the entire story of your brand and what you’re offering on the home page. Keep that same aesthetic in mind as you design additional pages. It’s about making it easy for your customers to navigate your site and find the information they’re looking for. This includes:
  • Identifying your services
  • Identifying your service areas
  • Contacting you using sticky headers, clear call to actions, and contact forms
• Speedy and secure: If the site is simple, it won’t take long to load, hence turning away customers who simply don’t want to wait. When we say “long” we mean any longer than 3 seconds. The site should be secure, meaning it’s HTTPS not HTTP, to give your website a ranking boost on Google and to allow customers to shop with the trust that their information will not be stolen.
• Features a website chat service: A website chat service (like Blue Corona Chat) can give the customer a warm fuzzy feeling: someone/something will be able to answer questions at any moment.

Customer Service as a Plumber Marketing Strategy

Just because we’ve attracted potential customers through data-driven advertising, organic SEO, and a great website doesn’t mean the job is done This means that your customer service really has to shine, not just to close the client and book an appointment, but to delight them so that they spread the word.

Invest in your Reps

Your customer service representatives (CSRs) are on the front line and should be given all the tools they need to successfully interact with customers. This starts with making sure hold times are low and that potential customers don’t need to wait to speak with you. When they do get connected with you, they need to hear a friendly, helpful voice.

You should also be monitoring phone calls to help improve each CSR‘s booking rate. This assumes a constant desire of everyone in the company, not just to shine in customer service, but to grow, seeing opportunities to up or cross-sell customers.

The best CSRs have a natural desire to be friendly and truly listen, not just go through the motions. If you feel like you need some help with this, Blue Corona has the experience and the passion to assist you.

Track your progress

Know your numbers. If you’re in good communication with your CSRs they can give you helpful intelligence as to why some potential customers aren’t booking appointments. This can allow you to either train the CSR to better deal with some of those roadblocks or address some of the needs that potential clients are asking for that your business isn’t currently offering.

Don’t give up

One of our proprietary services, Lead Recovery, ensures that you don’t have to spend additional money on marketing. We help you generate at 10% more booked appointments (at least!) from your existing leads by flagging opportunities from contacts that did not turn into appointments and giving you a second chance at earning that customer’s business.

Even if there turns out not to be a need from a potential customer, that customer will appreciate the contact and the follow-up to make sure they had been helped as much as possible.

Get More Plumbing Customers in Your Neighborhood with Nextdoor

If you haven’t already heard about Nextdoor, you will. It’s one of the top downloaded apps and is another opportunity to connect with potential customers. What makes it so attractive is its verification process, which makes sure that the people who are listed in a neighborhood actually live there. 90% of American neighborhoods are using Nextdoor, including asking their neighbors for plumber recommendations.

Read more on how to advertise your business on Nextdoor.

While you can create a personal Nextdoor account for yourself (and you should), what you also want to do is create a business account. This means you’ll be able to connect with local homeowners in joining or starting a conversation. It also will give you the chance to engage in both advertising and local deals through the Nextdoor platform.

Nextdoor Advertising

At the moment you can only advertise on Nextdoor if you’re a company with an enterprise-level budget, are a realtor/broker, or are a Blue Corona client.

We partnered up with Nextdoor to bring some of the fantastic benefits of Nextdoor to smaller businesses with smaller advertising budgets. You’ll be able to pick and choose which neighborhoods you want to advertise in without having to come up with the big bucks that the enterprise clients do.

Blue Corona’s CEO, Ben Landers, recently noted the power of sponsorships on the Nextdoor platform. Companies that choose to participate get two posts per month that are pushed into newsfeeds and are also featured in the Real Estate section of the website and weekly newsletter. There’s also a limit of five sponsorships at a time for any given zip code, so there’s a great opportunity for your plumbing company to stand out.

Nextdoor Local Deals

Nextdoor Local Deals are advertised in a carousel of offers and are aimed at reaching a certain number of customers in a certain time frame (the longer you choose to keep the offer up, the higher the price). This is less expensive than the ongoing advertising you can do with Nextdoor, but it also helps with full-spectrum brand engagement on the app.

Your goal is to be the authority on plumbing in the neighborhoods that you choose to engage in. Nextdoor provides a great combination of organic and paid opportunities to do so.

Blue Corona Gets You More Plumbing Customers

Any of these 7 ways to get more plumbing customers can be a game-changer for your business. Implement all 7 and you’ll be a force to be reckoned with.

Blue Corona is the premier digital marketing company for plumbers and home service businesses. We only work with contractors and members of the trades and are here to help you grow your plumbing business.

Contact us today for more information about our plumber marketing services and to receive a free digital competitive analysis.