In today's competitive market, plumbers rely on plumbing leads to meet prospective clients, book more clients and close more deals, eventually leading to higher earnings for services rendered.
In today's highly digitized market, the most reliable way to meet prospective clients is by reaching and engaging customers online. This is only achieved by strategically setting up your brand out from the competition.
Interested in discovering new ways to boost your plumbing business?
According to a 2019 Local Consumer Review Survey conducted to establish internet use by customers when finding local businesses. The study found that about 90% of customers use the internet to search local businesses, with 33% doing daily searches.
In case of a plumbing emergency and a homeowner Google for "plumbing services near me," is your company among the highest ranked? When they ask for referrals from their Facebook friends, is your business recommended? Would your neighbors recommend you on the plumbing referral services available?
Knowing effective ways to reach your prospective clients online is crucial to get the most of your marketing budget and minimize the cost per lead. This is achieved by setting up automated marketing campaigns, targeted email marketing, and using SEO for your website.
We engaged experts and other home service providers in the plumbing industry to put together a list of the best marketing strategies for the plumbing industry.
In order to compile this list of the Best Plumbing Marketing Strategies, we talked to industry experts in plumbing and other home services.
To consistently get that next plumbing leads for your business, they propose the following strategies:
- Revitalize and optimize your website
- Put your ads on online platforms
- Focus on Search Engine Optimization
- Create an online review marketing strategy
- Train staff on customer service
- Automate the customer experience
- Use ad campaigns for targeted email marketing
- Know your target market
- Utilize an app-based plumber referral service.
- Customer Experience Is Key
To generate more plumbing leads, close more sales, book new clients, the business should focus from start to finish on delivering an excellent customer experience. Explore each of the strategies suggested to improve your plumbing company's operations, increase revenue, and grow plumbing service leads.
1. Revitalize and optimize your website
If your website is not optimized to generate plumbing leads, you're missing out on numerous prospective clients and higher revenue generation.
Ranking higher in Google will be easier if you make your website mobile-friendly. Most searches for a local plumber are often emergencies that require immediate attention. Your job as a business is to make sure they find you first, and that you turn them into prospects by:
- Optimizing and revamping your website. Ensure the website is appealing and user-friendly focused SEO keywords to land more leads. To succeed, you need to focus on your site's mobile, with most users now using mobile phones for their searches.
- Offer discounts and special offers. Use offers and other incentives to reach more prospective clients.
- Introduce your business to clients. This is achieved by clearly describing the services offered to your clients. You can provide a quick slide show or a video.
- Being accessible to clients. Ensure that your clients can contact you by displaying your contact information at the website’s top and have someone available to answer 24/7
- Optimizing user experiences. By creating a, better experience for all users, you retain a higher percentage of your visitors who eventually become clients.
- Explore online resources available. Start a YouTube channel, a blog, or a podcast and reach prospective clients and other customers
Get an example of a business that increased revenue by optimizing their website
Instead of paying for a phone book ad, Absolute Air, Heat and Water optimizes their website with SEO keywords and asks for online reviews. According to Absolute's Chief Marketing Officer, Brian Hortin, as a result, the Utah Company grew their revenue by 10 times in just one year.
2. Take Advantage Of Online Advertising Platforms
Mastering online advertising has never been more critical. With more than 70% of consumers shopping online, it increases brand awareness and builds an online reputation for your plumbing business. Once you focus on providing outstanding services, customers will remember you every time they need a plumber.
In addition to the traditional marketing strategies such as T.V., radio, emails, newspapers, and billboards, plumbing businesses should allocate at least half of their marketing budget on SEO, positive customer reviews, and pay-per-click digital ads.
To grow the plumbing business, you cannot forget the basics of relationship building. Personal contact interactions with homeowners and leaving contact information for future plumbing also generate many prospects.
John Akhoian, owner of Rooter Hero Plumbing in California and Arizona, with 250 trucks and $50 million in earnings this year, says you can't give up those personal relationships.
Akhoian, for instance, tells his entire Rooter Hero team to leave a business card (with a coupon on the back) every time they go to a public restroom in a restaurant, bar, etc. He says his unconventional marketing strategy not only attracts new customers, but also inspires other service workers to think about plumbing as a possible career.
3. Focus On Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Mastering the Local SEO generates targeted traffic from prospective buyers. This is achieved only by ensuring that the plumbing company website is top of all search engines. This way, prospective clients looking for a plumber will find you fast first, giving you an advantage over your competitors.
To generate constant plumbing leads, you should include the top-ranked keywords and physical location of the business (name of the city and neighborhood) on your company website, digital advertising, and all social media platforms. For instance, “Plumber in Chicago.” Adding the physical location on the website is a requirement for most google services.
Your business will show up in Google searches for "sink repair" or "plumber near me". A Google search is based on a topic's relevance and geographical relevance, not just ad spend. You can promote your plumbing business on Google Local Services and get plumbing leads directly from customers. Small businesses get to be featured in searches just like big companies.
It is important to note that it's not enough just to optimize the search alone. Your site's content has to be appealing to potential customers; otherwise, many visitors will leave your website without making a single purchase. To make use of the traffic generated on the website, you need to optimize your conversion funnels' user experience and efficiency that maximize the number of leads and sales you generate from the traffic.
4. Create An Online Review Marketing Strategy
Many customers nowadays look for plumbing service providers from online sources. That’s why this marketing strategy is perfect for boosting sales. Many clients will check online for the nearest plumbers and check the potential clients' reviews. If your reviews are positive, you have high chances of winning more customers, but the customers will judge you with a negative review. You can have more clients with this feedback because review surveys from online platforms portray your service providence.
Many customers say that reviews increase the likelihood of people buying products. If customers leave positive reviews for a client, this helps build trust and boosts the plumbing leads. Clients read reviews before they trust a business; hence this plays an essential role in building leads.
Statistically, through Google reviews, many businesses globally get more clients. The five-star rating and Facebook recommendation help firms retain clients. This is the same strategy that helps companies get more new customers and improve their sales.
The tip and trick here is to give clients the best experience that’s worthy of getting a positive review. To make customers leave these reviews, it is advisable to send them texts and links to writing reviews.
Through direct links, you can also attach survey tools. These surveys can help you gauge where you stand and know the areas that need improvement. That’s among all the best strategies for getting more plumbing leads. That’s how all firms add their company rankings.
5. Train Staff On Customer Service
Service providence is the primary determinant of the rating you will get hence you should offer the best services to have positive review history. You should advise the plumbing technicians to ask clients to leave positive or negative reviews depending on their customer satisfaction. As long as you are in the business it’s advisable to ensure that you don’t complain whether the review is positive or negative.
Always keep in mind that in a business you don’t predict the level of satisfaction you can get from clients. The service providers should know these reviews have a huge impact on the company’s success levels. If you keep getting negative ranks there are high chances of losing the customers.
As a plumbing investor, you should incentivize the technicians to ensure they deliver high performance to get positive reviews. That’s how you stand out in a competitive market. If you build up positive reviews you will retain more customers. Negative reviews cause clients to lose their trust in your business and the cost of acquiring new customers is high than retaining old ones. With such a trick and tip you should always keep the customers satisfied.
Statistically, many investors say that a customer can come the second time if they had a nice experience the first time. The first impression is important in a business because that’s how you create a customer base. Reviews just strengthen the company and increase the chances of winning/ attaining more success levels.
All the appointments following up service delivery rely on the first impression of your business. Through online schedules, you can have it easy in the business and you will get more plumbing leads. This year is all about adapting the best marketing strategies whether the business is wholesale or retail.
Plumbers can also enjoy the ride and get more plumbing leads if they follow all these tips and tricks. The best marketing hack nowadays is to adopt technology in the business. This is the only way to get a client relationship that can last forever. Plumbing leads depend on customer satisfaction so avoid complaints or negative reviews by all means.
You should always listen to customers’ mindsets by accessing the reviews keenly. If the customer had a plumbing leak and they ask for plumbers’ advice or assessment just do your best. Reviews are honest and customers need a lot of convincing before they can leave a positive review.
Through technology, you can adapt software that sends links to clients automatically and invitations to leave reviews through an app. Generally, there are many technology hacks you can adopt and this is a nice way to reach out to customers. These are the best tips you can use to gain more reviews from customers.
6. Automate Customer Experience Processes
Plumbing leads are hard to get unless you are creative in this business. That’s where most plumbers go wrong because they don’t give it time to access the options for automating their business. There are several applications and plumbing software you can use to have a good customer service experience.
The secret about adapting the best efficient technologies is by having an efficient plan. For instance plumbers adapt the best delivery digitization techniques to have a better dispatch team. This automatically boosts the chances of success in your business.
Training staff members on how these applications or software works can also be strenuous but you need patience. Adapting to a new system can take time and everyone has their own way or pace of learning new things so you should be patient with the customers. Through these technologies, you can streamline a plumbing business and have fast operations in your business.
With a polished approach, you will have high customer service levels and that’s how you generate more plumbing leads. The best features of generating more plumbing leads include being kind to customers especially when they call to book services and answering their service history questions.
You can also guide them if equipment has issues or they would like to consult with managing experts about a service. These repeated services can always give you more plumbing leads because it’s a nice strategy to build your business reputation.
It’s the small things that count like greeting customers politely and so on. That’s how you end up getting more plumbing reviews and this depends on timely service providence, monitoring locations and keenly setting appointments.
Communication is always important in empowering technicians and through mobile applications you can get more online customers. Nowadays everyone is connected to the internet many hours in a day. There is a lot of information on the internet and that’s how customers know about your plumbing business. That’s how you get new plumbing leads effortlessly.
In such instances, you will realize higher profits within a few weeks. The trick about the online strategy is that you should give customers information constantly to keep them engaged. You can only do this by updating content on a daily basis or hourly basis about updates or changes in the business.
These small details matter a lot in client engagement because if your website has nothing interesting, no news about the latest trends, products reviews then customers will be bored.
It’s advisable to invest in the staff by training them how to be the best plumbers or service experts. This involves equipping clients with visual sales as a great presentation tool and skills. Update best photos showcasing your staff skills to attract more customers and that’s how you convert the leads to high sales.
All plumbing business owners should increase the opportunities for sales by preparing in advance. You can easily do this by sending text messages to customers when a dispatch is complete. That’s how you let them know about rivals and related stuff. That’s a great way to attain higher customer satisfaction.
7. Invest In Strategies For Targeted Email Marketing Like Advertising Campaigns
Many people don’t know the power of email marketing in a business. For plumbers, you can get more plumbing leads if you understand what the strategy entails. You cannot send emails without having targets and plans. If you overdo this strategy you might lose a customer but as long as you are wise you can maximize your profits.
The best thing about targeted emails is that they act as advertising channels so when a customer subscribes to daily notifications you can let them know if there is an update in the business or not.
This works like a consulting strategy in trade markets where this acts as a channel for advertising a brand. Do you know how many fashion lines came to be? It started as a small strategy and grew to email marketing later, then customers flocked the business. The skill works for businesses as long as the owner has a high understanding of the general rules of running a business.
This strategy works if it’s designed well and targeted to deliver appropriate messages that are relevant to customers. You cannot share irrelevant topics and expect more plumbing leads.
Keep in mind customers are in control of their emails so they can unsubscribe or report any sort of abuse. From a business point of view, this is a strategy that works for many companies because once you adopt good email practices success will be guaranteed.
There are some tips and tricks if you want to adapt this strategy as a plumber: firstly you should start with your contact list by sending small batches. The targeted customers will be a nice way to start a marketing campaign. Secondly, create many links to blogs or channels that have information about your business. You can send the links as emails to attract more customers.
Ensure that your subject lines don’t have a spam trigger or else you will get a bad grade. It’s advisable to clean the list often by removing inactive contacts in the email lists.
8. Know Your Target Market
As you plan a plumbing strategy ensure that you know tips to target a great audience. The trick about this is that you need to understand your target market and customers well. This means you should know the needs of your customers through the requisitions reviews and comments. Some basics about customers are important for instance you should know the age of clients, income, gender, or credit scores.
Some great relationships start as friendships and that’s what many people don’t know in the businesses. If you want more plumbing leads start at a personal level by relating well with customers. Act like a friend and know the basic information about an interesting client. These social groups bring high incomes to a business within no time. You can segment the audience into more classes considering factors like their homeowners, consistency of purchase, membership plans or status, etc. You have to know the right message for customers and you have to send it at the right time, or else the losses will start climbing.
9. Utilize An App-Based Plumber Referral Service
The trick about this strategy is ensuring that you have a good online presence or else the customers that show up physically are minimal. This means less customers, less leads, hence no profits. You can generate referrals from businesses if you have more referrals because this works using by tell a friend to tell a friend skill.
10. Customer Experience Is Key
As a business owner, you need to master several skills and customer experience is non-negotiable. To sustain a business you need customers so if you don’t relate well with customers this means you will experience more losses in the long run.
A great way to have a better customer experience is by having a plan that measure your return on investment. After measuring the ROI you can know the revenue of your marketing campaigns. You will know if the staff members are converting plumbing leads to sales or appointments. You will also invest the money in right proportions at the right time and the right place.
That’s how you boost performance and as an investor you should be strategic. With the best advertising techniques, you can find something that works best for you and that’s how you capture more leads.
