Owning a plumbing business requires expertise and knowledge. The most important experience is related to plumbing services but business owners often take on multiple responsibilities. That includes digital marketing, which is a necessity if you want to attract new clients to your small plumbing business and achieve your most important growth goals.
Here at Select Funding, we partner with plumbing businesses every day, providing them with the financing and guidance they need to be successful. That includes providing funds to fuel their marketing efforts. If you need some guidance about plumber marketing and where to put your resources, we’ve created this guide for you, with information about social media, advertising, web design, and more.
Why Should Plumbers Consider Digital Marketing Services?
Digital marketing involves everything that you do online to identify your brand, connect with your target audience, and promote your business. No small business, especially service businesses like plumbing companies, can afford to ignore digital marketing. Here are some statistics that indicate why digital marketing services are important to plumbing companies:
- There are over 120,000 plumbing businesses in the United States.
- No single plumbing company accounts for more than one percent of the market nationwide.
- 86% of all consumers say they read online reviews before hiring a plumber.
These numbers illustrate that it’s necessary for every plumbing company to find ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors locally, retain existing customers, and attract new leads and customers on an ongoing basis.
Digital marketing services are typically provided by marketing agencies who specialize in things like search engine optimization (SEO), search engine and social media advertising, blogging, and email marketing. Hiring an agency can help you refine your website, improve your search rank, and beat out your competitors.
What Makes a Good Plumber’s Website?
Effective plumber marketing starts with a well-designed and optimized plumber website. Your website is where you can use SEO, including local keywords and markers. Good SEO does the following things:
- Makes it easy for Google and other search engines to crawl and properly index your website to make sure it appears in searches.
- Allows you to connect with an audience of prospective customers who are looking for plumbing services in your area.
- Establishes your online brand and gives you a digital home base for all your marketing efforts.
- Gives you a place to put informative content, including blog posts, testimonials, and videos.
- Makes it possible for visitors to your site who may be vision or hearing impaired to access your content. (An example is the alt image tags that describe images for those who can’t see them or who use screen readers.
- Provides a place to put your landing pages for the digital ad campaigns you pay for.
A good plumber’s website should have certain qualities and characteristics that make it useful and memorable. Here are some of the most important things to include:
- A well-designed and visually appealing home page with unique images and compelling text.
- A responsive design that will look good on any device used to access it.
- User-friendly navigation, including a menu and a search function.
- Complementary colors that align with your brand and aren’t too bright or busy. (Too many clashing colors can be fatiguing to the eyes.)
- Easy-to-read fonts that aren’t overly complicated. Sans serif fonts are popular for a reason. They’re clean and unlikely to cause confusion.
- Detailed service pages that describe the services you offer and provide necessary information to help visitors to your site understand what you offer and what you don’t.
- A pricing page. While you may charge an hourly rate for labor, and charges can vary based on multiple factors, it’s still a good idea to be transparent about your rates. Not everybody wants to fill out a form to get a quote, so providing some information up front may help to prevent people from hitting the back button to visit one of your competitors.
- Reviews and testimonials. Linking to external review sites and posting detailed testimonials provides social proof of the excellence of your services.
- A clear call to action. You should not assume that people know what the next step is if they want to hire you. Having a clear CTA will increase the likelihood that they’ll subscribe to your email list, fill out your contact form, or call you to talk about their plumbing needs.
- An About Us page. Your About Us page is where you’ll provide information about your company, including its history and values. You may also include brief biographies of you and your employees.
- Contact information. You should have a stand-alone contact page, but it’s equally as important to include contact information on your home page and in your header or footer. You should be sure to list your physical address, phone number, and email address.
- Social media handles. Your social media handles should be listed in a prominent place, ideally with follow buttons to make it easy for your site’s visitors to follow you.
- Content library. Finally, you should have a content library with information that’s useful to your target audience. A robust FAQ section is a must, but you may also want to incorporate explainer videos, articles, blog posts, and other useful information.
Including these essential elements in your plumbing website will make it easy for people to find you online and provide them with the information they need to choose you instead of one of your competitors.
Digital Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Plumbing Business
Once you have an effective plumber’s website, you can think about other digital marketing strategies to try. Here are some of the most effective strategies we know.
Off-Site SEO
We talked a lot about SEO on your website, but off-site SEO can be just as important and impactful. Effective off-site SEO includes making sure that your company listings, sometimes referred to as NAP (name, address, phone number) listings are standardized. It might seem silly, but even something as simple as having one listing with an abbreviation and one without (St. vs Street) can make a difference.
Search Engine and Social Media Advertising
Advertising on search engines such as Google or social media sites like Facebook can make a huge difference when it comes to attracting leads. Advertising on Google requires bidding on keywords, and local keywords unique to your service area are best. Plumber social media marketing allows you to target people who are homeowners or business owners in your area. You can set your own budget and use Facebook’s detailed analytics to review your ad’s performance and refine it as needed.
Social Media Posts
While social media advertising is undeniably important, so are regular social media posts. We suggest choosing one or two social media platforms, with Facebook being ideal for consumer marketing and LinkedIn preferred if you do plumbing work for other businesses. Social media posts may include written content, photographs, images, videos, and more. Remember that it’s better to stay active on one or two social media sites than it is to have a lackluster or sporadic presence on many sites.
Online Reputation Management
Online reputation management is a must for every company and it’s particularly essential for service providers, including plumbing companies. To manage your reputation, you’ll need to encourage online reviews and then monitor review sites. Make sure to respond to all reviews, positive and negative, and do whatever you can to mitigate negative reviews. A lack of responsiveness will indicate that you don’t care if your clients have negative experiences, so respond publicly and professionally, take the conflict offline if you can, and do whatever you can to help turn the reviewer’s experience around.
Referral Program
Your online marketing may also include a digital referral program. Referrals can be a great way to grow your business because people often prefer to get a recommendation for plumbing services from someone they know. You can promote your referral program on your social media or to your email list, and you may also have information about it on your website and social media profiles.
Email Marketing
Email marketing gets an average return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every $1 spent. That’s higher than most other marketing formats, so it makes sense to use email marketing to promote your plumbing business. You can collect email addresses on your home page or run a social media campaign where you give away some unique content to entice people to opt into your list. From there, your list can be segmented to nurture leads and keep in touch with existing clients. It may also be useful for informing people about your referral program or encouraging people to leave online reviews about your services.
Get the Working Capital You Need to Pay for Plumber Marketing Services
Plumber marketing doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does require working capital if you want your marketing strategies to be effective. The information we’ve included here can help you decide which marketing tactics to use to promote your plumbing business.
Do you need working capital to pay for digital marketing services and advertising? Select Funding is here to help! Click here to learn about our small business financing for plumbing companies and begin the application process today.
