The industry can be tough to navigate when it comes to plumbing contractor marketing. Plumbers are constantly bombarded with calls from marketing agencies offering new shiny objects in the form of white-label features. But unfortunately, marketing is about salesmanship in many respects, which is bad for the plumber.
In today’s The Plumbing SEO Podcast, Nolen and Jason discuss slap on plumber marketing, which looks behind the curtain at how modern salespeople present the marketing process to local plumbing companies.
Marketing Sales Pitches for Plumbing Companies
The marketing industry is a challenge for plumbers because salespeople frame the marketing process that takes away from the process. An example of this is when a salesperson talks about features from white-label software. This salesperson might offer something like “pins,” but it really doesn’t help your plumbing website rank for any keywords.
The Upsell
Digital marketing services can range from $500 to $10,000 per month, so it’s key to understand what you’re paying for. Some agencies may upsell features unworthy of your investment, like slap-on marketing features that provide no tangible benefits. Companies that educate themselves about digital marketing can avoid such upsales and focus on ROI.
The Dog & Pony Show
Using a lot of big words does not mean the services works. For example, many plumbing marketing agencies will put on a dog and pony show with reporting, audits, and metrics that mean absolutely nothing. Once you start paying $1,100 per month, or more, you will grow frustrated quickly. Unfortunately, these shows don’t evolve into tangible actions that help your company.
The Urgency Instigator
The worse part of getting hosed by a marketing salesperson is when they create false urgency about your website or online presence. For example, they might show you competitor metrics out of context to get your blood boiling in these cases. However, since these salespeople don’t have the resources to actually help you close the gap, they only provide slap-on solutions.
Slap-On Marketing Examples
So what are some examples of slap-on marketing? Sometimes it’s easier to look at real-world instances so you can prevent these sales pitches from working on your company in 2022. Take a look at some prime examples of slap-on plumbing marketing below:
Heat Maps
Heat maps are relatively worthless unless they show up on your service and city pages with captions. For example, DataPins is a powerful local SEO tool because it disperses pins to the most relevant pages for SEO purposes. Unfortunately, other forms of heat maps barely do anything for your business.
Blog Posts
Most plumbing company blog posts are worse than worthless because they hurt your overall website authority. By publishing hundreds of 500-word blog posts that fail to target keywords, you are polluting Google’s index and telling search engines that you produce bad content regularly.
As a result, your crawl budget may lower, and you may lose ranking on your service pages.
Website Templates
If your website comes from a stock template, you can rest assured the agency loves slap-on marketing. Stock templates are prevalent throughout the web because they’re dirt cheap, and agencies can scale them across hundreds of clients.
Unfortunately, Google knows that these templates appear on thousands of websites, marking your website as completely non-unique.
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