We get it; you’ve tried every form of plumbing marketing over the years, and none of it works. That’s actually how we started our marketing agency to begin with.
We tried to hire marketing agencies to help grow our home services businesses, and they did nothing but patronize us and rob us of our money.
Having now been in business for more than a decade, we’ve compiled a guide to help plumbers learn marketing and develop a comprehensive marketing plan going into 2024.
We didn’t pull any punches because we know what’s it like to be disrespected.
Plumbing Marketing Essentials
- Company Brand
- Google Business Profile
- Website
- SEO
- Social Media
Plumbing Marketing Explained
Marketing isn’t rocket science. Every time you promote your plumbing company, you are participating in marketing.
In 2024, most plumbers resort to buying leads, but with our marketing strategy, you can generate free plumbing leads from various sources. You can beat these big companies at their own game.
While most modern marketing is digital, offline promotional methods like direct mail, print flyers, and networking are still effective, too.
Our guide covers every aspect of marketing for plumbers, not just SEO, PPC, and email blasts. We run the full gamut so that readers will have a broad knowledge of the craft.
How to Measure Plumbing Marketing Results
Plumbing companies can measure marketing campaigns with financial metrics like return on marketing investment (ROMI) and customer acquisition cost (CAC).
On a more granular level, plumbers can review digital metrics from Google Analytics and Google Search Console, including monthly clicks, monthly unique visits, and monthly impressions.
Because marketing can entail everything from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to pay-per-click advertising (PPC), the most informative metrics will depend on your unique campaign.
In some cases, quantifiable metrics such as revenue or return on investment (ROI) can provide conclusive measurements. However, more granular studies will provide further context.
Executing a Plumbing Marketing Plan
Plumbers need information, strategy, and resources to execute a marketing plan. Without them, there’s no practical way to follow through or feel confident in the future process.
Most contractors and companies are pressed for time and don’t think they have enough to allocate marketing resources properly.
Information
Businesses must gather information before developing a marketing plan. For instance, study target markets, consumers, and promotional methods as a starting place.
Smartphones and WiFi have changed how consumers interact with businesses, and plumbers must adjust.
Still, be aware of misleading information and ensure you are getting your data from a verified source.
Strategy
Reading about the cost of a plumbing website can provide ideas and even cost figures.
Still, until you decide what you’re willing to pay for a website and how much ROI you expect it to generate, it isn’t all that valuable. Developing a strategy solves this problem.
If, through research, you can determine that you hope to make x amount of dollars through marketing this year, you can begin to formulate a plan that projects a favorable return on investment.
Resources
Planning and doing are two different things. Plumbers can have the best marketing success strategy but lack the resources to execute the plan.
A single person cannot possibly perform all the actions that make up a promising marketing campaign, let alone a full-time business owner.
Access to a team of individuals with unique skill sets is the ideal scenario for promoting plumbing services. At Plumbing Webmasters, our team meets those exact needs.
Call it a sales pitch, but we intentionally built a webmasters’ team to provide the skilled labor required to execute a marketing plan.
Marketing Basics for Plumbers
Every form of promotion is marketing. Whether you buy billboard space on your local highway or build a branded company website and publish it online, you promote your plumbing services.
Think about the times you’ve left business cards on the windshield of parked vehicles or left fliers in the mailboxes of nearby homes.
That is marketing. Marketing happens even when you don’t realize it.
When you discuss your service with an acquaintance, think of it more like a friendly conversation, but make sure to “sell yourself” just in case you are marketing.
Contrary to popular belief, marketing doesn’t have to be manipulative, but it certainly can confirm that same belief.
- 1. Any Promotion of Your Plumbing Service is a Form of Marketing
- 2. Marketing Includes Paid Advertising
- 3. You Don’t Have To “Manipulate” People To Be Good At Marketing
Ways to Market Plumbing Services
At Plumbing Webmasters, our specialty is online marketing. There are many forms of promotion within the online marketing category, but offline promotion exists.
The more traditional forms of advertising like print, billboards, and even radio/television are all conducted without the need for an internet connection.
They also no longer work very well. Very few consumers find plumbers through offline channels in 2024.
Instead, they visit Google and search for nearby plumbing companies and often compare and contrast them based on customer reviews from their Google Business Profile, Facebook, or Yelp pages.
They might also check platforms like Instagram and YouTube to further understand the brand and its trustworthiness.
Take a look at some ways to market plumbing:
- Billboard Ads
- Business Cards
- Content Marketing
- Google Ads (PPC)
- Print Advertising
- Remarketing / Retargeting
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social Media Ads
- Social Media Marketing
- Telemarketing (Cold Calling)
- Television / Radio Spots
- Truck Wraps
Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing
If you were to break down the list above, you could place every way to market within one of two general categories: inbound marketing and outbound marketing.
An inbound strategy organically pulls potential customers into your services, while an outbound strategy goes out and gets them.
Most traditional forms of marketing (including advertising) are considered outbound. Newer methods, most famously SEO, are categorized as inbound promotion.
The main distinction between the two is that outbound marketing is both intrusive and interruptive, while inbound marketing is notably less so.
Since outbound promotion relies on “going out to get” potential customers, it tends to require a more significant financial investment.
The most common example of this is Google Ads (PPC), a modern form of outbound promotion that costs much more to execute than SEO, which is the contemporary face of inbound marketing.
Billboard Advertising
One old-school promotional tactic that has been rendered obsolete by the onset of inbound marketing strategies, mainly digitally relevant, is billboard advertising.
When drivers pass a billboard for your plumbing services, the likelihood of the ad being relevant to them at that time and place is shallow.
Compare that to the relevance for someone who typed in “plumber near me” on their smartphone.
In the latter case, the person viewing your search result has already demonstrated a need for your services, which makes the relevance of the search result much greater.
It so happens that the cost of securing that search result is also much lower than the price of the billboard, making it that much more advantageous from a marketing perspective.
Business Cards
Although they are an old-school marketing tactic, business cards remain a worthwhile investment for plumbers, if for no other reason than their sheer cheapness.
The investment in these paper-thin promotional materials is so minuscule that any benefit at all would make them “worth it.” There’s also a degree of personalization that business cards can extend.
After completing a plumbing service for a paying customer, leaving them with a card that lists your contact information and a reminder to review your service on Google or Facebook can increase callbacks, customer retention, and reviews.
So, while business cards are unlikely to “bring in” customers, they can help retain and maximize the ones compiled through other marketing methods, such as search engine optimization (SEO).
Content Marketing
One new-school form of promotion is content marketing. Whether it is a social media platform like YouTube or a search engine like Google, content is the internet’s lifeblood.
Without content, Google could not exist, Facebook could not exist, YouTube could not exist, and so on.
The opportunity present for plumbers is creating content assets and marketing them through all of these different channels.
An example of content marketing would be writing a highly informative blog post about common plumbing problems and, sharing it on Facebook LinkedIn, and converting it into a YouTube video.
As word of this blog post spreads via search engines and social media, it would begin to funnel visitors to your homepage while growing brand awareness.
If it became secure on page one of Google, it would start to earn inbound links, improving its ranking even more naturally.
Creating high-quality content gives your plumbing company the opportunity to distribute it across multiple marketing channels.
Google Ads (PPC)
PPC is the intersection between modern and traditional marketing. The concept itself is conventional, but its application is very contemporary.
You might think of Google Ads compared to the example of the billboard mentioned above.
The difference with ads on Google is that there is relevance that can be demonstrated and tracked. Google allows advertisements to target specific keywords, locations, and demographics.
This way, ads are revealed only to a group of people that are worth advertising to. You cannot apply this same tactic to a billboard campaign since plumbers could not possibly track everyone who sees it.
While Google Ads are decidedly modern in their application, keep in mind that they are still a form of outbound marketing, which makes them both expensive and, in some cases, off-putting to consumers.
Google Ads imitate organic results on search results.
Print Advertising
Local newspaper ads or ads in the Yellow Pages were once enough to generate high-quality plumbing leads. Those days are long gone, and print ads no longer carry much weight to prospective clients.
There’s more than one reason for this phenomenon, but the most obvious one is relatively straightforward: nobody reads print anymore.
Okay, so “nobody” is an exaggeration, but the decrease in print viewership from the late ’90s is astronomical.
Most newspapers have transitioned to digital formats as their flagship distribution channel, and that is, of course, because their readers will only show up online.
Being mentioned in a newspaper article still holds value in 2024, but only if it’s digitally published and preferably with a link back to your website. Inbound links serve as endorsements in Google’s algorithm.
Remarketing / Retargeting
If one marketing method can be considered both inbound and outbound, it would be remarketing, aka retargeting.
Remarketing is the process of advertising services to someone who has already demonstrated interest in your service in one way or another.
This interest is often made clear through website visitation, but users can also complete other defined events, such as watching a branded YouTube video.
If someone browses your website or watches your video, their interest in your ad is theoretically more significant than someone who has not.
Advertisements can retarget these users using browser cookie tracking.
The numbers back up retargeting as a promotional method by showing significant increases in conversion rates to groups who have shown prior interest in the service.
The previous interest of the consumer was inbound, while your promotional targeting of them is outbound.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the most effective marketing strategy for plumbers in 2024. It checks all the boxes discussed on this page.
It is a form of inbound promotion; consumers reach it at their most preferred source (Google), incredibly cost-efficient.
Furthermore, it can be easily tracked, monitored, and analyzed at all times.
While paid advertising methods like Google Ads (PPC) require a real-time investment for a short-term return, SEO for plumbers necessitates less investment to secure a long-term business asset.
Once search results appear on Google, they can become an ongoing lead generator for years to come and cost you very little as a plumbing company compared to other forms of promotion.
Google is a constantly evolving search engine, so SEO is always subject to minor changes.
Ranking at the top of organic search results yields the best long-term ROI for plumbing companies.
Social Media Ads
You now know about Google Ads, but were you aware that social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube also offer ad space?
Displaying ads on social media has become an increasingly popular promotional method.
Facebook, the top social network, has minimized the impact of organic posts from local businesses, including plumbing contractors.
Since an organic Facebook post on your business page will no longer reach any of your followers, advertising becomes the logical solution.
Ads, of course, can be expensive, but sometimes the investment is worth the trade.
Facebook ads can yield considerable ROI if adequately constructed, managed, and tracked throughout their lifespan. The process is not dissimilar to analyzing a Google Ads campaign, and the goal is identical.
Facebook’s Advantage+ audience targeting allows plumbers to reach the most optimal users online.
Social Media Marketing
Ads are not the only way to promote through social networks. Organic posts on Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube remain meaningful assets for plumbers.
While they may not directly generate leads, they can help grow brand awareness and even influence local SEO by sending signals to Google.
Even if it is effectively a business listing, a presence on social media boosts authority and lets Google and its users know that you are a legitimate business and have taken the time to connect with your potential customers through social media.
For example, one way to utilize LinkedIn is to share blog posts published on your website.
Content sharing helps distribute on-page content to external sources, which helps SEO as a general principle.
Facebook is a worthy platform to distribute high-quality plumbing content from your website. Of course, your reach will be limited unless you invest in Facebook Advertising.
Sharing original photos and videos is also beneficial to plumbers.
Telemarketing (Cold Calling)
Remember the days of smashing your Motorola to pieces with a baseball bat? Ok, so maybe you don’t, but that isn’t so far-fetched to consider when telemarketers harass you in your home.
There was always a negative connotation associated with cold calls, but consumers are more aware of their tricks in 2024 than ever before.
As a result, the few times telemarketing did work have dwindled to an even less likely occurrence.
So imagine calling random strangers in your service area to see if they have a broken pipe in their kitchen.
Here’s a tip: if they do, they have already searched Google and found the plumber of their choice to rectify the issue.
Unsuspecting consumers don’t need you and don’t want your phone call. They might even block your number on their iPhone or Android device and make a note of your utter disgracefulness.
Cold calling is not a viable marketing strategy for plumbers in 2024.
Television / Radio Spots
In 2024, the crazy plumber who comes on a commercial when watching the local news is doing two things: embarrassing himself and wasting money.
Flashback to 1999, and he’s only embarrassing himself. But today, there’s no longer an incentive to do so.
For that matter, TV spots and radio spots reach a much narrower audience than they did 20 years ago.
The cost of advertising on either medium remains higher than it’s worth, and a commercial’s production is not doing plumbers any favors.
Uploading a self-made video to YouTube using only your iPhone device has an excellent chance of ROI than does a TV spot.
Like other types of old-school promotion discussed on this page, TV and radio ads are a form of outbound marketing that reaches a pool of viewers or listeners who will find them primarily irrelevant.
Aside from large brands and franchises, TV / Radio spots are typically a money pit for plumbers.
Truck Wraps
Draping your truck in a sized-fit and mobile promotional sticker is not a horrible idea, even in 2023. Although it is undoubtedly a form of outbound marketing and is not trackable in the way SEO or social media marketing is, it can still provide ROI to plumbing companies.
What makes it different than a billboard, you ask? For one, it costs less money to implement. Secondly, once it’s a part of your truck, it becomes a permanent business asset.
With a billboard or TV spot, you are paying an ongoing fee to keep the word out. The truck or car wrap can show your company logo, contact information, website URL, and anything else you promote.
Again, it can be a worthwhile investment because it is a one-time cost with a lifetime of opportunity to return. There is no fixed fee, and it can help brand your business.
Benefits of Marketing for Plumbing Companies
A plumber benefits from promotion in many ways. Assuming you develop and implement the best strategies, marketing can drive your business to the top of your market.
The key is to take the time to create a plan based on research and to invest in the labor required to apply it successfully.
Brand Awareness
Building a brand can seem like “fluff” from a plumber’s standpoint, but branding is essential for several reasons and is a product of effective marketing.
Brands are built on recognition first and foremost, but trust ultimately sustains them. Google has shown time and again that trust is one of its most influential search ranking factors.
By building a brand through digital platforms (business listings, social media, website), you legitimize your plumbing company with a strong and expansive web presence.
When people complain about Google favoring brands, they are bickering about the trust those companies have built through Google and the individuals who utilize its search engine.
Sure, is it hard to build more confidence than a conglomerate? Yes. But remember, local results get priority for plumbers.
Lead Generation
Plumbing marketing exists to generate leads. It cannot be any more simple than that. Leads are potential customers who connect with your business in one way or another. Both an email inquiry and a phone call are examples.
Leads vary in quality, and services that are promising “lead generation for plumbers” may fail to produce serious prospects.
Sometimes, they offer shared leads, which implies those same customers are given to other plumbers in your area, making them less likely to convert into a sale.
The best kinds of leads are exclusive, meaning the prospect is inquiring only about your services in an email or phone call.
SEO produces the highest quality leads (exclusives), which is another reason why it’s so valuable. Advertising, digital or otherwise, is also designed to generate leads.
Plumbers can purchase leads from 3rd-party providers, but creating your own lead generation process produces a much higher ROI and retention rate.
The downside of buying shared leads has been well-documented over the years.
Return on Investment (ROI)
The goal of plumbing companies is to make money. It’s not rocket science. You, as a plumber, must make more than you spend.
This simple equation is known as ROI, which is short for Return on Investment. The revenue must significantly exceed the expenses to succeed in business.
When adequately executed, marketing will yield an ROI, and sometimes one that is so significant it changes the trajectory of your life.
SEO is one of the most powerful tools on earth because it can help plumbers earn money without spending too much on it.
It can get you a larger home, a more appealing car, and a better education for your children.
No, it does not guarantee you any of those things, but it gives you a chance, which is usually enough to justify the investment in the first place. But plumbers must decide for themselves.
Defining an Audience
No one can fully explain marketing without discussing the importance of a target audience. Sure, promotion in itself can reach anyone, anywhere, anytime.
But as we discussed with some of the specific methods, that is not always the best course of action.
It makes far more sense from both a practical and financial standpoint to promote services to a defined subgroup of people.
Who belongs to this subgroup is determined by you as a plumber and us as your marketing adviser.
Demographics
Age, education level, lifestyle, profession, relationship status, residence status. These are each an example of a demographic. Plumbing contractors might find one or more of these quite helpful when defining their target audience.
Let’s take residence, for example. Plumbing services are highly relevant for individuals who own and live in homes (homeowners). After all, they, as a homeowner, are responsible for the plumbing.
Now, let’s compare that to people who rent homes or apartments. These people are not liable for plumbing maintenance.
So, by and large, they aren’t on the lookout for your services. As you might imagine, promoting services only to homeowners and not home renters is cost-effective.
Demographic targeting is one of the most efficient ways to maximize ad spend on Facebook and other platforms.
Medium
Reaching a prospective customer requires some vehicle, and we don’t mean your plumbing truck. We are alluding to the medium or channel through which the prospect learns of your services.
We’ve detailed options and which of them we believe are the most effective in 2024.
In our opinion, Google is the number one medium through which to reach a potential client, and the data backs this up. With this in mind, SEO becomes a clear-cut choice for plumbing marketing.
Keep in mind that companies are not limited to only one channel. You can reach prospects on both Google and social media, for example. You can even use a truck wrap and also use Google Ads. There’s plenty of flexibility.
Radius
As a plumber with ambition, your service radius might be “optimistic,” to put it kindly. Contractors’ truth is that they should not market services to locations they cannot serve efficiently.
It can compromise your business if it takes 2 hours to deploy a truck to an area you market.
Not only are you spending on fuel it takes to get there and back, but you are providing a substandard service and one that a company with a closer radius could easily outperform.
Focusing on a radius that you can serve optimally will improve your performance and likely help your company build a superior reputation, including online reviews on Google and Facebook.
Tracking Marketing Data
We identified measurement as one of the three core elements of marketing. But before you can measure, you must track data. There must be a large enough sample of data to make a measurement worthwhile.
Several tools exist that can help plumbers track their marketing data:
Facebook Insights
Facebook Page Insights is the platform’s native analytics tool that tracks the behaviors of users who visit or interact with your page or posts.
Page Insights is the most potent native social media tracking tool available online. As we noted before, Facebook is no longer a network on which to reach consumers organically.
To bring people closer together, they changed the algorithm to return the focus to human interactions rather than business or brand to humans.
That’s not great news for plumbers, but Facebook Insights remains a useful tool for tracking Facebook users’ behavior.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics 4 is the number one tracking tool available online. And why shouldn’t it be? After all, it tracks data using the best source we possibly have, Google itself.
GA4 can track data from both SEO and paid advertising campaigns. Although they don’t reveal every bit of information, you can’t see all of the terms people search for to enter your website.
GA4 provides enough to give plumbing companies a good idea about where improvements are necessary and where their successes originate.
To install Google Analytics 4 on a website, you must embed the code within the HTML. Contact a local website designer or programmer if you don’t know how to do this yourself.
HubSpot Marketing
HubSpot Marketing is a marketing analytics software that tracks data from all of your different promotional channels.
Unlike Facebook Audience Insights or Google Analytics, HubSpot Marketing can organize information from multiple sources into a single unified dashboard.
It empowers plumbers to analyze their data from a broader view.
While HubSpot Marketing helps track data as it flows in, its utility is even more impactful than that. The ultimate goal of this tool is to increase website conversion rates for businesses.
Other kinds of software like HS exist on the web, but most independent evaluators rank it as the most prominent marketing analytics software available.
Plumbing Marketing Services
Many contractors have a fundamental question about marketing: is there someone who can do it for me?
The answer is yes. Plumbing Webmasters markets plumbers all across the United States of America and helps them reach their business goals each year. Our process is not complicated.
We have a team of 15 skilled webmasters who perform the skilled labor required for an effective marketing campaign. We handle everything from design (custom websites) to plumbing SEO services.
Here’s a full breakdown:
Content
Our content team includes professional writers trained regularly in the latest SEO practices and whose work is verified by an on-staff editor.
There is a saying in the SEO industry: content is king. That’s because Google has publicly stated its affinity for quality content and cites it as the most critical factor in a page’s value.
We produce highly relevant content that is original, relevant, and unique. Each piece of content published on Plumbing Webmasters’ designed websites passes Copyscape to confirm its uniqueness and avoid duplicate content issues.
Our writers are knowledgeable about plumbing services and write content for your consumers. We never engage in black-hat content tricks like keyword stuffing. We are a white-hat SEO company.
Design (Custom Websites)
Our website design team includes professionals with experience in marketing for plumbers. Each site built by our staff is custom-made and optimized for search.
But most importantly, it is designed with clean code and schema markup.
There is a direct relationship between SEO and custom design.
When HTML code is clean, CSS style sheets are advanced, and schema markup microdata is incorporated, the sky’s the limit for plumbing websites.
Visual appeal is also a consideration under the Plumbing Webmasters design team’s watchful eye.
Although the presentation does not reveal the code behind it, having an aesthetically pleasing display can increase conversion rates on a plumbing company website.
A practical design integrates your company logo and color scheme.
Mapping
There’s a saying in marketing, “Put yourself on the map,” and it’s never been more literal than in 2024. Today, “the map” in its most literal sense is Google Maps.
Search queries are adjusted based on the searcher’s geo-location concerning the search result.
Local SERPs yield a group of results known as the Local Map Pack, which is 3 Google Maps listings that are most relevant to the user, based primarily on their location.
Google Maps links with Google Business Profile to show the aggregate star rating of a plumbing company.
When Plumbing Webmasters conducts mapping services, we verify your Google Business Profile’s location and optimize it for local search.
We also go to great lengths to ensure that you optimize your Google Business Profile, including the presence of favorable reviews that we help you generate with DataPins software.
The Map 3-Pack is a prominent ranking position for local plumbing companies.
Reputation Management
Part of the promotion is reputation. How can a plumber most effectively market himself without a solid reputation? For many plumbers, reputation starts with becoming known in their local community.
Establishing a name can be challenging enough on its own, but maintaining a favorable perception is even more difficult.
The first step in gaining notoriety is to install DataPins software from Plumbing Webmasters. It makes the process of leaving reviews more convenient for customers.
They can visit your website and directly submit feedback to Google or Facebook without ever having to leave your site.
Additionally, the software sends text reminders with links so customers don’t forget to do it at home.
To maintain a positive reputation, try to do a great job on services and always monitor review platforms for any negativity. If it exists, respond professionally and request its removal if it is unfounded.
Optimization
The objective of SEO is to optimize every aspect of your plumbing company’s web presence. Some mistakenly believe SEO is explicitly reserved and only for a website.
That is not the case. SEO expands far beyond your main website — although it helps to have one as a central hub. Business directories, external domains, and social media pages are examples of web properties that encompass SEO on a larger scale.
There was a time when a website was the only viable destination for a prospective client, but that is no longer the case.
Google can no longer grade websites exclusive from other factors, including but not limited to citation sources and social media signals.
Inbound links remain an SEO factor whether Google chooses to dismiss it or not. Sites with quality links generally outperform those without them.
Final Thoughts on a Plumbing Marketing Plan
It is essential to have a marketing plan before embarking on your journey as a business owner.
The successful plumbing companies are not high up on Google because they’re big; they’re big because they’re high up on Google.
And you can be, too, by implementing your marketing plan.
While you may not use every suggestion in this post, it is important to cover the essentials like a Google My Business listing, a company website, and proper search engine optimization.
If you require assistance, feel free to reach out to Plumbing Webmasters to streamline your marketing plan and get more customers.
