Use These Simple Plumbing Marketing Tricks To Outrank The Competition, Obtain More Leads And Grow Your Business The Right Way
As the owner of a plumbing company, you should understand that starting your business is just the initial step. Retaining and attracting clients requires aggressive plumbing service marketing. Plumbers face a huge challenge in acquiring, attracting, and converting prospects into paying clients. And to achieve that, your business needs to know how to sell plumbing services (both online and offline) to wallet out customers.
The way people search for a plumbing company has changed in the past few decades. Earlier, homeowners used to go to their local directories or phonebook to search for a local plumbing service company but nowadays rely on Google search results to hire a nearby plumber.
Every plumbing company has one major goal: to obtain more clients and book more service appointments. And since there are dozens of tactics and strategies you can utilize, the beginning point remains the same: having a well-crafted plumbing marketing plan.
After all, marketing your plumbing services drives homeowners to schedule service appointments and bring in more revenue. But without a good plumbing marketing strategy, it is synonymous with heading to war without your weapons.
Without further ado, let us dive into our topic.
What is a Plumbing Marketing Plan?
A plumbing marketing strategy/plan is typically a blueprint that illustrates the methods you intend to implement to make your clients schedule service appointments with your company. It serves as a roadmap that informs your marketing tactics, plumbing advertising slogans, marketing activities, desired results, and costs. It should outline your plumbing business’s actions to achieve its goals.
A plumber marketing plan is your crucial guide to growing and promoting your business. It is the engine that skyrockets your plumbing sales, so you require a solid plan of action to make the most out of it. It takes research, careful planning, and a complete understanding of your industry to craft a plan that will guarantee the success of your plumbing business.
Reasons Why Your Plumbing Business Must Have a Well-Crafted Marketing Plan
Whether you are operating a small plumbing business or scaling a large one, you still need to develop a solid marketing plan.
After all, it comes with tons of benefits like the following:
1. A Marketing Plan Helps You Develop Measurable Company Goals
Clarity is extremely crucial when setting your plumbing business objectives or goals. Thus your plan shouldn’t be as easy as ‘closing more sales this year’ or ‘not going broke’. Otherwise, you would be setting your plumbing business for failure.
If you don’t have a clear goal, you can’t implement advertising activities to assist you to reach what you want to attain.
With a plumbing marketing plan, you can concentrate on tangible targets, boosting company performance and sales throughout the year.
2. A Plumbing Marketing Plan Ensures Consistency
Most plumbers who don’t have a clear marketing plan advertise their services sporadically and find that they only do aggressive marketing when they really require more sales.
What generally occurs is that there is a wave of advertising or marketing activity that produces new customers. Then, since they have no dedicated resources or plan, their attention is dedicated to meeting the needs of new clients. On the flip side, their marketing activity has entirely stopped.
Ultimately, this results in troughs and peaks of activity, which offers an erratic pipeline of sales or marketing opportunities. A plumbing marketing plan with resources allocated to it allows you to advertise the business consistently and continuously.
3. A Marketing Plan Helps You Sell Your Plumbing Services
The main focus of plumber advertising is that it should promote your plumbing services, and that’s how you maximize your profits. In the long run, plumbing marketing is what drives sales. Of course, it is crucial to have superior plumbing services, but unless homeowners get to understand your services, how will you advertise them? And that’s what a plumbing marketing plan does, it assists you to get your brand and name out there to draw clients and makes more sales.
4. It Helps You Offer Superior Services to Your Clients
The importance of a plumbing services marketing plan goes over and above the process. You can utilize it as a guide in dealing with your customers. When you know what you require to do, you can address your target market better.
5. Metrics for Your Plumbing Business Success
A marketing plan also offers important data to assist your plumbing company to grow. Once a baseline is set up, goals are in place, a marketing plan is just an evolution of these crucial steps. Once you have implemented your plumbing marketing plan, success can be measured and will offer valuable metric data going forward. This information will inform your strategy, so it is essential to have the correct performance metrics being measured from the beginning.
While crafting a marketing plan for your plumbing business might seem challenging, it is no doubt one of the best ways to scale your company and achieve measurable success.
Having a streamlined, efficient marketing plan will give data on what is working and what’s not so that you can make excellent strategic decisions that impact your company’s growth.
6. A Plumbing Marketing Plan Helps You Target the Right Audience
One of the primary reasons to develop a marketing plan for your plumbing business is to assist you to connect with the right prospects or clients. As we said in our post on how to start a plumbing company, knowing your target audience is crucial to success. With a marketing plan in place, you not only identify who your clients are and what they want from your business but also obtain insights on methods of reaching them.
7. It Helps You Spend Your Advertising Dollars in the Right Places
There are various marketing channels you can select from when you are trying to sell your plumbing services to connect with your clients. As well as conventional methods like TV and print advertising, there are also online marketing options such as content, email marketing, and social media. When you create a marketing plan, you can better understand where to invest your advertising dollars for maximum return.
How to Develop a Successful Plumbing Marketing Plan
An effective marketing plan can bring a whole range of benefits to your plumbing business. That said, why do we need to discuss everything you need to know about how to create a plumbing marketing strategy.
There are major steps needed to develop a strategic plan, set your marketing objectives, perform a marketing audit, conduct market research, identify your ideal target clients, come up with a budget, craft specific plumbing marketing strategies, develop an implementation schedule for the tactics and craft an evaluation process.
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Start with a Goal
Once you have decided to sell your plumbing services, you need to set measurable and realistic goals to attain within a given timeframe. This time span helps you plan activities around community events that are in line with plumbing marketing goals.
Your plumbing marketing plan goals should align with your overall business objectives. For instance, if your main goal is to reach a certain level of revenue, your marketing plan goal should be to increase conversions and website visitors by a specific amount.
You could also begin by defining a mission statement. This is essentially a ‘how and what’ of your plumbing business- a description of what you want to attain and how you plan to get there. Although not measurable from an internal perspective, it can assist you in developing a clear message for your plumbing marketing efforts.
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Research Your Target Market
Research is an important part of your plumbing marketing plan. You need to obtain more information about your market, such as growth, demographics, and size. It is crucial to keep an eye on your target market so that you are aware of changes over time, and this makes your strategy targeted and relevant. Before you begin crafting a marketing plan, you should understand the service area you are going to operate in. Marketing analytics are key to each step of the process.
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Understand Your Customers
Your clients should be at the center of everything you do when crafting a marketing plan for your plumbing business. With the assistance of your market research, you should be able to identify your “target audience”, which is a specific group of homeowners of a particular gender, location, and ethnicity. When you create a marketing plan, you should anticipate their pain points and how you can fulfill them more effectively than other plumbing contractors.
At this stage, you want to know some of your target markets and develop them into your customer personas. Whether you are starting a new plumbing business or have an established one, these are two of the main ways you can get to understand and know your customers.
By understanding the crucial details of who is attempting to appeal to, you can then begin to figure out how you can go about doing so. This helps make your plumbing marketing more relevant and targeted, increasing your probability of success.
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Describe Your Plumbing Services
To effectively advertise your services online or offline, you must be able to describe them. You can utilize a well-established tactic at this phase, also referred to as the 4Ps of the marketing matrix. The four points are:
- Product/ Service: Here, you want to understand what it is you offer to clients and what makes you stand out. Consider how it meets your customers’ needs and whether there are any additional features you can include.
- Price: As you know, this refers to the amount you charge for the plumbing services and how that compares to other plumbing contractors. Also, consider how you can increase your market share via promotions, etc.
- Promotion: Where can you advertise or promote your plumbing services, and what will appeal most to your target audience? These are questions you need to answer, along with how such promotions resonate with your plumbing brand identity.
- Place: Lastly, you need to figure out where your plumbing service will be needed most. How easy is it for clients to navigate these?
The 4P’s can give you a firmer understanding of the resources and services you have available when it comes to plumbing marketing.
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Establish a Plumbing Marketing Budget
For plumbing contractors, especially those just starting out, finding enough money to spend on advertising can be a real hassle. You are already keeping your eyeballs on expenses from trucks, tools, insurance to renting an office space. And unless you have funds set aside-your plumbing business advertising, spend that money is likely to come out of your pocket.
So what is the right amount of money your plumbing company can spend on marketing each month? While the response depends on your particular situation, consistency is crucial. Plumbing marketing is a continuous process, and it can take time to yield desired results.
To help you determine the amount to spend on marketing your plumbing business every month, several factors like company goals, client demographics, and market conditions must be considered.
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Develop Marketing Strategies
With your plumber marketing budget in place, you can start to define particular marketing strategies that will address your objectives, reach your target market and build your client base.
Plumbing Promotion and Advertising Strategies to Get More Clients
Improving your plumbing marketing can be a challenging task. Some various strategies and tools can help you grow your plumbing company. Thanks to digital technology, there are now more marketing channels plumbers can use to reach potential clients. Generally, all marketing efforts can be classified into two broad categories, either offline or online. Here’s an overview of those two major categories and the major types of campaigns.
Offline Plumbing Advertising
Anywhere your plumbing brand appears-apart from the Internet qualifies to be an offline advertising strategy. Here are various forms of offline advertising you can utilize in your plumbing business:
- Word of Mouth: Referrals are an extremely crucial part of any plumbing advertising strategy. Word of mouth incorporates conversations among your clients, influences, and any homeowner interested in using your plumbing services.
- Direct Mail: Use direct mail in a great way. Look at prior client records and identify old homes that had toilets or showers installed by your business some years ago. Create a direct mail campaign focusing on past clients offering repair, installation, or maintenance services.
- Television and Radio: Although these forms of conventional media no longer influence people like they once did, they remain effective ways to reach prospects or clients.
- Display Advertising: Â Bus stop signage, postcards, billboards, and any other physical locations you need to pay so that your logo shows up in your category.
Online Plumbing Marketing Strategies
A vibrant digital marketing strategy will assist you to boost your plumbing business. These 10 internet marketing strategies have been proven to help plumbers skyrocket their performance. If you use them, you could be on your way to creating a concrete internet marketing strategy that will help you bring in more clients and retain the existing ones:
- Invest in a professional plumbing website design: Your plumbing website is the first point of contact between your potential clients and business, which implies you need to make a memorable first impression. But if your site isn’t clean, interesting, and easy to read, it will not matter the amount of time you spend crafting other internet marketing strategies, and you will still lose clients. That’s why you need to hire a plumbing website design agency to create a site that’s attention-grabbing, mobile-friendly, and modern.
- Use Search Engine Optimization to Make Your Plumbing Website Get found by Prospects/clients Online: Search engine optimization and marketing are integral parts of what help your plumbing business rank higher on the search engine results pages. After researching online, this increases your chances of being the plumbing contractor a homeowner selects to hire.
- Invest in Pay Per Click Advertising to get immediate plumbing leads: Pay Per Click adverts to help your plumbing business instantly be found on the first page of Google, thereby delivering prompt results in the process.
- Manage Your Online Reputation to Get More Plumbing Contracts: Publicly responding to negative reviews or positive ones helps build trust with your audience, which may help you get plumbing contracts in the long run.
- Email Marketing: Not every homeowner uses Twitter or Facebook, but you increase your odds if your future and current clients have an email address, which is why this plumbing marketing channel remains very effective.
Figuring out which marketing channels are right for your plumbing company can be challenging, marketing tactics that may work perfectly for one business may backfire on another plumber in the same situation. Select your channels wisely and never risk all your eggs in one basket.
Frequently Asked Questions on plumbing Marketing Plan
What should be included in the plumbing marketing plan?
Some of the elements that should be included in a plumbing marketing plan include identifying who your ideal client is, unique selling proposition, marketing budget, and advertising strategies (both online and offline) amongst others.
What are the crucial elements of a plumbing marketing plan?
The 4p’s of marketing include price, promotion, product/service, place, and people. Together these elements form a marketing mix that places your plumbing business strategically and can be utilized to varying degrees of force.
How do you attract plumbing clients?
You can use several proven techniques to get homeowners to book plumbing service appointments with your business, including developing a professional website, using SEO services to help people find your business online, social media advertising, retargeting, and online reputation management.
Let Blackstorm Design +Marketing Help You Create and Execute Your Plumbing Marketing Plan
If developing and implementing the above tactics seem like a daunting task, that’s because they are! The good news is that you don’t have to do all of them on your own.
Do you want matters most-running your plumbing company and let the Blackstorm Design + Marketing team handle each aspect of your plumbing marketing plan on your behalf?
Schedule a no-obligation discovery call with Blackstorm Design + Marketing to know more about how our team can help you increase qualified leads and revenue.
