Give prospects or clients a reason why they should choose your plumbing company instead of other plumbers in the area.
With more than 500,000 plumbers in the US, you must differentiate your company with a unique selling proposition to book more service appointments and get more leads. Not differentiating your plumbing services is something that can adversely affect your business, and it is a scary scenario when new plumbers fail to allocate enough energy and time to make their company stand out from the competition.
One of the most difficult but not impossible tasks for a plumber is identifying their point of uniqueness in the market. Why should a prospect or client book jobs with your plumbing business instead of tons of other plumbers advertising the same services? The solution? You need to develop a unique value proposition that represents your HVAC or plumbing business.
Without further ado, let us dive in!
What is a plumbing Unique Selling Proposition?
As a plumber, you need to provide something special to be successful in your business. Your unique selling proposition is the solitary aspect of your plumbing business that will distinguish it from all other plumbers that may be providing the same service. It is a simple expression of why you are unique, better, and different than other plumbers.
Plumbing USP is one of the most important rules of effective advertising or marketing that have withstood the test of time over the decades. It is something that you should include in every piece of marketing collateral that your business uses, and you should never attempt to advertise without it.
Why Is a Unique Selling Proposition Crucial to your Plumbing Marketing Strategy?
Your plumbing USP is crucial because it differentiates your business from the competition, and it is the key to retaining loyal paying clients and winning new business. That said, your USP should be concise, clear, and easy for potential clients to understand.
If you invest time and effort in crafting a compelling USP, you can utilize it across all of your internet marketing communications, business branding, and interactions. When properly paired with your mission statement, you can offer a lot of clarity to your plumbing company model, what you do and why you do it.
When revising or creating your plumbing company’s USP, consider these important factors:
- Your target market: who are you targeting, and what desires or needs do they have?
- What makes your plumbing business unique: what are your strengths, and how can you capitalize on them?
- The advantages customers can get by doing business with you: Consider the value you provide to clients that they can’t find with other plumbers
- How do you convey your plumbing USP: what slogans or materials will you utilize to get your brand message across your physical or online marketing collateral?
Focusing on your target audience, analyzing your competitors, and examining what you have to provide as a part and parcel of your unique selling proposition.
Developing a unique selling proposition isn’t easy, but it’s worth the time and effort. When done properly, it will help you attract new leads or clients, set your business from the competition, and convey the value you provide.
10 Brilliant Ways to Hone a Unique Value Proposition for Your Plumbing Business
While developing a unique selling proposition can be a daunting task, it is important for your plumbing business to find ways of standing out from the competition.
There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for developing a unique selling proposition, but there are some important steps you can take to create an effective USP for your plumbing business:
1. Identify Your Target Market and Conduct Comprehensive Market Research
Before you can even begin marketing your plumbing services, you need to understand your target audience or market.
Who are you attempting to reach or serve? Are they commercial or residential? Do you want to focus on a specific geographical area? How old are your clients? What is their average household income?
These are some of the questions that will assist you to understand your target market. That implies identifying what benefits your clients are searching for.
Many plumbers don’t know that creating a USP isn’t about coming up with something new. It is about discovering what makes your plumbing business unique and concentrating on those advantages for your target market. In this crucial step, you have to remain as specific as possible.
- Define a plumbing market you want to focus on
If you are a plumber advertising your services, targeting any homeowner who needs help with toilet repair in the universe is too vague, bland, or too broad to work optimally.
It can be daunting to pick a direction if your plumbing marketing has embraced a general approach before. Evaluate your skills, unmet needs you identified during market research, and gaps among your competitors.
Here are some examples of an ideal client that a plumbing contractor might identify:
- Homeowner
- Real estate agents
- Restaurant owners
- Property managers
- Other home service contractors
Once you understand who your target market is, it is time to do some additional research to know which benefits they are searching for. This can include interviews, online forums, and interviews.
What are the specific issues or pain points that your target audience/market is experiencing? What are they searching for in plumbing service to meet these needs or solve these problems?
You can also do some of this research online or ask your target audience directly through interviews and surveys.
2. Identify Your Plumbing Specialty
Identify your research and competition what they are offering.
It’s not just enough to understand what your target audience or market wants.
You can’t promote your plumbing services without understanding what makes them unique.
And you won’t be able to develop a compelling USP. If you don’t understand who your competitors are, and how they are different from your business.
Your competitors could be indirect or direct. To find out, you need to do some research online as well as speak to people in your target audience.
Here are some factors to consider as you research your competitors:
- Who are your major competitors?
- What plumbing services do they provide?
- What is their USP?
- Is it working? How do people perceive them?
Finding answers to these questions will help you have a good understanding of what your competitors are doing and how you can differentiate your plumbing business.
3. Develop Your Brand Message and Point Your Unique Selling Proposition
Now that you know who your target market is, what they need, and how you can offer better services than your competitors, you can begin together with your unique selling proposition.
- Develop Your Messaging
Your brand message should be relevant and clear to your target market, and it should also be unique from what your competitors are providing.
- Identify the key differentiator or main benefit you offer
Select one or two differentiators that can distinguish your business from the competition. You may have discovered several options, and you need to choose which value proposition appeals most and meets your target market needs best. This could be a solution to a specific plumbing problem or unbeatable service charges.
- Convey it in a way that’s to the point and simple
During your marketing research, don’t attempt to cram in every differentiator or benefit you have identified. The ideal plumbing USP should fit in a single sentence, and it is a great tool that attracts attention and cuts above the noise.
- Ensure that your brand message is relevant to your target market
Don’t try to appeal to every prospect- it will be impossible and can sometimes cause bland messaging. Your brand message works best when you talk your target market’s language from the onset.
- Focus on what makes your plumbing business unique
Remember those key differentiators that distinguish you from the competition.
- Position Your Plumbing USP to Discuss Benefits for Potential Clients
Highlight the advantages of doing business with you that appeal to your target clients.
Simply put, market positioning is a process that seeks to establish your plumbing brand image and identity in the minds of target clients.
It revolves about determining how you want clients to perceive your business and later fulfilling that promise. If done properly, this can be more effective in increasing sales or obtaining market share.
Here are some strategies to help you out:
- Highlight the benefits of booking service appointments with you: Don’t concentrate on the features. What is in for the client?
- Be specific: Avoid vague statements like “we are the cheapest” or “we’re the best”. You need to be more articulate about why clients should care and why your plumbing company is unique.
- Use Powerful imagery and strong language: You have two or three seconds to attract attention in a crowded plumbing market. Utilize emotive language to drive your brand message home.
- Make it easy for prospects to understand your USP: Use straightforward, simple language that holds a punch. The advantage of doing business with you should be instantly clear to potential clients. Don’t attain a concise USP depending on the abstract, idiomatic expressions.
- Make it believable: clients aren’t going to trust you if you make far-fetched claims or ones that are impossible to achieve.
- Support your USP with proof: If you can support your plumbing USP with data, testimonials, or facts in the surrounding copy, you will assist clients to feel confident that you are truly unique from the competition.
4. A Strong Unique Selling Proposition is Concise & Clear
Keep it sweet, short, and straight to the point.
A strong unique selling proposition should be concise and clear so that your target audience can understand what you are offering and how it can benefit them. Here are some tips for making your unique selling point clear:
- Consider your USP as a memorable slogan or tagline: Taglines and USPs are different entities, but how difficult would it be to create one from your USP?
- Use active voice: Active voice is more precise and direct, which implies it takes less thought to know. Passive voice also tends to be more complicated, making it easy to eliminate unnecessary words.
- Use Positive language that tells your target market what they obtain from using your plumbing services rather than what they stand to lose.
- Eliminate any qualifiers: (“better than”, “almost”, etc.) from your plumbing USP so that it is as confident and strong as possible.
- Make it unique: If your brand message positioning conveys your differentiators using jargon in the plumbing industry, it won’t be memorable or clear.
5. Define Your Unique Selling Point
To be successful in your plumbing business, you need to provide something special. Your USP could be in any aspect of your plumbing business. Some plumbing companies USPS are:
- Qualified local expert
- Reliability guarantee
- Specialists in bathroom and kitchen fitting
- Drainage specialist
- No call out charge
- Free estimate/ consultation
- No job too small or too big
Once you have discovered your unique selling proposition, you can craft your plumber marketing around your specialty.
6. Optimize Your Plumbing Website for SEO
Your plumbing web design should be visually appealing as well as functional. Each webpage must be user-friendly with clear page links and clear headings so clients can find what they are searching for easily and quickly.
Here are a few tips to optimize your plumbing company website to add value to your plumbing website and keep those qualified leads coming in.
- Claim your local business listings on Yelp, Google My Business, and other directories where your business may show up.
- Use relevant keywords for your plumbing business
- Create a public company blog
7. Manage Your Online Reviews
As plumbers, online client reviews are crucial for your online reputation management. Prospects will read through many reviews before deciding to book jobs with your plumbing company. Even in emergency scenarios, homeowners will request for recommendations from their family or friends, or typically on social media. A satisfied client will pass on their narrative of exceptional customer service.
Inviting every customer to review your plumbing business after service should be a standard business practice. With most consumers depending heavily on reviews to find local home service contractors like you, having a steady volume of online reviews on platforms like Facebook, Google, and Yelp is important.
Reviews are endorsements that help your plumbing company stand out from other plumbers online. Invitations to review instantly upon completing a specific project are crucial, and you can add a link to your email to help you get an online review.
8. Community Marketing
There is nothing more effective for a plumbing business that participating in crucial activities for the community. Join community events, get involved in local drives and charity, sponsor a local sports team and establish social contacts with your community.
Secondly, you can utilize local targeted paid ads: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising only seen by prospects or clients in your local area drives more revenue than it costs. Social media utilize search-based advertising. Anyone in your service area using specific keywords, for instance, “leak” or “plumber” will come across your ad immediately when they require it.
Lastly, giving away some branded stuff will help prospects remember your brand name longer, especially when they need your plumbing services.
9. Promote your Plumbing USP
Spreading the word out there about what makes your plumbing business different.
Ensure your plumbing website, social media, and other marketing materials highlight your USP and inform the core for their overall message.
Discuss it in your sales conservations, and be prepared to explain why it matters to potential clients. If you can’t show what makes your company special, it will be difficult for clients to notice the value.
- Develop an elevator pitch that explains why prospects should book jobs instead of your competitors
A plumbing USP is an integral part of your elevator pitch. If you can easily show what makes you different, you will be better placed to get more leads online.
Your elevator pitch should be candid enough that it can be communicated from memory but allows for more information about your plumbing business.
- Create a plumbing tagline that sums up your USP in a memorable and catchy way.
A tagline is a memorable, short phrase that conveys the key advantage of your plumbing brand. A clearly-defined USP drives a great tagline. A good plumbing tagline can be the difference between a marketing campaign that falls flat and one that succeeds.
- Create marketing materials that help to support your USP.
Every touchpoint should try to reinforce what makes your business different from your competitors, from your client support templates to your landing page. Your plumbing marketing materials should be visually appealing, seamless to navigate, and easy to understand.
There are multiple ways to promote your unique selling propositions. Be creative and think of ways of coming up with unique ways to spread the brand message out there.
10. Talk to your team about your USP
Make sure every employee on your team, from service technicians, and client service to plumbing sales, knows about your unique selling proposition. They should be able to explain it confidently and clearly to potential clients. Invest in training them so they can effectively articulate your USP and close more sales.
- Make your USP part of your brand identity
Your plumbing USP should be an integral part of your brand identity. Thus, it should inform everything; from brand messaging, content marketing, email marketing, landing pages, and beyond.
Consistency is crucial when it comes to plumbing branding. If your USP changes with every plumbing campaign, prospects will get confused and lose trust in your business.
- Stay Consistent
Your unique selling point should be an integral part of your plumbing marketing and branding efforts. It should be showcased in everything you do, from your marketing, customer service, and words used to interact with your customers.
Keep your brand message consistent across all channels. Have a concise, clear message that you attach throughout your content marketing, website, marketing materials, and other client-facing communications.
Remember, consistency is crucial for establishing a successful brand identity.
Frequently Asked Questions on Plumbing USP
What do you mean by USP?
A unique selling proposition (also known as a unique selling point) is the essence of what your plumbing service is better than that of your competitors. In internet marketing, communicating your USP quickly and clearly is one of the ways of getting prospects to convert to your site.
What should be included in a plumbing USP?
A good USP for your plumbing business should define your target market, discuss the problem you solve, explain the distinctive benefits your services offer, define your promise and cut it down.
What are the benefits of having a USP in your plumbing business?
There are several advantages that your plumbing business can enjoy using a USP including higher revenue, having a clear differentiation, simpler selling, and loyal clients.
Now that you know the keys to develop a stellar plumbing unique selling proposition, it’s time to get to work. Follow the tips discussed above and ensure you stay focused on delivering a brand message that resonates with your clients. Consistency is key when it comes to branding your plumbing business, so make sure that you include the USP in all your marketing efforts.
