Digital Marketing

It’s safe to say that plumbing services will forever be in demand. It’s not a skill that is easily acquired and while many households might be able to resolve basic plumbing problems, it’s not always that simple.

However, despite it being a much-needed service, there are a lot of plumbing companies out there, meaning you’re in tough competition with both old and new businesses. These businesses might be doing a lot to acquire customers you’re after.

With that being said, here are some helpful tips to be one of the best plumbing companies in your area.

Build a website for online users to find you

Not all plumbers or plumbing businesses will bother getting a website, especially those who have been long-established and therefore don’t feel they need one.

However, with the digital world forever growing and transforming the way many choose to spend their money, it’s worthwhile to invest your time and effort into creating a website – even if it’s a basic one!

Building a website enables online users to find those, who might live locally and be in need of your services. It’s one of the first things that many people do when it comes to finding plumbers and other handy-type services in the area. If your business doesn’t exist online, then how do you expect new customers to find you?

While you might have committed customers now, they might not always be available.

Go above and beyond for current customers

When it comes to your plumbing business, focus on going above and beyond for your current customers. These, after all, are your bread and butter of business. They really are the individuals who are propping up your business all year round and most importantly, when times get tough.

With that being said, find ways to always provide more value and satisfaction for current customers. What could you offer as a reward for their loyalty? Perhaps a discount every so often that they can use on a bill from you. It’s these little treats and discounts that can often encourage your long-term customers to remain for years to come.

For newer customers, showing this attitude of going above and beyond, will also make a big difference to their viewpoint of the business and hopefully, they’ll find themselves coming back again and again for your services in particular.

Advertise locally and encourage word-of-mouth

With plumbing services, unless you’re a big company that’s got goals to go national or international, you may be relying on those who live locally for the business. Advertising locally is therefore an important part of running a successful plumbing business.

At the same time, you want to try and encourage word-of-mouth. Being chatty with your customers and ensuring they recommend you to anyone in the local area that they might know, is a good sign-off to have with every customer you have. 

You may start to find you get more queries for new customers as a result and a demand for local work that has come from personal recommendations.

Make use of digital marketing 

Digital marketing is something to be aware of when it comes to advertising your business. While you might not be the best at social media and the digital world as a plumber, there are certain companies out there that will be able to assist in your advertising needs online.

With digital marketing, it’s worth investing a bit of your money into marketing online. From paid advertisements that target local customers to building up a social profile on one of the many social media platforms, there are some great opportunities to be found with digital marketing.

A bit of digital marketing here and there can certainly help to build your business and attract customers from further afield. It’s something that might also open up opportunities for business expansion beyond your local area.

Hire the right plumbers for the business

Plumbers are an important hire to make when it comes to your business. The plumbers you have who are going out and representing your business need to be the creme de la creme of the plumbing world.

Hiring the right plumbers is crucial because every one of them will contribute positively – or negatively to the business reputation. Be selective with plumbers that you bring into the business and only do so when you feel confident that they’re the right fit.

It’s always useful to have plumbers who you can train from a young age or at least have come into the business with plenty of experience. That way, it can save a lot of time and effort on your part stressing about whether they’re the right fit.

Provide additional training to improve skillset

While it does require effort to train your staff, it’s always good to be able to provide additional training where possible. Improving your team’s skillset is always worthwhile, especially when it comes to more complex jobs and those individual jobs that they might not have experienced prior.

Think about what training might be available for you to make use of and to utilize in order to create a team that’s talented and knowledgeable for all plumbing needs.

Keep an eye on what your competitors are up to

Finally, when it comes to building a successful business of any kind, it’s always good to take a look at what your competitors are up to. After all, they might be doing something that you’ve missed or could do better.

For plumbing companies, they all offer the same service, which means finding ways in which your own business might be able to stand out. Consider what you might want to do or introduce in order to stand out from your competition and effectively steal prospective customers from those other businesses.

Being the best plumbing company in your area is a title that you should be keen to earn. Use these tips to help become one of the best, as well as have a reputation that only benefits the business over time.

The high competition level in the plumbing industry can make your business struggle to grow. However, you can find ways to attract new clients and generate more profits while gaining a competitive advantage over other plumbing businesses. You’ll need an effective strategy and careful planning to grow your plumbing business. This article outlines five tips for growing your plumbing business.

Create a plumbing business website

Creating a website for your plumbing business helps drive traffic to your brand from search engines, resulting in improved revenue and sales. It also offers a quick-to-navigate center for all your services and data while making it easier to reach prospective customers. A website allows you to communicate details about your business in one place for prospects to learn everything they need to know without looking elsewhere.

For potential customers to notice the plumbing services you’re offering, a website designed for plumbers, such as the Buckeye plumbing website, is essential to establishing a solid online presence, making your company more accessible to people looking for plumbing services. It also helps your business rank well on SERPs.

Set plumbing business goals

Most businesses fail because they create unrealistic goals. For your plumbing business to succeed, you must set specific, quantifiable goals, including developing a company to exceed customer expectations, expand your sales, and build a sustainable business capable of thriving off its cash flow. Business goals and objectives give you a clear path to follow while motivating your employees and setting targets to work towards.

They also provide you with criteria for determining whether your company is succeeding. Consider narrowing down your plumbing business goals and objectives for long-term success. Your plumbing business goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. Track your goals to ensure you’re on the right track.

Identify your target audience

Your target audience comprises people sharing similar demographic features, including age, education, gender, socioeconomic status, and location. Identifying your target audience can enable you to create effective marketing techniques while targeting a specific group of prospects most likely to be interested in your services.

Homeowners, real estate agents, small business owners, restaurant entrepreneurs, facility and property managers, and contractors include the various types of clients you’re likely to encounter in the plumbing industry. You can research to determine the plumbing services that are rarely available within your locality and specialize in that to stand out.

Invest in SEO for plumbers

Considering the plumbing industry’s competitiveness, a website alone can’t get you in front of new clients. This is where SEO for plumbers comes in. homeowners and other potential clients prefer looking online to find a local plumbing service they can hire. With SEO, these customers can easily find you, provided you use keywords that rank. 

To increase your leads and sales with SEO, conduct a competitive digital analysis, optimize your site code ad content, publish fresh content, and invest in local SEO. Track your SEO campaign’s performance and tweak it as needed.

Track your success

Creating plumbing business growth metrics is an excellent way to track your progress. Measure your business’s progress with key performance indicators (KPIs) while regularly checking your action plan’s results. Following the results, you may need to adjust your strategy to meet your business goals.

Endnote

Running a successful plumbing business can be challenging. However, these tips can help grow your plumbing business.

When Dana Spears assumed full ownership of Cornerstone Pros in 2009, it was a very different company than it is today. She credits much of her Tampa Bay, FL business’ increased success to her relationship with KickCharge Creative, a New Jersey-based marketing agency that serves small businesses across the country.

The partnership began in 2013 when Cornerstone sought KickCharge’s expertise to rebrand the heating and cooling company. As the company expanded its services to include plumbing and electrical, its name changed from Cornerstone Air to Cornerstone Pros. The team at KickCharge created a dapper, friendly retro technician mascot to communicate Cornerstone’s differentiator—old-fashioned quality service in today’s fast-paced world. KickCharge Creative wove the retro brand into all of Cornerstone’s marketing efforts, including its service vehicles, initial brand announcement, brochures, blogs, print ads, billboards and stationery.

Cornerstone Pros had five service vehicles when its rebranded fleet first hit the streets in 2014. But Spears said the visibility and power of the new brand made customers feel like there were many more vehicles out there. Today, Cornerstone has roughly 56 vehicles in its fleet. Spears said the increased visibility has helped with employee recruitment efforts, too.

During the eight years since this partnership began, the new brand continues to pay dividends, including a 300% boost in revenue. Spears said annual revenue was $3 million before the rebrand and it jumped quickly to $5 million within the first year after introducing the retro brand and new services.

Since 2016, KickCharge has been managing Cornerstone’s highly successful digital marketing campaigns, which include search engine optimization, email marketing and pay-per-click advertising. KickCharge also launched a retro-themed, custom-designed website for this brand.

THE STATS:

• 300% growth in annual revenue since rebrand\
• Increase from 5 to 35 service vehicles

Spears’ goal is slow-based growth. As of 2020, the company had more than $12 million in annual revenue and roughly 78 employees. Cornerstone has nearly 2,000 reviews on Google with a 4.8/5 average rating. Its closing ratio is 87 percent even when the team has too much work to tackle same-day appointments.

For Cornerstone, newspaper ads were once a primary driver of leads and Spears relied heavily on print, billboards and home-based advertising as well as some radio spots. These days, digital marketing is the dominant force. Google is the leading source of call volume (80 percent of leads), followed by repeat and referral customers.

“I am now dominating online so I don’t need to spend as much in other marketing areas,” she said.

Digital marketing campaigns offer more control over lead volume because they can be targeted specifically and adjusted instantly based on demand and seasonality. Those are factors Spears likes. It’s also easier to track these campaigns and to evaluate results.

“Although I was reluctant to turn my marketing over to an agency,” Spears said. “I’m glad that I did.”

All businesses occasionally need a quick assessment on how they are running and how they can improve. Technology, trends, and customers’ needs are constantly changing, and people want more reactive, quick responses, more automated processes, and things to be as simple as possible for them. Being on the ball will help your business stand out from the others and attract new customers while retaining the existing ones. It can also help you save money and speed up productivity in some cases.

Customer Service Contacts Are Key

One of the things you can start to look at is customer service. Customers want to talk to someone immediately without waiting and have things resolved there and then. It can be very costly and waste a lot of time doing this in-house. You can look to outsource this work to a live answering service. It helps you have a structure for growth within the company by using fully trained people part of the service answering your calls which can be done over all 365 days of the year. So if you have a small business where the owner ends up wearing a lot of hats and doing all sorts of different jobs, including ones they aren’t particularly good at or enjoy, you can use something like this to help take the pressure off. It is an affordable service with great prices. 

Move Into The New Age Marketing

Marketing changes all the time but so much so lately that digital marketing is the way forward. Tv advertisements, billboards, and mailers are no longer as effective as they used to be. The majority of the population are online for hours a day, consuming content. This is why online marketing is one of the most successful ways to reach new audiences. It also is a lot more affordable than previous marketing campaigns. With Facebook and Instagram advertisements, you can personalize it to suit your business. By choosing what gender, age-range, and location you want to focus on, you can make sure that your business and your message get out to the right people. Not only that, but it gives you real-time updates on how the promotion is going, how many people have seen it, interacted within, and clicked through onto your website. It is a lot easier using this method to track how much your business has gained from particular advertisements. 

Happy Staff Are Productive Staff

If you have people working for you, then you should know how important it is to keep them happy. Just naturally, people who are happier end up working a lot better, are more interested in what they are doing, and be a much better asset for your business. You can keep an eye on this and help improve morale by rewarding staff for great work. Whether that is through a bonus on their pay or simply just showing them, they are valued employees in your business. You can show this by getting breakfast for everyone, getting small perks for the employees like half days if things are quiet, and treats for the office. It is also important to be friendly with them, show interest, and ask about their lives, passions, and hobbies. It may be that you have someone who is an avid social media user and great with graphic design as a hobby who could be an asset for your business and run things online for you. You don’t know unless you ask. 

Train Up Existing Staff

A great way to keep employees happy while also helping your business grow is by the upskilling of staff you have. If they show a keen interest in what you do, then offering them the chance to learn and grow within the company can really be beneficial for both parties. They will be learning new skills and a new trade while you will have someone you can rely on to do more important tasks while delegating jobs. Showing your trust in someone and helping them evolve their career will have them a lot more interested in your business and helping your business grow and be more successful. 

Keep Your Technology Up To Date

Technology is always changing, and every year there are great strides in developing new things. It is important to keep on top of this and upgrade as and when you need to. This will make sure that you are ahead of your competitors and make life a lot easier for you and your staff so things can run more smoothly.