Starting, running, and scaling a plumbing business is no easy task. The plumbing industry is loaded with competition, and most consumers decide who they use based on search engine results, reputation and price.
Like all service based businesses, digital marketing plays a huge role in the overall success of your business. In order to grow your plumbing business, you'll have to employ robust plumber internet marketing strategies to generate more leads and close more sales.
In this guide, we'll look at three things you can focus on to generate more leads and sales for your plumbing business.
Design an Appealing, Informative, and Functional Website
Every business needs a website in order to be successful nowadays. But, plumbing businesses desperately need a powerful website, as that is where most people will find you and your services. Web design is often overcomplicated and it really doesn't have to be. If you intend on building your own website, make sure to watch some videos on the basics and read some guides on things to focus on. If you're trying to decided on whether Wix or Wordpress is the right choice for you to build your website, make sure to read our Wix vs Wordpress blog post.
If you're working with a web design agency, make sure that they truly understand who you are, what your business does, and the kinds of consumers you're trying to target. For example, if you want to target corporate plumbing work, you shouldn't have a website that only speaks of residential plumbing.
While how your website looks is very important, it's just as important that your website work well too. Keep in mind that most people utilize their mobile phone over a desktop, so ensuring that your website is responsive and optimized for mobile will play a huge role in your plumber internet marketing strategy.
Utilize Local SEO
The fact of the matter is that your plumbing business will always be a local plumbing business. And don't take that the wrong way. There is a lot of local plumbing business out there for your business to really be successful and it's extremely difficult to build and scale a nationwide plumbing business, so you're better off dominating your local market.
With that being said, local SEO will play a pivotal role in how successful your plumbing business is. On Google search results, there is something called the local pack. The local pack shows the three closest businesses relevant to the searched for keyword. Now, even if you're the closest business, if you don't have a strong local SEO presence, you won't come up first. A lot of what goes into local SEO is creating local business citations, managing your online reputation, meaning focusing on building a strong, positive review profile, and writing and distributing local press releases.
Local SEO is an on-going strategy, and only gets better with time if you continue to commit and invest in it. Concentrating on local SEO is an excellent way to generate high-quality leads with high conversion rates for your plumbing business, so make sure to incorporate it into your plumber internet marketing strategy.
Run PPC Ads on Google
While local SEO is a fantastic way of generating more leads and converting more sales, it's also critical to run some paid ads, because they have more of an immediate effect and generate quicker results.
With Google, you'll have access to an entire suite of advertising tools within your Google Ads Manager. In the ads manager, you'll decide what your goals are, and for this kind of business, you'll want to get more calls and website conversions. So, for a local plumbing business, the best way to structure a successful PPC campaign is to incorporate a full lead generation campaign, including search, call-only, display, and remarketing.
If this sounds like a new language to you, don't panic. We're going to explain what these all mean.
Search Campaign: Google Search Campaigns allow for you to display advertisements in the search listings of a Google Search, it's a display ad in search results.
Call-Only Campaign: Call-Only Campaign ads look very similar to typical PPC ads, but they're designed to encourage users to call the advertiser, rather than click on an ad and visit a landing page.
Display Campaign: Unlike traditional Google search ads, Google display ads are ads shown to users across 2 million+ websites, videos, and applications that are a part of the Google Display Network (GDN), based on their previous online activity.
Remarketing Campaign: Remarketing is a way to connect with people who previously interacted with your website. It allows you to strategically position your ads in front of these audiences as they browse Google or its partner websites, thus helping you increase your brand awareness or remind those audiences to make a purchase.
Now that you know all of the different PPC campaign choices and what they can do for you, it's important to decide which one will be best for your business.
In our PPC lead generation campaigns, we include them all, and will also build you a custom landing page that's optimized for conversions.
What Digital Marketing Service Works Best for Plumbers?
This is a question we get all of the time, because hey, let's face it, digital marketing can be costly, but it's important that you can generate enough of an ROI for it all to be worth the investment.
With that being said, your business needs a website. So make sure that your plumbing business has an online presence first before you begin investing in any internet marketing.
Once you have a website up and running and only have the marketing budget for one particular service, our professional recommendation would be to focus on your local SEO presence.
Why? Because SEO is a long term game. You're not starting a business to do a few jobs and be done in a few years, you're building this business to grow and scale it. SEO will support your long term vision. While the results are not as immediate, with commitment and a good SEO company, the investment will pay off and you'll begin generating leads on auto pilot for a long time.
Conclusion
As you have now read, starting and scaling a plumbing business is not so easy. But, internet marketing will play a critical role in how successful your business is or isn't.
The Dillon Ross Group provides plumbing internet marketing services for plumbers all over NJ and NYC. If you own a plumbing business and are searching online for how to get more plumbing leads, contact our digital marketing agency to begin working on your plumbing internet marketing strategy!