Plumbing companies like yours want to eliminate unwise, wasteful spending. I don’t know how many plumbing contractors enjoy spending dollars on marketing. They understand it’s important, and they might even allocate some advertising budget to it. But they don’t enjoy it. It’s challenging to put your hard-earned dollars out into the world without a guarantee of more clients, leads, and revenue. We get it.
The sad reality, though, is that are no real warranties in plumber marketing land. There are tons of variables, and too much that’s out of your reach. If you want to maximize your revenue or profits, then your marketing budget should be tightly reviewed and monitored. There are numerous ways you can waste their plumbing marketing dollars which we will discuss in this post. No plumber wants to see their hard-earned money going down the drain, and each plumbing contractor wants to tirelessly ensure their advertising budget is correctly utilized.
Biggest Plumber Marketing Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)
Here are a few common blunders we see plumbers make when promoting or marketing their businesses. Get rid of those strategies, and you will generate consistent leads or revenue for your company every month.
1. Putting all their eggs in one basket
You have potential customers at various stages of your sales funnel and hanging out in all kinds of the spaces-at-home where they might come across your door hanger, performing research using Google, scrolling through Facebook, and out in the neighborhood talking with their family and friends. By spending too much of your advertising or marketing budget on one channel, you will risk missing a huge percentage of prospects searching for your plumbing services elsewhere online. A plumbing marketing plan crafted to drive more leads and therefore, more clients needs to be purposely diversified.
2. Improper Ad Spending
Not all ads should be focused on improving brand awareness, and a good advertising strategy should strike a good balance of non-lead generation vs lead generation spending. Yes, brand awareness is crucial, but further steps are required to get conversions.
Your ads must have a compelling call to action. Such CTAs like contact us form or link, phone number, or special offers will assist to skyrocket conversions. Brand awareness can’t be the only focus. If all you are doing is advertising-spending money on radio spots, print ads, and even internet marketing campaigns and not engaging in marketing- establishing relationship-adding value, gaining trust, and providing unmatched/superior customer service, you may as well as spend your plumbing marketing dollars and create a match for them.
3. No Tracking or Monitoring System in Place
Do you know where your plumbing leads are coming from? Do you know which ads or even which platform generates most of the best plumber leads?
You will never understand how your campaigns perform without proper measuring and analytics.
At a minimum, you need to have analytics connected to your advertising platform for proper attribution. As you scale the complexity of your internet marketing advertising, you might want to use phone call tracking, a customer relationship management tool, and marketing automation.
4. Targeting the Wrong Plumbing Keywords
If you are investing in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Google Ads for plumbers, make sure you are targeting the best keywords. If you are guessing, you are likely to waste money or at the very least, missing chances to leverage your ads for more leads.
Plumbing keywords work best when they are based on intent. Digital advertising is useless without targeting the right keywords, and these keywords are what prospects use when utilizing and researching search engines.
One good example is targeting the wrong geographical area. This could include focusing on an area where your target audience/clients don’t live. Don’t make the blunder of mistakenly targeting Murfreesboro, TN when your audience lives in Miami, Florida.
5. Lack of Consistency
Plumber marketing works best when you have a consistent message and strategy. Inconsistency can cause confusion. Ensure the key business information, such as name, phone number, and address, are all consistent wherever your plumbing company is mentioned online.
Likewise, dividing resources thinly or abandoning them too fast can lead to wasteful ad spending. Make sure your marketing campaigns, such as a newly launched Google Local Service ad for plumbers, have enough time to generate sufficient time.
6. Being Anti-Social
Your potential clients are on social media. When they type “anyone who can recommend a plumber?” as their Facebook status, it would be great if people mentioned you, and it would even be more awesome if people mentioned you. It would be helpful if they would tag your Facebook page so a prospect could so check out, learn what kind of business you are, and see what other clients are saying about your plumbing company. But if your Facebook business page is dying or dead, that sends the exact wrong signals. Don’t underestimate the importance of social media advertising in your plumbing marketing plan.
7. Not Understanding Customer Behavior and User Intent
Knowing who your clients are and how they behave is the initial step to successful plumbing marketing campaigns. If you don’t know your clients, the campaigns that you run are bound to fail since you are targeting an audience that is in no way interested in your plumbing services.
As an example, we took an ad campaign for a plumbing contractor that had already spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on the keyword “Car AC repair.”
What a waste!
We fixed it by adding the term car as a negative keyword so our ads wouldn’t compete and display with the local mechanic. Actually, qualified clients use multiple keywords when they try to find plumbing services.
8. Poorly Targeted or Written Ad Copy
One of the most common blunders plumbers make is copying ad content from other advertisers. This can be an efficient strategy to save time, but if you are not keen on the ads shown, it may do more harm than good since they have the same keywords as yours, and their ads may not fit your business image at all.
Also, if you are not keen on the ad content you use, it may be too unclear or vague about what your company offers, so prospects will have a rough time understanding how your plumbing services actually assist them. The result? They are most likely to click through to learn more about your company.
Create a compelling ad copy by:
- Using a unique selling proposition
- Use special characters and numbers to stand out
- Use keywords
- Use a headline and question
- Keep it reader-friendly and simple
Next, you will require to ensure your ads to the appropriate landing pages. If you have ads around plumbing services and point them to your homepage that begins off talking about who you are and the number of years you have been in business, you are likely to convert clients that you will be sending that traffic to a particular landing page about 24/7 plumber services.
9. Not Targeting Paid Search Ads
Online advertising is an excellent way to improve conventional advertising (such as billboards, radio, print, and more) you may be doing (and internet marketing is often more targeted and cheaper).
Demographic and geographic targeting in paid search advertising should be more specific. Leads will not come if your targeting is left untouched or unclear. Know where your clients reside and what resonates with them. Target your ideal potential clients with purpose.
10. Broken Plumbing Website Pages
Broken site pages cause frustration to your prospects. If a customer lands on a site page (also known as a 404 page), they will normally click off your website. If a paid ad leads a client to a broken site page, that is even worse since you have just paid for the ad click.
If you are planning to run advertisements, ensure to send them to a working landing page. This page should have helpful and useful information, as well as a clear call to action so the customer can take a meaningful next step (like completing a form or calling).
Fix These Plumber Marketing Mistakes: Find Your Perfect Clients with Better Internet Marketing Strategies with Blackstorm Design + Marketing
Promoting business within a particular industry calls for a specialized marketing plan for it to be effective. This is why investing in a plumbing internet marketing agency, like Blackstorm Design + Marketing, is crucial for plumbing businesses to attain successful advertising initiatives.
Blackstorm Design + Marketing‘s internet marketing professionals can assist assess your online assets and developing a custom marketing strategy to improve your online presence and get more service calls and more clients.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The initial step to ranking your plumbing website in search optimization. Blackstorm Design + Marketing can help improve your plumbing SEO strategy, so you boost your online visibility. Our search engine optimization professionals will audit your plumbing website and recommend key SEO activities to help particular content and pages rank higher in search results.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-Per-Click or PPC ads assist you to obtain targeted traffic that is likely to convert. Blackstorm Design + Marketing’s online marketing for plumbers has exceptional PPC professionals to help you in managing effective PPC campaigns for your company. With the assistance of plumber internet marketing experts, you can obtain more plumbing leads with pay-per-click advertising.
Website Design and Development
We provide web development and design as the main feature of plumbing internet marketing services. Whether you want to create a new plumbing website from scratch or revamp an existing one, our talented web designers can help. We ensure that your plumbing website is easy to navigate, fast, and has calls to action that skyrocket conversions.
Social Media Marketing
Clients are now expressing their perceptions about local businesses like yours on social media, so your plumbing business shouldn’t be left. Blackstorm Design + Marketing’s social media experts will assist you on how to have a great following and generate more sales.
Online Reputation Management
Customers are nowadays looking at online reviews before making a hiring decision. For service-based businesses like roofing or plumbing, online reviews are vital for your plumbing company’s online reputation. With positive review ratings, your business has a higher chance of generating sales and leads.
SEO Content Writing
Whether you require copy for your email marketing campaign, web pages, or blog. At Blackstorm Design + Marketing, we have experienced writers, copywriters, and editors who can help you with your content writing requirements. Publishing relevant SEO content for your company improves brand awareness, which is just as important as generating leads.
Developing a result-oriented, comprehensive plumbing marketing plan can be overwhelming as a plumbing contractor, after all, you are not a marketing expert.
If you are tired of wasting your marketing dollars, schedule a free discovery call with Blackstorm Design +Marketing to get a plumbing marketing strategy that will help generate consistent leads or revenue every month today.