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19 Reasons Why Your Plumber Marketing Isn’t Working
Are you curious as to why your phone isn’t ringing off the hook for your business? Have you invested thousands of dollars into online plumber marketing companies that have brought you zero tangible results? Is this the third plumbing marketing company you’ve used in the last few years and you just want a solid, trustworthy organization that has hundreds of clients to validate their success? Well whether you decide to work with Redmond Growth or not, too many contractors are suffering from having no idea how to market themselves successfully. As a good test for your plumbing business, we’ve created a helpful list for you to self-evaluate how good a job you’ve been doing based on the common themes we’ve found with our most successful plumber marketing clients.
Your plumber marketing will work for you when it’s actually increasing the revenue that comes into the business. You can advertise and promote a storm out of your business on billboards and mailers and even on the internet, but if you can’t track the success of more calls, more booked deals & more money in your bank account, then your plumber marketing will be worthless.
Reason #1 – You Have Little to No Reviews Online
In order for any plumber marketing to work effectively, it’s so pivotal that there’s a fanbase of people screaming your praises online. Research has discovered that 86% of customers read reviews before they decide to purchase a service or product from a company. Furthermore, 78% of customers trust online reviews just as much as personal referrals! That means when your friend or family member tells you about some plumber to call for issues, it basically carries the same value as written reviews online. If you think about it, reviews are practically just as powerful as personal referrals!
The sad part is that if you were to Google search your local city with the type of service needed, most companies barely have any reviews. If you’re one of those plumber marketing businesses that hasn’t gotten on the bandwagon for Google reviews, then you need to jump on board. Your competitors who have hundreds of reviews are scooping up most the work that’s available from Google. On top of that, Google dramatically increases your website rankings for search terms due to how many reviews you have. So get fired up and ask anyone who loves you and your work to leave you a review! This should be a fiery, burning passion of yours from now on with the business.
Reason #2 – You’re Trying to Rank High for Insanely Competitive Terms
Getting to rank in the first three spots for search terms that receive hundreds upon thousands of searches per month would be a dream come true. It’s also definitely attainable with our plumber marketing resources. Let’s face it though, you’re likely a small business owner that has trouble spending any extra money for advertising, marketing or search engine optimization. With some investigating, you’ll likely find out that search terms with a volume of 500 searches or more are likely in a very competitive playing field. Our recommendation is to find early wins with lower search-volume key terms then attack the super popular search terms in your local area. While it doesn’t look as sexy as getting to the top of Google for the big key term, you won’t need to wait for three years to start getting leads from Google when you can be the top dog for a number of key terms that aren’t as competitive.
Reason #3 – Your Website Doesn’t Follow Google’s Canonical Rules
There are too many plumber marketing and advertising firms that care too deeply about cool-looking designs. While you do want your website to be attractive and appealing to the user, the most important user for your website is Google. Google crawls the internet and approves or disapproves every single website on the world wide web over a span of 21 days. When they do this, they are always checking to make sure that the standard rules of websites are followed. These are similar to our Bill of Rights for the United States. These canonical rules will likely never change and have stayed the same for several years consistently. Some of the examples of canonical rules include that your website have a “Sitemap” available or that your website displays its phone number at the very top, easily available for any customer. You can find the details for what is canonically compliant in massive books like SEO for Dummieswritten by the foremost authority on search engine optimization, Bruce Clay.
Reason #4 – You Have Less Content Than Your Competitors
Content is king when it comes to ranking high on Google. The popular analogy we use when conveying this idea involves going to a library. Let’s say you need to check out a book on a certain topic, like Mt. Fuji. You ask the librarian, “Hey, which book is the best book you have on Mt. Fuji?” The librarian will give you a giant book to look over like a huge research study on Mt. Fuji or an encyclopedia or a big book on volcanoes.
This is because Google (the librarian) considers websites that have the most content towards certain keywords to be the most reliable sources.This is in combination with tons of great reviews and following all the canonical standards for your website. While there are specifics on how you should best set up your content, the big, overarching rule is that you should have significantly more content than any of your competitors. We recommend doubling your competition so they have no hope of beating you and so your plumber marketing will also rule supreme.
Reason #5 – Your Third Party Listings Online Aren’t Completely Filled Out
Following the theme from the last topic, the content on 3rd party listings such as Thumbtack, Porch, Homeadvisor, and others are important. Not only do the reviews make a difference, but what can you write about your company that helps identify why you stand out? What are the main reasons customers should choose you? What videos and photos do you have the visually illustrates your expertise and skills? Have you completed any of the verifications and background checks some of the listings provide? All of these factors do make a difference on the 3rd party listings’ preferences for ranking your listing compared to others as well as people’s perception of your company.
Reason #6 – Your Company Isn’t Remarkable
Seth Godin speaks at length to this topic in his New York Times bestselling book, Purple Cow. He speaks on the fact that “in a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.” We interacting with plumber marketing strategies from all sorts of companies and too many are utilizing the same terminology for their work. “We’re the Company That Cares.” Oh really? YOU care more about your work than anyone else in your area?
How can you prove this? It’s so vitally important that you identify the true value of what you’re helping the customer with and remarkably communicating this. Oftentimes, as Seth Godin puts it, “If you’re remarkable, it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise–ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out.”
Reason #7 – You Don’t Have a HOT No-Brainer Offer
The most important results we get with our plumber marketing and advertising is getting the customer in the door, by a phone call or a filled out form. From there, we can run with it! So what’s the best way to bring in a customer to the business? Have a really hot no-brainer offer. It’s an offer that you utilize in your business to get the customer to say, “Well, why would I not give this company a call?” There’s a number of ways to promote a no-brainer offer, for instance, the number of dominating reviews you have compared to anyone else, a great deal for first-time customers, an on-time guarantee, or a freemium item for the customer by choosing you. The important aspect you have to apply is a no-brainer offer HAS to be a sacrifice for you and needs to actually inspire the customer to contact you. 10% off your next service call? Yeah, that’s not enticing. $100 off your service call for 1st-time customers? Sounds like a sweet deal!
Reason #8 – You Don’t Answer Your Service Calls Within an Hour
The research out there validates that companies are terrible with answering customer calls. Just to name a few stats…anywhere from 35% to 64% of leads never get called back. 50% of sales go to the first salesperson to contact the prospect. Also, companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7X as likely to have meaningful conversations with the decision makers. Yet, only 37% of companies do this. Answering service calls within 24 hours is not good enough. Answering service calls at the end of the day isn’t good enough either. If anything, implement just these two rules with your leads…call them all within an hour of their request and call them constantly until you reach them. Research also shows that the bare minimum number of attempts to contact at least 50% of your leads is six times! If you want to aggressively grow this business into a beast, you gotta be aggressive with your pursuit for leads. If not, you’ll be wasting all the plumber marketing dollars you’re spending.
Reason #9 – You Aren’t Actively Tracking Your Leads and Where They’re Coming From
Where your leads come from is such a huge thing to track. It’s such a dangerous place to be in when you promote and advertise your business, but you have no idea how your dollars in plumber marketing tools are actually working towards generating calls and leads. We have to daily be tracking what leads are coming in the business and where they come from. In order to do that, we have to ask where the person found out about us. Until we do this, we will never truly know for sure how the person found out about us or gave us a call. Did the customer look at all of our Google reviews? Did they find us by looking at our Porch profile? Did they have a friend who told them about us, but they also looked us up online at our reviews and at our website? If we don’t ask, we don’t know. And if we don’t know, then we’re just running blind.
Reason #10 – You Don’t Use Scripts for Your Phone Calls
How do you ensure that you’re asking the right questions and saying the right things over the phone? The first move is to write a script of exactly how you want your calls to be addressed. If you think this sounds like much, then you haven’t interacted with enough businesses. We talk with so many business owners where their response to calls that come in for work are different every single time. There response is based on whatever emotional state they’re feeling right then and there. And if you hire someone in your company to fulfill all of this work, you’ll be surprised to hear the nonsense of their responses. Create a script of what the best practice responses are to customer requests and book appointments!
Reason #11 – You Don’t Record Your Phone Calls
The first question that might pop in your head is “Is this ethical?” Our answer is, well, doesn’t every giant company you call record their phone calls? Credit card companies? Airlines? Why would you not record your calls? Small business owners seem to have this perspective that the policies and practices of large-scale, super successful companies don’t apply to their businesses. Can you see how flawed that is?? Plus, if you’re writing a script and want your person taking calls to be the best they can possibly be, then this is your best bet to ensuring quality with all of your calls.
How terrible would sports teams be if they couldn’t watch game film?? This also lets you know who will be good fits for your company or not. We’ve found that A players in organization actually enjoy having their phone calls recorded because they want to be awesome at their jobs. On the contrary, B & C players resent having their calls recorded because they know that they don’t care about being awesome on the phones. Accountability comes with pissing people off and you’ll never be able to grow your company without people who are coachable to accountable measures for success, like recording calls.
Reason #12 – Your Ad Money Goes to the Wrong Avenues
Do you want everybody and anybody to know via marketing plumbing expertise that you provide awesome work? Of course! The utilization of which channels to take for plumber marketing is an important topic though because small businesses do not have endless amounts of cash to invest into advertising. Some have even rebelled against advertising because too many plumber marketing companies have screwed them in the past. We don’t blame them either!
Plus, all the rage has gone to plumber marketing and promotion for social media. While social media is a vital advertising tools for many industries, we’ve found in our experience that it hasn’t shown to be as fruitful for actually getting deals as with advertising on Google. Think about it, no one is browsing their Facebook page, finding an ad for a local plumbing company, and then realizing, “Oh yeah! I gotta fix that water heater!” When someone’s water heater stops working, they’re immediately going to Google and searching for who to the top people are in their area. That’s why reviews are SO IMPORTANT and why you should dump your advertising money into Google advertising products.
Reason #13 – You Aren’t Constantly Putting Up Photos of Recent Work to Profiles
We’ve seen from recent articles by Google and conversations with 3rd party listing representatives that the content you post up to these pages make a world of difference. It’s not only the mass amounts of content, but the consistency of posting the content. These 3rd party companies that provide listings for all sorts of companies are looking at which companies are actively bringing great results. By active, are they consistently getting great reviews about their work? Are they posting up new photos and videos of them doing work in the area? So while it might seem like such a little move, it does make a difference with your local rankings on Google and with your relevance on these 3rd party pages.
Reason #14 – You Aren’t Proactively Seeking Out Companies Who Can Be Great Referral Resources
There is no replacement for stomping the grounds in your city, knocking on doors, and dialing for dollars. For plumbing companies, even while much of the work is for service jobs, there are companies such as apartment complexes, real estate agencies, homebuilders, property managers, warranty companies, and other organizations that can provide great referral resources to the work. At Redmond Growth, we look to build out a 3-legged marketing stool with our plumbing marketing. That way, we’re not totally focused on just one avenue and we aren’t overwhelming with too many options to siphon our marketing plumbing dollars too. The maximum amount of legs to the plumber marketing stool would likely be 5 legs. We just want to be focused on making sure the first advertising avenues we choose work and we’ve tracked the months of progress to ensure that.
Reason #15 – You Don’t Stay in Touch With Your Previous Customers
This is a flaw we’ve found in too many companies with their plumber marketing. For a majority of clients we begin working with, they have hundreds to thousands of contacts and clients that they’ve previously worked with. When we ask our clients whether a large majority of their people liked their work, they emphatically express, “Of course! They loved working with us!” Okay, well then why have we never followed up with them or tried to communicate with them again?
Once someone buys from you and enjoys your work, the likelihood that they will buy from you again is exponentially greater than choosing someone else. So we recommend to our clients that on a monthly basis, shoot a brief email, text and even direct mailers to their previous clients. That way, you aren’t annoying them with emails every single week, but you are at least saying at the top of their mind so that when they do need a plumber, they’ll have more chances of going to you. We’ll run email campaigns for Google reviews and all of our clients will likely have at least one or two people reach out for further work on their property.
Reason #16 – You’re Late for Your Appointments or Give “Time Frames” for Arrival
While you may be screaming at me about how unpredictable plumbing work can be, you HAVE to consider the customer in all these situations. If one customer is given a window of three hours to arrive at your property versus another customer who is given an exact appointment time, which customer will be happier? The customer who actually receives a specific time. Are you a internet provider? No you’re a plumbing company so don’t like an internet provider. It’s even worse if you are late for your appointments you set with customers. Our plumber marketing works wonders for our clients, but our clients also have to make the most of the phone calls that come in. So we strongly enforce them to give extra time to appointments if needed because nothing is worse than being late constantly. There are also free things greater than being the company that always arrives on time and has their stuff together.
Reason #17 – You Don’t Keep a Daily Calendar or Honor Your Calendar
How do you then ensure that you won’t be late for appointments? How will you keep track of all the appointments that go on throughout your day? Keeping a daily calendar is going to be your saving grace. By having a calendar that you adhere to, you’ll always have an awareness of what’s going on in your business, your personal revenue-producing activities, and your team’s key action items. What’s the result of not having a calendar? You leave yourself vulnerable to not burning fires coming up in the day, taking over your life and then you end the day with none of your key action items being taken care of.
This brings the 2nd fold topic to light which involves honor your calendar. Every successful entrepreneur we’ve been in conversations with expresses how insanely important it is to manage an awesome calendar. What throws people off course is when they don’t honor their calendars by saying no to everything else. That means in those instances when burning fires have erupted, you as the business owner have to decide to either let those burning fires rage or address the burning fire and have a longer workday ahead of you. As you grow the business, that’s why we work with our clients to document processes and protocols for various situations and burning fires that come up and hire super managers to take on the responsibility of addressing those daily burning fires in the business. Your plumber marketing will not reap rewards to your bank account if you can’t manage your calendar.
Reason #18 – You Don’t Keep a Daily To-Do List
The same discussion can be made for a daily, written to-do list. You may have things written on your calendar, but you may not have access to always have your calendar available. Furthermore, you have extra action items that are reminders to stop at this place or call specific leads that came through on your plumber marketing. That’s why we highly recommend that you document adaily, written to-do list to keep your key action items at the forefront of your mind. Along with that, you can’t take notes throughout the day so that when you set up your calendar and to-do list for the next day, you have those extra notes to carry over.
Reason #19 – You’re Letting Your Emotions Determine the Success of Your Business
You can create plumber marketing and advertising campaigns for your business to generate leads. You can create scripts to ensure that your team and yourself knows in a split second how to properly address a concern. You can track the marketing plumber progress of leads coming into the business. You can create a calendar management system and a to-do list method that works wonders. At the end of the day though, if you can’t emotionally be stoic and stay true to the big objective (growing your business to create time and financial freedom for life), then you shouldn’t be a business owner.Too many entrepreneurs are ruled by their emotions which leads them to not ask people for Google reviews, not keeping track of leads coming in, not sending that monthly email to their previous customers and all the other action items we’ve discussed. Then suddenly, they get less and less phone calls and wonder why this is happening.
If you’re needing a plumber marketing company whose ultimate goal is set on growing your bottom-line and ensuring the long-term success of your business, then Redmond Growth is that company. We provide a 13-step FREE business assessment that is also our road map for getting you to your big goals for marketing plumber work and towards time freedom and financial freedom. Give us a call today at 918.361.3047 or simply fill out the form on our website.
One of our awesome team members will reach out to you to set it up. Many of our clients find that the biggest way Redmond Growth has helped them is through the weekly meetings we have to keep them on task (or at least remind them about those core tasks). The system works if you work it. While we provide tons of resources to work it for you, you gotta want it badly enough to go through the years of strenuous work to get there.
