Marketing for plumbers, built by someone who only works with trades

There are two kinds of plumbing customer and they behave nothing alike.

The first is standing in a kitchen watching water come through the ceiling, or has woken up to a cold house in January because the condensate pipe froze overnight, or to no hot water because the immersion has finally gone and the cylinder is stone cold. They have one hand on a phone and one hand on a towel. They will not compare quotes, they will not read your about page and they will not scroll. They tap the first result that looks like a real local business with a real number, and they ring it. If nobody picks up, they go back and tap the next one. That decision takes seconds and it is decided almost entirely on who appears first and who looks like they can be trusted with a key to the house.

The second is thinking about a new bathroom or a wet room, a shower that has never run at a decent pressure, or replacing a heating system that is still limping along. They will look over several evenings, study photographs of finished work, read reviews properly, get two or three quotes and take a week or more to make up their mind. That is a considered purchase and it is worth many times a call-out.

Then there is the calendar. Plumbing demand is not flat. The cold snap arrives, heating gives up, pipes freeze and burst, and for a few weeks every plumber within twenty miles is turning jobs away. Come May the phone goes quiet. Most plumbers try to fix the quiet spells by doing marketing in the quiet months, which is exactly the wrong way round. Search visibility takes time to build, so the effort that wins you a good December has to happen in June.

Almost every plumbing website I review is built for the second customer only: a portfolio, a gallery, a soft contact form. It is the more pleasant site to build. It is also the one that loses the call-out at eleven o'clock at night.

These are two different problems and they need different money. The quickest way to tell them apart is to search for the jobs you want, in the town you want it, on a phone, and see whether you appear at all.

If you do not appear, or you appear well down the ordinary results and nowhere on the map, being findable is your problem. A prettier website will not solve it.

If you do appear but the phone is not ringing in proportion, being convincing is your problem. People are seeing you and choosing somebody else, and that is what a website is for.

Most plumbers who come to me need both eventually. Almost nobody needs both in the same week. Getting that order right is most of what marketing for plumbers gets wrong.

Marketing for plumbers is a short menu once the jargon is stripped, and ranking it is more useful than describing it. First: Google, both halves. The map for the emergency customers, the results for the planned ones, because that is where people with money already in hand look. Second: reviews, the cheapest compounding marketing a plumbing business owns; customers read them, Google counts them, and asking costs nothing. Third: the website, because every marketing channel sends people there and it either converts them or wastes the spend. A long way fourth: paid ads. Google Ads can plug a quiet fortnight, but ads are a tap. The enquiries stop when the spending stops.

Fifth and further down the digital marketing menu: social media, email marketing and content marketing. Social media reassures customers who already found you; it rarely finds new ones for this trade. Email marketing earns its keep for service reminders and little else. Content supports the search visibility rather than replacing it. Marketing strategies that start from the bottom of this list, video, branding, social campaigns, before the fundamentals are in place are selling to the plumber, not for them.

The order is also the budget answer. UK plumbing businesses that get the fundamentals right, meaning profile, reviews, website and local search, typically stop needing bought leads inside a year, and every marketing pound after that is choice rather than dependency. That is the outcome the plumber marketing industry rarely sells, because dependency renews and independence does not. It is, not coincidentally, the outcome this business is set up to deliver: the digital foundations owned by the customers who paid for them.

I would rather tell you not to spend money than sell you the wrong thing. A quote makes you commit before either of us knows what the problem is; an audit tells you what the problem is and what it would cost to fix, and leaves you free to fix it yourself or to do nothing.

Send me your website address and the towns you want jobs from. Within three working days you will get back a plain assessment of where you stand: whether you appear for the searches that matter in your area, what your site is doing to the people who do find it, and which of the two routes I would put money into first if it were my business.

No call, no pitch, no follow-up sequence. If it says you are fine as you are, that is the whole answer.