Leads are a vital part of running any business, and that includes plumbing services.

A plumbing company can’t always be choosy about who it works with, but that still relies on you having customers available to work with in the first place.

If your plumbing business needs more plumbing leads, then it is your job to seek out potential customers worth marketing to. But how do you find good plumbing leads so easily?

What are Plumbing Leads?

If you do not already know, plumbing leads are any connection you have to potential customers.

Plumbing leads could be website visitors, potential customers who visit your physical office, or even a company that has expressed interest in your plumbing services.

Many plumbing leads are also more vague – potential customers seeking plumbing jobs in your local area who haven’t specifically visited your plumbing website yet.

How to Generate Plumbing Leads for your Plumbing Business

Generating plumbing leads is a partially active process. While you can get more plumbing leads through word-of-mouth marketing and other long-term options, you also need to apply some effort to start generating plumbing leads effectively.

Here is a range of common techniques that plumbing service providers use to gather new customers. These are all proven generation strategies that have been used all across the plumbing services industry and beyond.

Get Started With SEO

A search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is the ideal digital marketing strategy to get more plumbing leads.

SEO allows you to target potential customers by making your plumbing business website appeal to search engines. This makes you far more prominent in search results, letting you gather new customers more quickly.

Unlike Google Ads and other paid ad lead generation strategies, plumber search engine optimization is effectively free. Plumbing business owners can get plumbing leads with nothing more than a few keywords and some spare time.

Local SEO is also great for a local business that wants to surpass other local businesses in the same service area.

SEO Depth

SEO is an extremely varied field with a lot going on, and that makes it hard to break into.

Thankfully, you can usually just stick to the basics at first and expand as needed. If you focus on your weakest points over and over again, you can build up a solid marketing base quite quickly.

Remember that SEO is not always easy. There will be times when you have to decide how to proceed without as much information as you would prefer.

In those situations, just think carefully about what you are planning to do. A large part of SEO is just about using common sense to choose the most reliable outcome.

Look Into Paid Ads

The commercial plumbing industry is full of paid online advertising and digital advertising options. It is rare to find a decently established plumbing company that doesn’t do some form of online advertising.

Online ads are one of the most visible ways that you can get your plumbing business out there. Even the most basic paid options let you put ads above search results or on select sites to generate high-quality leads all across the internet.

Some careful tweaking allows you to define a target audience and generate quality plumbing leads extremely quickly, all while ensuring that every person who clicks your ads is a potential customer.

Paid Ad Costs

Paid ads can be expensive to run, but it depends on how well you run them. If you keep making mistakes, you will constantly be paying for them.

The art of using paid advertising is all about finding balance. The less you have to pay to get the results you want, the better.

Effective paid advertising is about reducing how much you are paying while still retaining the same amount of presence on the market – and earning more customers.

Trial and error can be an important part of finding the right balance to suit your business. Do not hesitate to plan your ad strategy out ahead of time, too.

Attempt Email Marketing

Targeted email marketing can earn you exclusive plumbing leads and let you bring past customers back into your target audience. However, these exclusive plumbing leads are hard to earn.

Email marketing campaigns can be risky if your marketing efforts are even slightly below perfect.

There is always a chance that you might just annoy potential customers or misrepresent your own plumbing service with bad email wording.

Even so, email marketing is a powerful tool that can be very effective in the right hands. If you have plumbing services to promote, consider using email systems to contact individual site visitors or interested parties directly.

Email marketing is also very difficult to pull off well. You need to know how to piece together individual emails in a way that works, which becomes even harder if they are personalized.

However, with the right skill set, it is entirely possible to make emails a core part of your marketing. You just need to be prepared for the rejections that might come through.

Try Social Media Marketing

Your social media marketing efforts can give you even more exclusive plumbing leads while staying in contact with both new and past customers.

Social media allows you to gather new leads while posting content in places that many customers search regularly.

Whether you advertise your plumbing jobs directly or just post engaging content, you can spread awareness of your plumbing services very quickly.

Not only can you keep in contact with existing customers, but you can generate leads just by posting content and interacting with site users.

Plumbing Company Social Media Posts

It might seem like a plumbing business would have nothing to post about online. However, that is not true at all.

You do not need to make every single tweet or social post directly related to you being a plumbing business.

For example, you could post clips of office shenanigans involving plumbing equipment in the hopes that they will go viral. If you want something simpler, a weekly update blog can make a huge difference, too.

You need content to go onto your social channels, content that will draw people in. If that means that you have to rely on memes and joke posts, then it might be a step worth taking.

Read Online Reviews about your PlumbingCompany

Another way to get plumbing leads effectively is to look at business review sites. The more positive reviews you can get, the better.

During online searches, positive reviews are going to be one of the most important things that a potential customer will see. This makes them indirect plumber leads.

If you can present high customer satisfaction through reviews from real satisfied customers search, then your plumbing business will get an edge over other companies appearing in the same search results.

Only three things matter to the average customer seeking plumbing services: reviews, cost, and whether or not they find your site trustworthy.

Taking advantage of all three is a great way to ensure that you get more plumbing leads in a shorter span of time.

Negative Reviews

You can often deal with negative reviews by contacting the person who left them and offering them something to try and smooth over the problem.

While a discount might sound good, it will not always work, especially if they seem intent on never working with you again.

Things like refunds, open apologies, promises of quality checks, and discipline – these are all good places to turn if you are able to.

If you can show that you are trying to do better, then you can sometimes get those negative reviews taken down or even bumped up a few stars.

Review scores are extremely important – do not underestimate them, and do your best to keep the average high.

Improve Your Site

While it might sound like a strange move, improving your own site can result in far more plumbing leads. Potential plumbing customers are more willing to trust a site that looks worth using.

Whether you are a local plumbing company or one that operates across a much wider area, lead generation is based around how potential clients perceive your company.

You need to think about more than just digital marketing – your entire plumbing business is important.

If your site does not represent your plumbing business very well, then you should expect far fewer leads for your troubles.

Paying customers want to use plumbing companies that they think they can trust, and your site is the biggest indicator of your business’ quality.

Plan Ahead

Your plumbing business will only succeed if you take charge of your situation and plan ahead. Passive lead generation is absolutely possible, but it requires that you take some kind of active role in setting that lead generation process up in the first place.

Even if you choose to use third-party lead generation services, you still need to get involved in making that happen. Lead generation will not just perform itself.

The plumbing industry is deep and varied, and you need to carve out your own niche. Doing that takes time, as well as an actual idea of where you want to end up.

Lead generation is very simple in theory, but many plumbing business owners do not plan ahead and end up regretting it.

Your plumbing business needs to distinguish itself from the competition somehow, and you can only do that effectively if you have a plan in mind.

Other Tips and Strategies for Plumbing Services Lead Generation

While the basic lead generation platforms mentioned above are all a great place to start, you still need to figure out your own path towards success.

Copying existing business tips can be a good guideline, but no two plumbing companies are going to be identical. Your goals might be completely different from a competitor’s.

You need to examine your own plumbing business and figure out how to pursue the best leads for your situation.

Choosing Plumbing Lead Generation Platforms

There are a lot of sites and systems out there that can provide you with plumbing lead generation opportunities. Always aim for the options that give you the best-quality plumbing lead choices.

Good marketing agencies know that quality is almost always better than quantity since quality means happy customers who walk away satisfied with the product or service they paid for.

You want your new leads to be valuable customers. The more value they can offer, the more it will cost you to acquire them, but the more impact they will have on your business.

This all depends on your perspective and niche, of course. All plumbers and plumbing services are different.

A solo plumbing contractor might find any plumbing business valuable, whereas a plumber who specializes in certain kinds of work might want to be more specific with the plumbing customers that they target.

Competing with Plumbing Businesses

When it comes to plumbing lead generation, only try to capture the same target audience as a competitor if you think you actually have a chance of taking some of their leads.

Like in any industry, there are times when smaller or lesser-known plumbing businesses will have to turn towards less obvious means of getting leads.

Do not enter into direct conflict with a competitor unless you have to. Direct competition can be tempting but also very hard to manage if you are not better than their company in every single way.

Instead, focus on things they have not: using your plumbing techs to gather more leads, targeting a specific service area, or setting up some kind of customer referral program.

Local and Large-Scale SEO

Local SEO is invaluable for targeting your local area, and that is something that almost all plumbing businesses are going to do. However, you do not want to sell yourself short and target a space that is too small.

When people want to find local service providers, they will look for any businesses that mention their area. If you are near to another town or city, do not hesitate to add them to your site as keywords.

Some plumbing business sites even have unique landing pages for each specific area they serve, offering similar content but using a new set of keywords to appeal to that area. This helps them gain more plumbing leads from that area without having to do much extra work.

Positive Reviews

Always aim to get as many positive reviews as you can, at least until you are well-established. Business is not fair, and customers will always naturally gravitate towards any plumbing website that has a good amount of positive reviews.

In some cases, not even the number of reviews matters, only the star rating or overall number rating.

Potential plumbing customers will always aim for four-to-five-star businesses where possible. If you can become one of the best businesses in your service area, you can expect a lot more plumbing jobs.

Remarketing

Trying to market yourself to previous customers can be tricky but very worthwhile. Plumbing is never a one-and-done process, and most homes can suffer a plumbing fault at almost any moment.

There can always be value in re-using old customer information to generate new qualified leads. Sometimes, this is just going to be something that happens passively – if you provide a good service, a customer will remember that when they need more plumbing done.

There are also multiple active ways to remarket yourself towards previous customers or even just potential customers that you failed to capture during your initial attempt.

If you have a small target audience – such as only operating within a specific local area – then you might have a limited pool of customers to choose from. Trying to re-capture some previous leads can be effective in the long term.

Word of Mouth

Using word-of-mouth to promote your business is a very common option, especially in local businesses. Referrals are an easy way to generate leads while also giving your company a huge amount of credibility.

If somebody refers your plumbing business to a friend, that friend is going to trust them more often than not. This gives you a massive advantage because they are already inclined to trust you the moment they learn about your company.

Referrals also tend to be far more valuable. If a customer is assured that your business is safe and offers good-quality results, then they are usually going to spend more there than they otherwise would.

What Next?

Getting more plumbing leads is not easy. There is not a single ideal way to approach this kind of work.

When you are looking for more leads, you have to consider what your customers would be looking for. Leads are a two-way process, and you need to find prospective customers with an actual interest in your business.

Moving Forward

If you are already planning out how to get more leads, remember that a lot of the information here was vague for a reason.

There is not any method that will guarantee the maximum possible amount of leads. That is not how leads work.

However, if you plan carefully and think about what you are actually doing, it becomes a lot easier to get the right leads at the right time. The more focused you get on generating useful leads, the easier it becomes to keep everything snowballing into more and more successes.

Useful Guides

Please see some useful guides related to generating more business leads.