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5 Plumbing Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Business

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Within 5 miles of our office, there are 12 plumbers. All of which appear in the local search results, but none of them clearly differentiate themselves from the others. While plumbers may be experts when it comes to fixing broken pipes and unclogging drains, many fall short of marketing their business to allow their customers to find them. Get your plumbing business flowing in the right direction with these 5 marketing strategies.

#1 - Tighten The Bolts of Your Brand

You can’t fix a plumbing issue without tools, and you can’t build a business without a brand. The building and foundation of your brand is essential for success and local awareness. Define your plumbing company by clearly stating what makes your organization different and create a unique value proposition that will be the foundation for your plumbing marketing. Your brand must be consistent everywhere – from print to digital marketing. Brand guidelines, a set of standards for the design of documentation, signage, and any other form of other brand identifiers, will help to bring consistency.

#2 - Local SEO: Be the “Local Plumber Near Me”

Plumbing Marketing in Reading, PA

When it comes to search engine rankings, every business strives to be #1. What many don’t realize is that due to Google’s personalized algorithm, the top organic search results (for service related searches) tend to be businesses listed on Google maps.

To ensure your spot in the local pack, the content on your website should be specific to your service region and consistently show your name, address, and phone (NAP). In addition to on your site, this information should also be listed on your Google My Business. You should also include all of the services you offer within the region. This will help you to dominate in mobile searches and acquire positive reviews that will help you to stand out from the crowd.

You’re an Expert? Prove it With Plumbing Videos

Videos are an effective plumbing marketing tool because they can be placed on your website, local listings, social media, paid search, and more. Videos are a great way to engage your audience and provide relevant information. Create simple “how to fix” videos for minor issues, such as a clogged sink. You want to provide your customers with tips they can do themselves, without giving away everything and the kitchen sink.This will establish yourself as an plumbing expert and build your audience’s trust. Building their trust will improve new customer acquisition, extend brand reach and visibility via social sharing, link earning, and word of mouth, and increase your current customers’ willingness to give positive reviews and testimonials.

Target Your Customers With Paid Search Campaigns

When I search “plumber near me”, I see about 4 different plumbing companies running paid search campaign which appear before the maps and organic search. Paid search can be specific to your service region, banners, videos, text, gmail and mobile. It allows your company to be present when consumers are searching for your services. With remarketing, you stay top of mind as they make a purchasing decision.

Measure Campaigns and Adjust Your Plumbing Marketing

Just as you would test a pipe after fixing it, you need to make sure your marketing efforts are working. Invest in the measurement of marketing campaigns to reallocate budget to successful campaigns. Just putting Google Analytics on your website isn’t going to collect the necessary information. Most of the time, consumers are going to call you so you’ll need call tracking connected to Google Analytics and your marketing efforts. Look at the entire customer process and what marketing tactics impacted the decision. This will give you more context to make budgeting decisions.

Have a leak in your plumbing marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments below, or contact us today! For more information, subscribe to our newsletter.

How SEO Can Help Your Local Business Compete With Bigger Brands

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In the story of David and Goliath, David (not very big) is faced with the daunting task of killing Goliath (the name speaks for itself). With an effective strategy and persistence, David accomplishes this feat over his much more powerful adversary.

In today’s economy, your local business probably feels a lot like David: small and up against much larger foes such as national brands. But, fear not! With a well-thought-out SEO strategy, combined with hard work and dedication to the tactics listed below, your small business can walk amongst the giants.

SEO Tips for local businesses

Local SEO: David Has Home Field Advantage

If you’re going to battle, you’d ideally want it to be in an area you’re familiar with. The same is true for your small business. If you’re going to compete with bigger businesses, you have to do it in your local market. While bigger companies surely carry more notoriety, local SEO will prevent your business from going unnoticed.

When it comes to Local SEO, there are two tactics you need to cover: on-site and off-site.

Tactic #1 - On-Site

On-site local SEO is essentially optimizing your website (hence “on-site”) from a local perspective. To do so, I suggest covering the following:

  • Include Your NAP (name, address, and phone number) on every page of your site.
  • Create localized content.
  • Include local signals within your tags, titles, descriptions, and headers whenever possible, while sounding natural.
  • Add schema tags to your website.

Tactic #2 - Off-Site

Off-site local SEO deals with factors that influence your website’s performance that are not directly on your website. A huge factor for visibility within search engines is local listings. Being identified or “listed” accurately and consistently within local listings will send local signals about your business to search engines. This will allow you to appear higher in the search engines in your geographic area.

For example, when I conduct a Google search in Reading, Pa for “Italian Restaurant,” local restaurants appear as opposed to bigger chains.

Seo Consultants in Reading, Pa

On top of that, these local listings appear above the organic search results. That means that if you’re listed in them, you could be the first thing your searchers see.

Tactic #3 - Local Link Earning: Get The Crowd Cheering For You

When you’re in a competition, positive support from those around you can help. The same applies in the digital realm. In order to gain recognition and increase reach and visibility within the local market, you’ll need to place a heavy emphasis on local link earning (also known as link building). Link earning is a crucial part of any SEO campaign; but, the strategy is different for local businesses.

As opposed to going after major brands and influencers to obtain links like national brands do, local businesses should target the influencers within their community. These include:

  • Local Chambers
  • Local Online Directories
  • Local News Stations
  • Other Local Business
  • Local Bloggers
Local SEO Link Earning Tactics for Businesses

Tactic #4 - Social Media: There’s Strength in Numbers

Social Media has continued to grow in popularity and influence in digital marketing. For SEO, specifically, a social media presence is now an important ranking factor. Search engines want to see you engaged with your audience, having an active conversation, and disseminating relevant content.

As opposed to other digital marketing tactics, Social media is not all about metrics – it’s about relationships. This is where most big bands miss the mark. Many major companies are more concerned with just having high-level brand accounts that all speak the same (non-personalized) message.

You know your local audience better than the big brands, so speak to it! Craft messages they’ll relate to and connect with other local accounts. The more locals that share your social posts and the more local accounts that engage with you, the more buzz you’ll generate within your area. This will help boost your local positioning within search results, too.

Social Media Marketing Boosts Local SEO Performance

Local businesses tend to stick together, so it shouldn’t be difficult to gain support from others. You know what they say: “The more Davids, the better.”

Moral of This Local SEO Story:

With an effective SEO strategy intact, combined with a dedicated team, your small business can go toe-to-toe with the Goliaths of your industry. Oh yeah, and that all Davids are bound to be successful.

What are the biggest issues your small businesses face? Let us know in the comments below! To set up a consultation, contact us today!

By: David McDowell

Your Business Technology as Marketing – Mike Sutton, Guest Blogger

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Check out this educational guest-blog post and video from Mike Sutton at TS Tech.

Would you go out to a business mixer or shoot a promo video in a dingy old shirt? Of course not, because you know your appearance sends a message about your professionalism and competence.

But what about your operations process? Or your technology infrastructure?

Everything you do sends signals to your market and the people around you. Sometimes, like with your marketing and sales messaging, those signals are carefully crafted and intentional. But other times, they are not as closely managed.

When you communicate, it’s not just the content, but also the timing, style, and medium that signals your professionalism, responsiveness, and attention to detail. Consistency and clarity in your follow-ups say a lot about your quality and competence as a service provider. Your efficiency shines through when you can address inquiries quickly and accurately the first time.

Your internal operations process and technology integration can have a huge impact on your ability to do these things. I’m going to touch on three areas where your operations and technology act as marketing for your company.

Client Touch Points

Do you have a way to easily and consistently follow up with clients and prospects that serves to keep them informed, feel connected to the process, and helps to effectively manage expectations? Automated status updates to clients and follow-up reminders to you triggered by relevant events and timing can reinforce the appearance that you are responsive and competent. This kind of effective communication will add value and build relationships and trust in a way that can’t be matched.

High Quality Integrated Experience

If your ordering, customer service, billing, and delivery systems are properly integrated, it will not only make your life easier, but it will impress and satisfy your client’s desire for ease, convenience, and accuracy. Proper integration reduces mistakes and workload. This will not only make you more profitable, it will help you keep costs down and retain clients.

Business Technology Integrates & Automates Your Marketing for Efficiency

Efficiency Is a Win-Win

Technology is a resource multiplier. By properly equipping your team and integrating your systems you will be able to do more for a bigger market with fewer people. You keep costs down and deliver a high quality product or service. And your clients get fast, reliable, consistently good service. This creates a loyal fanbase and good word-of-mouth marketing.

Business Technology Is a Tool

When effectively implemented, technology will improve quality, productivity, consistency, and efficiency in a way that supports your strategic vision, goals, and objectives. If it’s your goal to be a budget solution provider, the efficiency of properly integrating your systems will be invaluable. If you desire to be a best-in-class provider and a price leader, leveraging your technology to deliver a top-notch, fully integrated client experience while maximizing quality and profitability will be invaluable to your organization.

The bottom line is that what you do and how you do it will deliver more impact than what you say, so make sure that your actions match your words. If you’re out there saying you’re the best in your industry, your infrastructure and process had better back that up.

If you’re looking for additional ideas on how to digitally transform your business, please check out my 20-minute video presentation on Digital Transformation for your business. I share over a dozen case studies and ideas to digitally transform your business that I’ve either used personally or with my clients to increase market share, expand to new markets, or maximize profit, revenue, and opportunity. You can find the video at tst.io/dabrian.

DaBrian Marketing Redesigns Grove Dental Group’s Website

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Visitors to Grove Dental Group’s new website benefit from improved usability as well as enhanced accessibility to research and register for dental services.

Web design company in Reading, Pa

March, 2017 (Reading, PA) – In coordination with managing their digital marketing to reach new patients, DaBrian Marketing Group noticed that Grove Dental Group’s website needed a new layout and structure to rank higher on search engines and improve usability.
The website’s new design and architecture improves both the business’ visibility on search engines and allows customers to easily learn about Grove Dental’s services. This involved organizing the content of Grove Dental’s former website into an updated structure. This enhanced the indexability and significantly improved the value of Grove Dental’s content to search engines. Overall, users on major search engines, such as Google and Bing, are now more likely to find and visit Grove Dental’s website.

Visitors to Grove Dental’s website also experience an increase in speed when they navigate through pages. The new, simplified design decreases the time that is required for each page to fully load. After a visitor finds the service in which he or she is interested, a newly created registration form allows that person to immediately contact Grove Dental’s staff and schedule appointments. DaBrian Marketing Group placed these registration forms on the new website to expedite people’s next step from learning about Grove Dental to actually requesting their services.

Megan Link, Director of Projects, Marketing, & Financial Operations at Grove Dental expresses excitement over the improved capabilities of the website and DaBrian Marketing Group’s services:

“Partnering with DaBrian was a no brainer for us and we couldn’t be more pleased with the service they provide. DaBrian is like your best friend, always has your back and looks out for your best interest. They are really an extension of our team, and the transition was smooth and effortless on our part. Our new website is living proof of my statement. They knew when to ask questions about what we wanted, but really I had very little to do with the new website other than giving the final a-ok. I recommend DaBrian to any business looking to change their online appearance.”

Grove Dental’s precise branded guidelines made the redesign of their website a simple project without complications. Grove Dental concretely identifies its brand – from the personnel’s attitude and level of patient-engagement to the overall mission of the company. This allowed DaBrian Marketing Group to create a layout and structure that effectively communicates Grove Dental’s digital brand to potential patients. This redesigned website complements the organic (search engine optimization or SEO) and paid (pay per click or PPC) search engine marketing efforts as well as the social media marketing efforts that DaBrian Marketing Group continues to perform for Grove Dental.

Visit Grove Dental Group’s website to experience the latest web design project by DaBrian Marketing Group.

About DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC
Founded in 2008, DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC is a full-service digital marketing agency, focused on providing original and strategic digital marketing solutions for businesses, that want to create digital awareness, increase return on investment (ROI), and identify insights that not only will help achieve goals but will also help to increase your business’s efficiencies. DaBrian Marketing Group’s services include email marketing, digital branding, search engine optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, web design, web analytics, social media marketing, and more. Company headquarters is centrally located at 500 Penn Street, Suite 201, Reading, Pennsylvania 19602. For more information about DaBrian Marketing Group, visit dabrianmarketing.com or call 610.743.5602.

Humanizing B2B Marketing for Better ROAS

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A core component of producing a humanized or relatable B2B marketing strategy is to first measure that strategy, correctly. Recently, business-to-business (B2B) marketing has focused on content marketing, marketing automation, and social media management to grow a business’ return on investment (ROI). While measuring ROI is an effective way to measure success, it’s about time we shift our mindset to think more about return on ad spend (ROAS).

Focusing on the the individual advertising tactics rather than the strategy as a whole allows you to more precisely analyze the results of your marketing efforts – including advertising campaigns. This also helps you to humanize our B2B marketing initiatives by understanding exactly what kind of marketing efforts work. These include behavior-based tactics such as:

  • Responsive web designs
  • Unique and helpful content
  • Consistent interactions on social media
  • Personalized and attentive client relationships.

Although you’re prospecting another business rather than an individual (B2C), we cannot forget the fact that the decision-makers are still “normal” customers. How are you going to speak to them to build the relationship between their company and yours?

Commit to Responsive Web Design

When we envision a person in upper management, we typically see them sitting at his or her desk all day long. This is never the case. Business decision-makers are on the move and will most likely visit your website through a mobile phone to find more information about you.

Your website must be mobile friendly in order for them to clearly review your products or services and understand how your business is different from the competition. The mobile experience must quickly provide that information. It must be easily read by the most popular smartphones of your target audience. In fact: 62% of B2B marketers planned to invest in responsive web design in 2016. Invest now to be ahead of your competitors in the rest of 2017.

B2B Marketing Tips to increase ROAS - Reading, PA

Attract New Customers with Unique Content

Craft your copywriting, design, and imagery to appeal to your potential customers while enforcing your brand on every page. Not only must the content be written in the most common languages of your target audience, but it must also be accessible with Google and Bing.

To market your written content and business, it’s recommended to assist your content marketing efforts with SEO and Paid Search (PPC) advertising to increase awareness of products and services. Follow the SEO best practices and work with a Google AdWords partner for optimal results.

How to Increase ROAS with B2B Content Marketing

Socialize with Business to Business Customers

Friends, family, and customers all use social media for leisure and business purposes. With the growth of social media management, potential customers are looking for your business to provide helpful information about your industry along with being someone they can talk to. Socializing with them provides you with an opportunity to demonstrate expertise and reinforce your brand’s value.

Social Media Marketing to Increase B2B ROAS

Dedicate time to sharing content on your personal and business social media accounts. This will prove your expertise and help you to stay top-of-mind. You can also advertise products and services on targeted social media networks. Facebook and LinkedIn ads have shown the best value for B2B social marketers.

Nurture Individual Accounts with Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Lastly, marketing automation can create consistent interactions with potential customers and provide you with the ability to nurture existing clients when executed appropriately. Take a look at this annual trends report from Econsultancy and Adobe for quantitative evidence.

For example, the use of account-based marketing brings several departments together to keep your current business while obtaining new prospects simultaneously. ABM is a business-to-business strategy to drive collaboration between business marketing and sales teams by focusing on building individual client accounts to drive revenue. Pardot and Marketo have templates to help you to nurture individual accounts and grow your revenues.

Nurture B2B Relationships with Automated Marketing

Your Business is Made Up of Hard-Working Humans. Show It.

There are many tactics to attract new customers for any business, no matter if you’re B2B or B2C. It’s just important to keep in mind that when marketing to other companies, there is still an actual person on the other end, not just another business. Be relatable to the people at those other companies and understand their behavior and motivations to see profits on your own end.

Comment below any experiences you’ve had when marketing for a B2B company – I’d love to share mine, also.

How to Use Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, and Houzz to Build Your Business

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As a part of the home services industry, people regularly open their doors to you and bring you into their living spaces. While many people may not consciously realize it, that action requires a certain level of trust. To enter any person’s home is to be trusted in one’s personal area of daily living.

To succeed in the home services industry, then, your target audience must know you. They must feel comfortable with your brand and your identity in order for you to be allowed into their lives (learn more on our industry page).

So, how are people hearing about you? If you are not active in the digital landscape, it may be difficult for you to answer that question.

With Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, and Houzz, your business can gain significant brand awareness to gain leads and stay informed with customer-reviews. These home services resources are both popular and currently growing solutions for consumers to both rate and find service-providers. A recent article from FieldPulse reports that, as of 2015, Angie’s List has over 3 million paid memberships.

These platforms provide both consumers and businesses with opportunities to connect with each other and ensure that reliable, valid work is completed. This avoids situations like the one, below.

Home Services Marketing Agency in Reading, Pa

Angie’s List: Establish a Higher Level of Credibility for Your Brand

One of the hallmarks of Angie’s List is the ability for consumers to openly discuss the quality of service-providers. Angie’s List utilizes a BPA-certified review collection process that filters any fake reviews of home services businesses. Therefore, fellow consumers only experience genuine opinions from actual people that had work done by those hired businesses.

This is a prime opportunity for your business to get maximum exposure of your high-quality offerings and completed projects. Find your business and claim your profile to get further insight into reviews of your work and consistently improve for better quality.

Positive experiences with your brand will most likely generate more positive experiences and profitable leads. Fellow consumers will see positive reviews; and, they may be more willing to trust you. Likewise, you will understand exactly what customers currently love about your services.

Do not underestimate the power of customer-reviews. Ironically, they operate as non-paid advertising for your business. And, they definitely make a difference to people. Even in 2014, a study by BrightLocal found that 88% of consumers reported that they equally trust online reviews and personal recommendations. Read the article from Think with Google that reports this statistic.

Overall Benefit for Your Business:

Your presence on Angie’s List creates a signal that your brand highly regards customers’ opinions. For those that are searching for help with their home improvement, repair, landscaping, home pet care, or a host of other needs: this signal makes you relevant to their current situations. This ultimately increases your credibility in the minds of your target audience because you value people’s feelings.

How to Use Angie’s List to Grow Your Business

HomeAdvisor: Generate Meaningful Interactions with Customers

Whereas Angie’s List can be seen as a valuable resource for consumers to obtain advice and recommendations for service-providers, HomeAdvisor is a tool that connects home services businesses with searching consumers. It is important to note that Angie’s List also offers this capability; however, this is not the primary focus of that platform.

In this way HomeAdvisor has an equal but also separate benefit than Angie’s List. Both of these platforms assist consumers; but, HomeAdvisor serves as a direct link between your business and a consumer that needs your help.

This home services resource allows your business to create a personalized profile that utilizes your specific business-related needs to meet consumers’ demands. People that use HomeAdvisor to find reliable home services businesses for their projects will be matched to your business as a function of availability, desired work to be completed, location, and other relevant factors.

Specifically, the platform walks searching consumers through the process of choosing a service-provider to get them the best possible help for their particular situations.

As a result of HomeAdvisor’s program, the quality and profitability of your interactions with consumers may increase. HomeAdvisor works to make sure that you, as the service-provider, and a consumer, as a person that needs a service, have the same goals to make more sales and loyal customers. There is significantly less ambiguity about the type of service that people need or the kind of work that you offer.

Overall Benefit to Your Business:

HomeAdvisor serves your business as much as it serves consumers. Where people gain the benefit of faster help for their projects, you gain the benefit of meaningful interactions with those people.

How to Use HomeAdvisor To Grow Your Home Services Business

Houzz: Increase Your Reach & Visibility in a Consumer-to-Consumer Network

Although it is not yet as well-known as Angie’s List or HomeAdvisor, Houzz is a growing social media platform that offers a digital community of both service-providers and consumers. Similar to both Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor, Houzz does allow direct communication between consumers and service-providers.

However, the particular advantage of Houzz is the ability of consumers with home improvement projects to discuss options, styles, and service-providers with each other. Houzz also allows users to read recommendations and receive information about current trends to generate ideas for their homes and gardens.

This is an interactive experience that does not simply entail a searching consumer that reads a review of your business’ completed projects. Rather, Houzz provides a lively and behavior-based space in which people can converse about a variety of home-related products and services.

You can become a part of that conversation to reach your target audience. Beyond the abilities that Houzz offers to consumers, this platform offers profiles for service-providers to actively gain visibility for their brands. You can publish photographs of your work to function as case studies wherein you solve customers’ problems with high-quality solutions. Solve those problems, quickly, by actually selling your products on Houzz.

Participate in consumer-to-consumer conversations to give clarification and expert-level guidance for their complex projects. Additionally, Houzz allows you to collaborate with your customers through digital interactions and the sharing of electronic documents.

Overall Benefit to Your Business:

As a social medium, Houzz gives your home services business the reach that you need to secure members of your target audience through direct interactions. Secondly, you receive visibility that gets you increased brand awareness through visual evidence of your work and the ability to sell your products.

Build Even More Trust in Your Home Services Business

The digital marketplace is a landscape that allows both consumers and service-providers to interact, discuss projects and needed work, as well as get that work accomplished. Three effective tools or resources that help your business to generate digital brand awareness are Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, and Houzz.

While each of three home services platforms offer distinctive benefits, all of them grant you the enhanced ability to get your name in front of the consumers that need you, now.

Need Help Optimizing Your Profiles On These Platforms?

Tell us about your needs in the comments, below. Learn more with constant digital marketing advice when you follow our Facebook and Twitter accounts.