I recently came across a report written by Geoffery Moore of yourbestmarketingmove.com and he did a great job encapsulating the challenges associated with marketing your plumbing business.
As a plumbing business, you face some special marketing challenges:
- Selling the “Invisible.” You don’t have a store people can see and visit and you don’t have a tangible product people can handle.
- What Customer Loyalty? Your customers only need you once in a great while, so it’s hard to count on customer loyalty and repeat business. Many people can’t even remember which plumber they called the last time they had a problem.
- Relationship Roulette. Generally speaking, people don’t want to hear from you at all—until they have a problem. And then, they want you IMMEDIATELY! This makes it difficult to build relationships with customers.
- Media Waste-land. If you advertise in the local newspaper you know that on any given day, only a tiny fraction of people reading the newspaper will need your services. This means that over 99% of the money you spend running an ad there is wasted! And it’s the same for most other advertising media.
- The Yellowed Pages. You can reach them via the Yellow Pages of course, but this medium is getting more and more expensive—even as fewer and fewer people are using it. People are turning to online searches. But who?
- Mystery Prospects. This means that it’s getting harder to identify your prospects in advance and know how to reach them.
With challenges like these, it’s little wonder that so many plumbing companies have such bad stories to tell about their marketing experiences.
What do you think? Have you recognized these challenges in your plumbing business? What are you doing or have you done to overcome them in your plumbing business?
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