Getting More Plumbing Customers in a Town Where Everyone Already Has a Plumber

There is a particular kind of advice written for plumbers, and you can spot it by the word funnel. Awareness at the top, consideration in the middle, a booked job at the bottom, and a chart.

In Maple Run, population four thousand and change, the funnel is this. A pipe fails. Somebody says a name out loud. That is the entire journey, and it takes about eleven seconds.

Everything useful about marketing a plumbing business in a small town follows from taking that seriously.

Plumbing has almost no consideration window, and that changes what works

Most trades give the customer some time to think. A new roof, a landscaping plan, a furnace replacement in October: there is a stretch of days where the customer is comparing people, and that stretch is where advertising and websites and reviews do their work.

Plumbing splits into two halves and the halves behave nothing alike.

Emergency work has no window at all. Water is coming out of something. The customer calls the first name they can retrieve from memory or from the top of a search result, and if nobody answers they call the next. There is no comparison. There is no evaluation. There is a phone and a decision made under stress.

Planned work has a normal window. A bathroom remodel, a water heater the customer has decided to replace before it fails, a new line to an outbuilding. Here the customer does look you up, does ask around, and does compare.

The mistake is spending on the second kind of marketing and expecting it to win the first kind of work. A beautiful website does not win a two in the morning call. Being retrievable does.

Retrievable is the word that matters

Being retrievable means that at the moment of the problem your name is available to the person with the problem, from one of the four places a name in a small town actually comes from.

Memory. They have used you before, or you did work for their parents, or your truck is lettered and they see it every week. This is why a lettered truck genuinely outperforms most paid advertising in a market this size. It is a sign that drives around all day, parked in the driveways of houses on the streets where your next customers live. There is more on this in the piece on trucks, signs and shirts.

Somebody else's memory. The neighbor, the spouse, the guy at work. This is the referral channel and it is the largest one in this trade.

The town Facebook group. Somebody posts "anyone know a good plumber" at seven in the evening and gets nine replies. This happens in every small town, constantly, and it is the closest thing to a live auction for your trade. The rules for participating without being the guy who advertises are worth reading before you jump in, because getting it wrong costs you more than staying out.

A search on a phone. Usually a map result rather than a website. Which is why the Google Business Profile is the higher priority of the two and the website is the thing that has to survive being opened afterwards.

Notice that three of the four are not things you buy. They are things you accumulate, and they accumulate at a rate set by how the last job went.

The leave behind is underrated in plumbing specifically

Plumbing has an unusual property among the trades: the same household will need you again, probably within a couple of years, and they will not want to spend any effort finding you the second time.

That makes the cost of being forgotten unusually high, and the fix unusually cheap.

A magnet on the water heater. A sticker on the panel or the shutoff. A card in the drawer. Any physical object that sits at the place where the next problem will happen, with a phone number on it. This is not clever and it is not new, and it wins more jobs per dollar in this trade than anything else available to a small shop, because it puts your number at the exact coordinates of the emergency.

The second half of the same idea: when you leave, tell the customer the one thing about their house they should know. Where the main shutoff is. Which fixture is on borrowed time. What the noise in the wall was. People remember the person who told them something true about their own house, and they repeat it, which is referral marketing that costs you forty seconds.

What to say when somebody asks the group

This is the highest leverage minute in small town plumbing and most contractors either skip it or blow it.

Blowing it looks like: "Call us! 555 1234! Free estimates!" That reads as an advertisement, the group moderator may remove it, and the neighbors scroll past.

Working looks like answering the actual question. Somebody asks about a smell in the basement drain. You explain what a dry trap is and that pouring a gallon of water down the floor drain fixes it for free most of the time. You do not pitch. Two things happen. That person now knows who you are, and so does everybody reading, and you have demonstrated the thing people actually want from a plumber, which is that you will tell them the truth about whether they need one.

You will give away some small jobs this way. You will get larger ones, from people who decided you were honest before they ever had a reason to call.

The number worth watching

Not calls. Not revenue. Repeat rate: what share of this month's jobs came from a household you had already served.

It is the number that tells you whether the business is compounding or churning. A plumbing business in a fixed population that is not building repeat work is running to stand still, because the pool does not grow. There is a fuller treatment in the five numbers a service business should watch, and in repeat customers as the growth lever.

Three readings to take this week

• Call your own number from a cell phone at eight at night and see what a person with water on the floor gets. If it is a voicemail greeting recorded years ago, that is the job list for this week.
• Count how many of last month's jobs were repeat households. Under a third in a fixed population means the leave behind and the follow up are doing no work.
• Look at the last ten jobs and ask whether anything with your phone number on it is still in that house. If not, buy the magnets.

Adapted from Small Town Strategy: Simple Marketing for People with Real Work to Do, out now on Amazon in paperback ($14.99) and Kindle ($6.99).