Plumbing marketing ideas you can start this week.

Plumbing has two kinds of work: the call that cannot wait, and the job that can be planned. Good plumbing marketing wins the first and gets ahead of the second. Pick a few of these, do them this week, and track the calls they bring.

Win the emergency call

A homeowner with water on the floor calls the first plumber who looks open and picks up. If you miss it, they do not leave a voicemail. They call the next listing.

• Call your own number at 7 pm on a weekday and on Sunday morning. Hear what a customer hears.
• Decide who answers after hours: an on-call tech, an answering service, or an AI receptionist that says it is an AI assistant, tells the caller where the main shut-off usually is, and books or dispatches the job.
• Reply to web forms in minutes. A 2011 Harvard Business Review study found companies that answered online leads within an hour were nearly 7 times more likely to qualify them than companies that waited longer.
• Say “24/7” only if it is true. If you take emergency calls on weekends but not overnight, say that.

Get ahead of water heater replacements

Water heaters are planned work hiding as emergencies. The U.S. Department of Energy says most storage water heaters last 10 to 15 years, and tankless units can last more than 20. It also says water heating typically accounts for about 18% of a home’s energy use.

Make that useful:

• On every service call, note the water heater’s age from the label and record it in your software.
• When a unit hits 10 years, email customers who opted in: “Your water heater is about 11 years old. Here is what to watch for, and what replacement looks like.”
• Build one page on your site for water heater repair and replacement, tank and tankless, with prices or price ranges if you can.

Set up Local Services Ads with the phone covered

Local Services Ads appear above regular search results for many “plumber near me” searches. Google charges per lead, not per click. A lead is an answered call, a text or email from the customer, or a missed call during business hours where the caller stayed on the line more than 20 seconds. Google may credit low-quality leads after review, and you can report a bad lead in the feedback survey.

So two rules. Pick job types you want, like drain cleaning, water heaters and leak repair, and switch off the ones you do not. And do not run LSA unless every call gets answered. Our Local Services Ads guide covers setup in more detail. For help with setup and tracking, see ads and listings.

Track every LSA lead in a simple sheet: date, job type, booked or not, ticket value. After a month you will know which job types pay and which only ring the phone. Dispute leads that are clearly not plumbing, like solicitors or wrong numbers, through the feedback survey each week instead of letting them pile up.

Make your Google Business Profile complete

In BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer search survey, 52% of people began their most recent local business search on Google Search and 9% on Google Maps. Google says local results depend on relevance, distance and how well known the business is, and that review count and rating are part of that.

What to fix this week:

• Primary category “Plumber”, then secondary ones that match real work, such as drainage service or water heater installation.
• If customers do not come to your shop, set a service area by city instead of showing an address.
• Real hours, including emergency hours.
• Photos from actual jobs: a new tankless unit, a clean repipe, a cleared main line on camera.
• Ask every customer for a review. BrightLocal’s 2026 review survey found 74% of consumers only care about reviews from the last three months. Our guide to Google reviews has the rules and reply templates.

Build service-area pages that are worth reading

City pages help homeowners see that you work in their area. They only work if each page says something true and local. For each main city you serve, write:

• Which neighborhoods you cover and your usual drive time.
• The jobs you see there: older homes with galvanized pipe, slab leaks, root intrusion in clay sewer lines, hard water wear on fixtures.
• Two or three real jobs from that city, with photos and permission from the homeowner.

Five good pages beat fifty thin copies. Link each one to your service pages for drains, water heaters and repipes.

Offer a maintenance membership

A membership gives you planned work in slow weeks and a reason to stay in touch. Keep it simple: one yearly plumbing inspection, a water heater flush, priority scheduling and a discount on repairs. Offer it on every invoice and every water heater install. Call or email members once a year to book their visit.

Follow up, and be careful with shared leads

Big estimates go quiet: repipes, sewer line replacements, tankless conversions. Follow up two days after the visit, again at one week, and once more at three weeks. Email customers who agreed to it. Automated follow-up texts go only to people who agreed to receive them, for example on your estimate form, since the TCPA restricts automated texts and calls without the right prior consent.

Plumbing leads from marketplaces are often sent to several plumbers, and you pay whether or not you win the job. In 2023 the FTC ordered HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million and stop making false or unsupported claims about its leads. Track cost per booked job across every channel. The channels you own, your profile, reviews, site and members, get cheaper per job as they grow.

Ammett does not sell leads and does not promise a number of calls. We set up these channels and answer what comes in. See what we do for plumbing companies, or start with a free audit of how customers find and reach you today.