Beat your competitors

As an installer of plumbing or heating products, you should constantly be asking yourself “What can I do so that clients choose me over my competitors?” If you’ve hit a brick wall when it comes to what you can do to stand out from the crowd and increase your customer and job list, we’ve put together some tips to help you engage with potential customers and get those projects rolling in more frequently.

1. Referral Schemes

A great way to grab the attention of new customers is to get your existing customers to do it for you! By offering some sort of incentive for a customer to recommend you for another job they know if you build a loyal customer base that can keep growing and expanding. All you have to do is ensure the quality of your work is good enough for them to want to recommend you and offer them some sort of incentive. The offer doesn’t have to be mind-blowing or even monetary based to get someone to refer you, but equally, it must be good enough for people to want to bother doing it. If they’re potentially sticking their neck out for you, you’ve got to give them a reason to do so.

2. Online Marketing

It sounds obvious, but the world has moved towards all things digital. While it’s great to have face-to-face contact and meet new potential customers in person, the reality is a lot of people may well be looking for the service you offer online and you need to get in front of them. Your competitors may well be utilising these methods and connecting with potential customers online breaking down their sales resistance and conditioning them into believing they are the service they require before you ever get close to speaking to them in person.
A slick yet simple website is a good place to start in terms of showcasing your work and service as well as creating a platform for you to link all of your other online elements too. From there you can post within online directories like Yelp and get active on social media to help potential customers find you more easily.

3. Highlight your Unique Selling Points

To stand out from your competitors, you need to explain what you can offer that they can’t. Do you offer free quotes or a faster than average turnaround on projects? If you can highlight the things you do that your competitors can’t then you’re giving a potential customer a huge reason to pick you over them. However, for customers to do this they need to know about them! This is where your online presence, especially social media, is great for shouting about how your service can benefit a customer and why that means they should choose you for their project.

4. Focus on a smaller area

While the dream is usually to become a huge, nationwide service, you will be better served in terms of your marketing strategy by targeting more specifically. By focusing any work that you are doing to spread the word about your services such as in print or online ads to a smaller target audience, you increase its effectiveness while ensuring your budget doesn’t get stretched too thinly across too big a range of people. It’s all about being smart with where you put your energies into marketing yourself and the money you spend and getting a better return on investment. Marketing to everybody is marketing to nobody, so the more specific you can be in your targeting you’ll reduce the number of people you reach but make it more likely they will be a higher quality and use your service. You can start by choosing a smaller area geographically and focus on building a quality customer base within that area before expanding.

5. Customer service is paramount

People buy from people, and this is even truer in installer industries. People want someone who will not only do high-standard, quality work for them but also be someone they can trust and rely on as well as being someone they like. This is where your customer service and manner with your clients comes in, and you need to strive to be better than your competitors.
It’s almost always simple things that are easy to do but are incredibly important to your customers and will make a huge difference in how they perceive you professionally. Something as simple as just being available for their calls or questions and keeping them in the loop can be the difference between them recommending you to a friend or not. Understandably you’re busy, so sometimes you’ll have to come up with ways to maintain a high level of customer service at times that suit you. An example of this could be rather than not taking a call while you’re busy, arrange regular calls ahead of time to update them on the project. That way your customers don’t feel ignored and remain up to date while you aren’t constantly interrupted while trying to complete the project.

In a digital age, it’s simultaneously easier to connect with potential customers and yet harder to stand out from your competitors. You need to convince a potential customer that your service will benefit them more than if they were to choose anyone else, which is exactly what these tips can help you achieve.
For more industry tips & tricks, read our other posts here. As industry experts and suppliers of high-quality piping solutions, Multipipe can provide you with the products and technical support you need to create quality works and generate a loyal customer base. Contact us today for product and solutions information and find out how we can improve your service.