Guide
Electrician marketing: one plan for the emergency, another for the planned job
An electrical business gets found in two moods. The 9pm emergency, where somebody picks from the map in three minutes. And the planned job, the panel upgrade or the EV charger, researched for weeks before anyone calls. Most marketing advice treats them as one audience. They are not, and the plan below splits them: what wins the emergency, what wins the planned job, and where video fits without pretending it does everything.
- Customers this plan splits into
- 2
- Lite a month, if you hand the edit to software
- $19.99
- To cancel that tool, under Settings
- 1 click
The emergency customer buys speed. The planned customer buys trust.
Power out, burning smell, a breaker that will not stay on at night. This customer does not browse. They search, scan the map results, and call the first plausible number that answers.
The panel upgrade, the rewire, the EV charger, the hot tub circuit. This customer has weeks. They compare, read reviews, watch videos and collect two or three quotes.
Everything below serves one of the two. Doing the emergency work first is deliberate: it pays back in weeks, and it funds the patience the planned side needs.
Two customers, two clocks on the wall
The same business, found in two completely different moods.
| The emergency call | The planned job | |
|---|---|---|
| Decision time | Minutes | Weeks |
| Where they look | The map and the review count | Reviews, your site, your videos |
| What decides it | Who answers the phone | Who they already half-know |
| What to build | Profile, reviews, answer speed | Explainers, befores, followed-up quotes |
Win the emergency: the map, the reviews, the answered phone
Claim the Google Business Profile and fill it like it is your storefront, because at 9pm it is. Categories, service area, hours, and whether you actually take emergency calls.
Load it with photos of real work, the van and your face. Twenty is a floor. A profile with a logo and two photos loses to the one that looks staffed.
Ask for the review on the doorstep, when the lights are back on and relief is doing the selling. One ask per job, plus a same-evening text with the direct link.
Answer the phone. Every marketing dollar upstream of an unanswered phone is wasted. If you cannot cover nights, say the hours plainly on the profile instead of missing calls.
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Win the planned job: be the electrician they already know
A planned customer shortlists from memory. The name on a neighbour's recommendation, the van they keep seeing on the street, the electrician whose flickering-lights video they watched last month.
Educational video is the cheapest way into that memory. Why lights flicker. What a panel upgrade involves and how long the power is off. What a proper EV charger install looks like next to the horror stories.
The dramatic befores earn the attention. A scorched outlet stops a thumb mid-scroll in a way a van photo never will, and it is honest: the danger was real, and you fixed it.
Say the credentials out loud in every one. Licensed and insured, or registered in the UK. In this trade, that sentence is the marketing.
Reviews are the one asset both customers read
The emergency caller counts them. The planned customer reads them. No other asset works on both sides of the split.
Reply to every review, including the unfair one. The reply is written for the next reader, not the reviewer, and a calm answer to an angry review does more work than five ordinary ones.
When you reply, name the job type. Reviews that mention panel upgrades tell the next panel-upgrade customer they are in the right place.
Lead sites: the honest arithmetic before you buy leads
Angi, Thumbtack, Checkatrade and the rest sell the same homeowner's request to several electricians at once. You pay per lead, then compete on speed and price.
That can still be worth it in month one, when the phone is silent and the review count is near zero. It is a bridge, not a plan.
Every job a lead site brings should fund the asset that replaces it: the review, the photos, the video of the fix. The goal is to stop renting attention the site owns and start owning your own.
Where video fits, and how the habit survives a busy month
The videos this plan asks for are talking videos: you, explaining a fault or a job. Filming one in the van takes a minute. Editing it is the step that kills the habit.
Two honest routes. Post raw to stories with the platform's own captions, which costs nothing and is fine for people who already follow you. Or hand the edit to software and post finished videos where strangers find you.
Cutroom is built for the second route. Upload the take, and the transcript is the editor: highlight the phrase where you describe the scorched outlet and your clip of it lands on those words. Captions burn in. A finished 9:16 MP4 comes back in about a minute.
A batch is 100 credits and export adds 20 credits per finished minute, so a 30 second video is about 110 credits. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, about 11 of them, cancel in one click.
The credit price of one finished video
Batch plus export. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits.
- Batch: transcript, director pass, b-roll100 credits
- Export, per finished minute20 credits
- A finished 30 second video~110 credits
Questions people ask
- How much should an electrician spend on marketing?
- Start with the assets that cost time: the profile, the reviews, a filming habit. Spend money only where the return is countable per job, which usually means per-lead search first and paid social last, behind videos that already worked unpaid.
- Does an electrician need a website?
- A one page site with the licence number, service area, phone number and a few reviews is enough to start. The Google profile does the heavy lifting for emergencies. The site is where the planned customer checks you are real.
- What should an electrician post on social media?
- Befores with your explanation over them, safety answers people actually search, and one plain video that says who you are and where you work. Social feeds the planned job, not the emergency, so aim for local memory rather than reach.
- Are lead generation sites worth it for electricians?
- As a bridge, yes. You pay for the same lead as two or three competitors and win on response speed. The mistake is treating the bridge as the destination and never building the profile, reviews and videos that make it unnecessary.
- What does the video editing step cost?
- About 110 credits per finished 30 second video with Cutroom, batch plus export. The first 3 are free in your first 7 days, with 600 credits and no card, and carry a Cutroom mark. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, roughly 11 of those videos, takes the mark off, and cancelling is one click.
- How long before any of this brings in jobs?
- Reviews and the profile can move the emergency side within weeks. The planned side is slower by nature, because you are building memory for a decision the customer has not started yet. Judge it in months, and count calls, not likes.
Split the plan the way the customers split themselves. Speed and reviews for the emergency. Memory and proof for the planned job. And an edit that takes about a minute, so the habit survives the busy weeks.