Guide
Plumbing advertising ideas, ranked by what a booked job costs
Advertising a plumbing business has one honest measure: what you paid for the job that actually booked. Clicks and likes are not it. This page ranks the standard ideas by that measure, from the van you already own to ads that charge per lead, and it names the ones to skip until the vans multiply.
- Ideas on this page, cheapest first
- 9
- Question for every caller: how did you find us
- 1
- A finished 30 second video ad, batch plus export
- 110 CR
Measure cost per booked job, or you are guessing
Every caller gets one question: how did you find us. Write the answer on the job sheet. After a month you know what each channel produced. After a quarter you know what to cut.
A channel is judged on booked jobs, not calls. Ten calls from a coupon site that haggle you down are worth less than two calls from a neighbour's recommendation.
Everything below is ranked by what a booked job tends to cost through it. The exact numbers move by city. The order rarely does.
The tier that costs almost nothing
These use assets you already own. Do all of them before spending a pound or a dollar on ads.
- The van. Name, trade, number, area, big enough to read at a junction. It advertises at every red light and outside every job.
- Yard signs and door hangers. Ask the customer if a small sign can sit out front for a week. The street just watched you fix their neighbour's flood.
- The Google Business Profile. Post the week's jobs as photo updates. It is a feed your next caller actually reads.
- Nextdoor and local Facebook groups. Answer plumbing questions plainly, no pitch. The recommendation threads do the selling later.
- The boiler sticker and the fridge magnet. The cheapest repeat-business ad ever printed.
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Paid search: the panic tax, worth paying carefully
Local Services Ads charge per lead and sit above the map. You verify the business, Google shows the badge, and you pay for calls, not clicks. Start here rather than with regular search ads: a plumbing buyer is in a hurry, and the top box takes the call.
Regular Google Ads on emergency terms can work but punish sloppiness. Tight radius, emergency keywords only, phone-call bidding, and switched off in the hours nobody answers.
Both channels convert on your reviews. Under thirty reviews, fix that first. The ad brings the click; the score books the job.
Before and after is the native plumbing ad
The most watched plumbing content is the state of the pipe. The scale inside a fifteen year old water heater. What came out of the shower drain. The under-sink cabinet before and after the re-pipe.
You produce this material on every job. Twenty seconds before you start, twenty after you finish, permission asked at the quote.
Posted plainly with a line of text, it is content. With your voice explaining what went wrong and what fixing it involved, it is an ad, because the viewer files your name under knows-what-they-are-doing.
Boost only a post that already worked on its own, to a small radius around your patch. A boost amplifies a proven ad. It cannot repair a dead one.
What to skip until you have more vans
Radio, local print and bus-stop posters sell reach you cannot measure. When a caller says I-just-see-you-around, that is the van working, not the poster.
Sponsoring the youth team is a fine thing to do for the club. Book it under goodwill, not advertising, and it will never disappoint you.
Lead-selling platforms sell the same emergency to five plumbers at once. You pay to race to the phone. Some owners make the arithmetic work; most quietly stop.
Making the video ads without the editing evening
The before and after route stalls in the edit, not the filming. Clips, captions, timing: an evening per post, after a day in crawl spaces.
Cutroom removes that step. Film one talking take at the van, up to 3 minutes. It transcribes every word, writes the hook, places your before and after shots on the exact words that describe them, and returns a finished 9:16 MP4 in about a minute. You direct on the transcript, not on a timeline.
A 30 second ad comes to about 110 credits: a 100 credit batch plus an export at 20 credits per finished minute. The first 3 are free in your first 7 days, no card, with a Cutroom mark across the middle. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, about 11 ads, nothing on the picture, cancel in one click.
A job becomes an ad in four steps
Forty seconds of filming per job, one talking take, about 110 credits per finished 30 second ad.
Before shot
Twenty seconds of the problem, at the quote
After shot, plus one take
Explain the fix at the van
Batch
100 credits: transcript, director pass, b-roll
Export
20 credits per finished minute, 9:16 MP4
Questions people ask
- What is the most effective advertising for plumbers?
- For emergencies, the map box plus reviews, because that is where the panic search lands. For planned work like bathrooms and boilers, before and after content that shows the standard of the work. No single channel wins both, which is why the how-did-you-find-us question matters.
- How much should a plumber spend on advertising?
- The common rule of thumb is a single-digit percent of revenue, but the honest answer is: spend what you can measure. Do the near-costless tier first, then add one paid channel at a time and count booked jobs through it.
- Do Facebook ads work for plumbing?
- For planned work, often: a bathroom refit is researched on the sofa, and a radius-targeted before and after reaches that person. For emergencies, rarely, because nobody scrolls a feed while the ceiling drips.
- Are lead generation sites worth it?
- They sell the same lead to several plumbers, so you pay to race to the phone and the price gets haggled. Some owners make it work as filler between busy periods. Go in with the job-sheet question running so you can see the real cost per booked job.
- What does a video ad cost to make this way?
- About 110 credits per finished 30 second ad on Cutroom, and Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, about 11 of those. The honest floor is cheaper still: a phone and the platform's own captions cost nothing, and for stories they are enough.
Rank every idea by the jobs it books, do the near-costless tier first, pay the panic tax carefully, and let the pipes themselves make your ads.