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My mum called a plumber today

by JohnnyBattles
9 replies
One of the things I love to do is learn how real people search both online and offline for fixes to their problems.

Today my mom was telling me about a leaking pipe in her kitchen. Her first instinct was to find a plumber in the yellow pages. She never looked at names of plumbers but scanned the telephone numbers and called the first one that was local to her town.

They came and she paid them $150 to fix the leak. The only problem was they weren't from her town and she was not happy about that but it made me realize that some local business owners can be smarter than you think. The plumber was smart enough to have a local telephone number in different towns to appeal to a wider audience.

Our job is to convince them to let us handle the marketing so they can focus on fixing the leaks.
#called #mum #plumber #today
  • Profile picture of the author jimbo13
    So would you have thought to do this? ie Place print Ads with local numbers diverting to a mobile or landline in out of area publications?

    Or would you have overlooked this simple thing?

    Just being curious as you wish to handles peoples marketing for them.

    Dan
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    • Profile picture of the author JohnnyBattles
      Originally Posted by jimbo13 View Post

      So would you have thought to do this? ie Place print Ads with local numbers diverting to a mobile or landline in out of area publications?

      Or would you have overlooked this simple thing?

      Just being curious as you wish to handles peoples marketing for them.

      Dan
      Hey jumbo,

      I have not worked with many service businesses but have used local call tracking numbers. It just caught me by surprise because I have always associated this type of strategy for online marketing and never had considered it to be used in the yellow pages.

      It just goes to show that you learn something new everyday in this profession.
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  • Profile picture of the author bob ross
    tradesman are often way smarter than most of us think for sure. I belong to a big contractor discussion forum and some of these guys actually have a lot of experience in SEO and routinely have discussions about how marketers call them and they can't even explain how they'll actually improve rankings.

    Most contractors do understand that yellowpages are dying out but they know that they still get business from them (especially emergency services like plumbing, HVAC, and electrical. I've seen some of the stupidest people I've ever met who are contractors, carry multiple pre-paid phones on them with area codes that are local to different places.

    Spend some time on places like contractortalk.com and you'll see how knowledgeable some of these guys actually are.
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  • Profile picture of the author DubDubDubDot
    An alternative explanation is that he lives outside of the area he wishes to do business in and wants to provide a phone number that doesn't involve long distance fees.
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  • Profile picture of the author Dustin Blevins
    If this is something you want to do for your own company it can easily be done with something called voice over IP. You can get as many phone numbers as you would like that all direct back to your personal phone.
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  • Profile picture of the author rain21
    yea, I also know some people doing the same thing here in Russia. They are smarter than we think
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  • Profile picture of the author NeXtReview
    On the point about local phone numbers, it is sometimes the opposite that I find a little annoying. I'll be riding by in a car, or a bus sometimes, and the local business will have their telephone number plastered on the shop front. However, because they are local, they won't write the area code because "everyone knows". Well, I don't! I'll drive by, and never call the shop because I didn't know the local code and so couldn't be bothered to follow it up!
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