Morgul Marketing

    Chicago, IL

    Chicago plumbing content that could not be filmed anywhere else

    Most plumbing content is filmed somewhere with a driveway, a garage and a basement nobody ever finished. Chicago is a different job. In February the crew parks where the plow left room and carries the machine in. The cleanout is behind paneling somebody put up decades ago. The water line into the house may be lead, and the owner has never looked at it. After a wet week a whole block decides on its own what an overhead sewer does. Those four things belong to the houses on your route in Cook County and the collar counties, and they are what this page is about.

    A February service call here starts with the parking, and that is the shot

    Snow decides how a crew reaches a house in this city, and the part nobody films is the part that explains why a winter call runs long.

    On a residential block in Bridgeport or Ravenswood after a plow run there is nowhere to put a truck. The crew parks where they can, carries the machine down the walk, and the clock has been running a while before anybody touches a pipe.

    Show that. A homeowner watching a service video shot somewhere with driveways sees a van pull in and a technician step out with a bag. The version on your route is a truck two houses down, snow coming off a shovel and a machine going up the back stairs.

    The block is watching as well. A spot somebody dug out with a chair sitting in it is not a spot to take, and a crew that understands that gets remembered on the street for longer than the repair is.

    It also sets an expectation you cannot set on the phone. Winter work in the city runs long for reasons that have nothing to do with the pipe, and a video that says so plainly beats an apology on the invoice.

    In a finished bungalow basement, nobody can find the cleanout

    Owners here finished their own basements decades ago, and the access a plumber needs now sits behind paneling, a dropped ceiling and a bar somebody built in the seventies.

    The call starts badly because of it. A drain is backing up, the homeowner cannot say where the cleanout is, and nobody wants to hear on the first visit that something may have to come apart.

    Make the video that fixes that. Where the cleanout usually sits in a bungalow, where it tends to be in a two-flat, what the floor drain in the middle of the slab is connected to, and how the laundry tub fits into the picture.

    Ask people to go look while nothing is wrong. A homeowner who walks down on a Sunday and finds it has done the slowest part of your first visit for you, and they remember who told them to.

    Shoot it somewhere you control. Your own basement, the shop, a job where the ceiling is already open. The version filmed in a customer's finished basement is dark, cramped and full of somebody's belongings.

    Owners here keep asking what the pipe into the house is made of

    Chicago houses were built with lead water service lines for a very long time, and most owners cannot say what theirs is or where it comes through the wall.

    The question arrives constantly and usually gets answered with either a shrug or a pitch. There is a plain middle. Show where the line enters, what a coin scratch and a magnet tell somebody, and what the setup normally looks like in a bungalow against a two-flat.

    Be clear about what a replacement covers. The piece inside the building and the run out under the parkway are two different jobs, and an owner who does not know that will misread every quote they are handed.

    Keep the filter and flushing advice in the same video, because people want something to do this week. The shop that gives them that is the one they call when they decide to replace the line.

    Say who is even able to order the work. In an owner-occupied bungalow the decision belongs to one household. In a two-flat or a courtyard building the person asking you in the comments may be renting the unit and have no say over a service line at all, and answering as though they can hire you wastes their afternoon and yours.

    After a wet week the block decides what an overhead sewer does

    Flood protection here gets settled neighbor to neighbor in the days after a storm, and the version going around a street is rarely accurate.

    One neighbor had an overhead sewer conversion done years ago and stayed dry. Three did not. By the weekend everybody has a theory about why, and none of them called a plumber to check it.

    Take the subject seriously on camera. What an overhead conversion actually changes, what a backwater valve protects and what it does not, why an ejector pit comes with the deal, and where a sump pump fits into any of it.

    Keep prices out of it. What a crew finds once a bungalow floor is open moves the number enough that a figure in a caption turns into an argument in your inbox.

    The rest of running an account, cadence, who should be holding the phone, what to do when a thread turns bad, reads the same in Ohio as it does in Cook County, and we have written that half out once at /industries/plumbing/social-media.

    Questions we actually get

    Will showing the winter carry make us look slow?
    It does the opposite of what owners fear. The customer already knows a January call took longer than a June one; what they do not have is a reason, so they supply their own and it is usually unflattering. A clip of a crew parking down the block in Andersonville and carrying a machine through snow settles that before anybody reads an invoice.
    The cleanout question comes up every week in our comments. Is a whole video worth it?
    It is the one that gets saved. Basements here were finished by owners, so the access is behind paneling or a dropped ceiling and almost nobody has looked. A video showing where the cleanout usually sits in a bungalow and in a two-flat gives people a job to do on a Sunday afternoon, and the ones who go and find it remember who told them to.
    Should we post about lead service lines at all, or does that just scare people?
    It is already being discussed on your blocks whether you join in or not, and a lot of what circulates is wrong in ways that cost a homeowner money. Cover the part somebody can act on this week: where the line enters, what a scratch and a magnet show, and what a replacement covers inside the house against the run out under the parkway. Show the entry point in a bungalow and then in a two-flat, because they do not look alike and most of the confusion starts there.
    A storm flooded the North Side and missed the suburbs. Do we post the same thing everywhere?
    No. A combined sewer event covers a few square miles, not a metro. A post that reads as useful in Ravenswood on a Tuesday reads as fear selling in Naperville, where the week was fine. Write for the blocks that took water, name them, and let the rest of your area get the same explainer when it is their turn.
    A lot of our work is in Oak Park, Evanston and Berwyn. How do we show where we go?
    In the videos rather than in a bio nobody reads. Suburban homeowners in Skokie or Elmhurst genuinely do not know whether a company with a city address will come out, and a list of towns in a caption reads like a franchise. Say the town out loud when the job you are filming is in it, and over a season the coverage question stops getting asked.

    What is different here

    License numbers belong in advertising, as with the other trades. The more useful local variable is that water source, water chemistry and sewer versus septic service differ between neighboring municipalities, which changes which problems a plumber is actually called about and therefore what the page should be about.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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