Morgul Marketing

    Plumbing content for thin air, moving soil and an early freeze

    A plumbing feed gets made here under conditions most marketing advice never considers. The air is thin enough that a water heater is set up differently from the one in the video a homeowner just watched. The ground along the Front Range swells and shrinks with moisture, so the yard you left in April is not the yard anyone sees in July. And the fall stretch when a crew touches the most houses in this metro is the same stretch when nobody has a free hand for a phone. Build the content around those three facts and a Denver shop ends up with a feed that could not have been made in fifteen other cities.

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    Batch the winter clips in August, because the blowout stretch has no spare hands

    Sprinkler winterization compresses into a few weeks here, and every one of them is booked before the first hard freeze arrives.

    Irrigation has to be cleared before the ground and the backflow freeze, and at this elevation that deadline lands earlier than most of the country expects. From late summer until the first cold night a crew is in a new yard before the last one has finished draining.

    Whatever you plan to publish in November has to exist before that stretch starts. August is slow enough to shoot on purpose: the hose bib on a north wall, the crawl space vent, the shutoff nobody in the house can find, the manifold in the basement.

    Shoot the indoor material in the same batch. A utility room looks the same in any month, so a clip filmed in shirtsleeves plays fine on an evening when the wind is coming down off the foothills.

    Keep the batch loose. You are not producing a series, you are stocking a shelf for the weeks when the only thing anyone in the shop can do is drive.

    A water heater flue a mile up does not match the video they watched

    Denver homeowners research appliances on national video, and thinner air changes exactly the parts those videos skip.

    Combustion needs air and there is less of it here. Draft, venting and how an appliance is set up follow from that, which is why a walkthrough filmed at sea level can leave a homeowner in Congress Park holding confident wrong ideas about their own basement.

    A Denver shop therefore has an unusual content job. You are not explaining a subject from scratch. You are correcting something the viewer already trusts, and doing it without making them feel foolish for having watched it.

    Stay on what altitude changes. Why draft behaves the way it does up here, what happens when an appliance gets swapped in without anybody thinking about air, what you look at in the first two minutes of a quote.

    An older house does the teaching for you. A furnace room in Capitol Hill with a heater, a boiler and a chimney that have all shared a flue at some point in their history explains more in one shot than a diagram ever will.

    Dry air puts a plumber on two water lines nobody counts as plumbing

    Low humidity is ordinary at this altitude, and most of the equipment people use to deal with it is fed by a pipe you installed.

    A whole house humidifier runs on a small supply line and a drain, and it fails in ways the homeowner reads as a humidifier problem. A swamp cooler is the same story: a supply, a float, a bleed line and a shutdown nobody remembers.

    Neither is exotic to you and both are invisible to the public as plumbing. A short explainer on where those lines come from and what a Denver winter does to them is content almost nobody in the trade bothers to make.

    Put the shutdown side in the same batch. An evaporative cooler line left charged into November is a burst waiting for a cold night, and the shop that showed the valve in September gets the call in December.

    Leave the national maintenance advice about controlling humidity alone. It was written for a humid market and a homeowner in Arvada can tell within a sentence that it was written for somewhere else.

    Ground that keeps moving turns one job into two photographs a season apart

    Front Range soil swells and shrinks with moisture, so a finished yard is only finished for a while.

    Bentonite rich soil takes on water and pushes, then dries and drops. Buried pipe rides that movement, which is why offset joints and bellied lines are ordinary findings here rather than rare ones, and why a repair has a second chapter.

    It changes what a before and after can honestly show. The patch you photograph on the last day is not what that lawn or that walk looks like after a wet spring, and the shot worth publishing is usually the later one.

    Going back is also a reason to be in the driveway again. A Wash Park owner watching you re-level a patch that settled over the winter is a better story than anything filmed on the day of the repair, and it is a story a stranger cannot fake.

    Everything that happens after the footage exists, from where to put it to what deserves money behind it, works the same in Jefferson County as it does anywhere else in the country, and we have written that part out on our plumbing social media page.

    Questions we get

    Nobody in the shop has a free minute between Labor Day and the first freeze. When are we supposed to film?
    In August, before the blowout stretch starts. Indoor material can be shot any month because a utility room does not have a season, so the honest plan is to build a small shelf of clips while the calendar is still soft and spend the fall driving. A plan that assumes spare afternoons in October is a plan that stops in October.
    Our sewer camera clips all look the same. What else is there to show?
    The yard around them. On ground that moves, the interesting part is not the monitor, it is the offset joint and what the surface above it was doing beforehand, and then the same address after a wet spring. A camera clip with no context is a dark tube. A camera clip with a settled walk over it is a story a Littleton homeowner recognizes from their own house.
    Do we need different content for Aurora and for Castle Rock?
    Write for the system rather than for the town. An older bungalow with a cast iron stack and a newer Douglas County build with a manifold in the basement are different subjects, and the neighborhood name mostly tells people you actually drive there. Denver being one consolidated city and county while everything around it is a separate county matters far less to a viewer than whether the pipe in the video looks like theirs.
    Hail week takes over every local feed. Should we be posting into that?
    Mostly no. That week belongs to roofers and to the exterior trades, and a plumbing post gets buried under it. The one thing worth saying is what a hail day does to the equipment on a roof deck or the exterior lines feeding it, because a beaten up swamp cooler cabinet is a plumbing problem that arrives looking like storm damage.
    Our best clip is an evaporative cooler shutdown. Nobody outside a dry market would understand it. Is that a problem?
    It is the point. A shutdown that only makes sense at this altitude and in this humidity is one nobody in a wetter market has bothered to film. Date it carefully, though. A cooler line left charged past the first hard night splits, and along the Front Range that night lands earlier than the calendar most equipment manuals were written around, so the clip has to be out in September rather than whenever a national maintenance list says to start thinking about winter.

    Rules that affect your marketing

    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. Updated .

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