Louisville, KY

What a Louisville plumbing feed should be doing in the months before May

A plumbing feed is easy to start and hard to point at anything. Most shops in this metro end up posting truck photos and a coupon, then wonder why the account never turns into work. Louisville hands you better material than that. The calendar gives you one stretch of the year when the whole town looks hard at the condition of its house. The state line runs through the middle of your service area. The older neighborhoods are full of houses whose plumbing behaves in ways nobody has bothered to explain on video. And a large part of this town is awake at hours another city is not. Here is how we would use all four.

April is the month this town looks hard at its guest bathroom

Hosting drives more planned plumbing work here than any advertisement does, and the weeks before the first Saturday in May are the only ones when a homeowner will fix something that has not broken yet.

Houses across Louisville Metro fill with guests in the spring. Spare bathrooms get used for the first time in months, disposals get tested, and a water heater that was fine for two people has to cover six showers in a morning.

Post into that. What to check in a guest bath nobody has run since fall, what happens to a slow drain when four more people use it, whether the shutoff under that sink still turns.

Then accept that the week itself is closed to you. Traffic, road closures and a house full of visitors mean almost nobody is letting a crew in, so planned work either lands before it or waits until the middle of May.

Say that in March, out loud. A homeowner who knows the crews disappear for that stretch books earlier, and the shops that never mention it spend the last week of April turning down work they could have had in February.

Name the county at the top of the video, because the answer changes a few miles away

Every explainer you film in this metro is right in one jurisdiction and possibly wrong within a short drive, which is a production problem before it is a marketing one.

Louisville Metro and Jefferson County run as a merged government. Oldham County, Bullitt County and Shelby County do not. Cross the Ohio River and you are in Clark County or Floyd County under a different state entirely.

So any video touching inspection, backflow, venting or who is allowed to do a piece of work has to name where it applies in the first sentence. A video that hedges every claim teaches nobody anything.

When the difference actually matters, shoot the explainer twice. One version for the Kentucky side, one for Southern Indiana, both short. It costs ten extra minutes and it stops a New Albany homeowner from acting on something that governs a house in the Highlands.

Licensing is the version of this that costs you money. If your crews work the Kentucky side only, say so in the video rather than in a footer, because a Jeffersonville caller who watched three of your explainers before dialing is going to be annoyed with you and not with the river.

A shotgun house runs every fixture into one line, so one clog stops the house

The older neighborhoods here are full of houses where the kitchen, the bath and the laundry sit on a single run, which changes the job and the video with it.

In a shotgun house in Germantown or Butchertown the rooms are in a row and so is the plumbing. A blockage near the back does not slow one fixture down, it takes the whole house out at once.

The reason to explain it on camera is the waiting. It changes what a homeowner should do in the meantime. Which fixture to stop using, why running the washer makes it worse, where the water comes up first.

It changes the repair as well. There is no second run to work around, so the crew is in the middle of the house all day and the owner deserves to hear what that looks like before agreeing to it.

Film the same job in a postwar house out toward Jeffersontown or Fern Creek for contrast. Two branches, two options, and a viewer learns which of those houses is theirs.

Publish the overnight rate before somebody argues about it at two in the morning

A metro built on air freight and warehouse shifts calls plumbers at hours another market does not, and most disputes in this trade are really about what the call cost after ten.

Shift work is ordinary here, so the overnight call is not an outlier on your board. Neither is the customer who agreed to a rate at two in the morning and reconsidered by lunch.

Get ahead of it on camera. Explain how after-hours pricing works at your shop, what a trip charge covers, and when waiting until morning is the honest advice. Owners are afraid this video costs them calls. It mostly costs them arguments.

Your inbox needs the same decision. A message at three in the morning is a service call rather than a comment, so settle in advance who sees it and what the automatic reply tells that person to do.

The rest of it, how often to post, who should be filming, what to do with a thread that turns sour, works the same in Kentuckiana as it does anywhere else, and we have set that part out once at /industries/plumbing/social-media.

Questions we actually get

A lot of our customers moved here for a warehouse job. Does that change what we post?: It changes where you start. Somebody who arrived a year ago for a night shift has no neighbor to ask and no idea that the house they just bought in Okolona sits under different rules than the place they rented in Clarksville. Explain the metro alongside the trade. Everyone else reads it as generous and to a new arrival it is genuinely news.
Should we make separate accounts for Kentucky and Southern Indiana?: Usually not. Two accounts means twice the work and half the momentum, and most shops cannot keep one going. Run a single account and be specific inside it, with videos that name the county they apply to and a plain statement of where your trucks go. Separate accounts make sense only if you have separate brands or genuinely separate crews on each side of the river.
What should we post during the first week of May?: Almost nothing new, and nothing with an offer attached. The town is saturated that week and a plumbing post is not what anybody is looking at. If your crews are running, one plain note about which calls you can still take is enough. The real material belonged to the run-up, which is where the attention was anyway.
We also serve Oldham and Bullitt counties. Do those buyers want the same content?: The same trade against a different house. Metro sends you century-old stock in Old Louisville and the Highlands. Out in Oldham County and Bullitt County you get newer builds, some on a well and a septic system, where a video about a city water shutoff means nothing at all. Alternate deliberately across the year instead of assuming one house type covers the market.
A competitor is posting prices. Should we?: Publish what you can stand behind. A trip charge, an overnight rate or a flat diagnostic fee are safe and they settle the argument before it starts. Prices for repipes, sewer work or water heater swaps move with what a crew finds once a wall is open in an Old Louisville house, and a number in a caption turns into a fight on the job. Explain what drives the range instead.

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.

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Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

Talk to us about social media for plumbing companies in Louisville

Tell us what you are working with and we will say what we would do first, and what we would leave alone. A real answer, not a pitch deck.