Morgul Marketing

    St. Louis, MO

    Getting a St. Louis plumbing name repeated past the end of the gangway

    Word travels here, but it travels short distances. Through a parish, a festival, a block of brick two families where people have lived a while. What a plumbing shop can put into that stream is decided almost entirely by the houses, and in this metro the houses are more alike than in most cities its size. Brick everywhere. City lots narrow enough that the trench runs between two buildings. Plaster over lath behind every wall a crew opens. A freeze that comes back in waves all winter instead of arriving once. Four things follow from that, and together they cover what a camera can get here and what a homeowner actually wants explained.

    The only camera position on a city lateral is the neighbor's gangway

    City lots here are narrow and the houses sit close, so the lateral runs down a gangway and there is no way to shoot the job from your customer's ground.

    A trench between two brick houses is the most useful footage a plumbing shop in this market can get, and getting it means standing on somebody else's property with their windows behind you.

    Ask before the machine arrives rather than after. A knock on the door, a plain explanation of what the camera is pointed at and a promise their house stays out of the shot is usually all it takes, and that neighbor is often your next estimate.

    In much of St. Louis County the problem inverts. Yards are wide, the lateral runs to the street, and the constraint becomes the municipality: whether a machine can sit on the right of way, and how long a trench can stay open. Ask the inspector on the job before you set up a tripod.

    Frame it wide once and close once. The wide shot proves the gangway really is that narrow, which a homeowner three streets over does not believe until they see it, and the close shot proves the pipe was as bad as you said it was.

    A pipe in a solid brick wall freezes where the same pipe in a frame house would not

    The brick housing stock here behaves differently in a cold snap, and it hands you a question set no national plumbing page bothers with.

    Supply lines run inside exterior masonry walls in a lot of older City and inner county houses, with no cavity and very little between the pipe and the cold.

    Freeze and thaw here runs in waves through the winter rather than as one bad night, so the same wall gets tested again and again, and a line that held in January can split in February.

    Film the specifics. Which walls to worry about in a brick two family, what an open cabinet door under a sink actually accomplishes, why the kitchen at the back of the house goes first.

    Then say what the repair costs in disruption rather than in money. Reaching a pipe inside a solid wall means opening it from the inside, and a homeowner who has heard that from a video is not hearing it for the first time from a technician standing in their kitchen.

    A repipe in a brick two family is a plaster job with pipe in the middle

    The pipe is the short part. What the homeowner is really deciding about is the plaster over lath on both sides of every wall your crew has to open.

    In this housing stock the stack and the supply runs sit inside interior walls finished in plaster over wood lath, which does not cut, patch or come back the way drywall does.

    So the video worth making is not the pipe going in. It is the wall before, the wall open and the wall closed up, with a plain sentence about who does the patching and whether that sits inside your number.

    Say what a second unit adds. Two kitchens stacked, two baths, somebody living on the other side of the ceiling, and a job that is easier to phase than to run in one week.

    The neighbors are the audience. A brick two family in Tower Grove has the same walls as one in University City, and an owner watching the patch go back in learns more about what a repipe means than any line on an estimate can tell them.

    Your name gets repeated at the parish festival before it gets repeated in an ad

    Local reputation in St. Louis moves through institutions rather than through channels, and the account has to reflect a company that is actually in those rooms.

    Parish festivals, school auctions and ball fields in Dogtown, The Hill, Soulard and out through Webster Groves and Kirkwood are where a contractor's name gets said out loud by somebody who is trusted.

    Post from those places when you are genuinely there. A tent at a festival, a sponsored jersey, a crew handing out water. Nobody wants a press release about it and everybody notices who shows up.

    The unit is smaller than your service area. A shop known at one parish is unknown three miles away, and St. Louis County holds a long list of small municipalities that each work the same way, so pick the handful you actually want to be known in.

    The parts of this that would read the same in Denver, how often to post, who should be filming, what to do about a thread that turns sour, are written out once at /industries/plumbing/social-media, which lets a page like this stay on the City and the county.

    Questions we actually get

    A lot of our work is in the Metro East. Does the Illinois side need its own content?
    It needs to be named, at least. Buyers in Belleville and Edwardsville can tell instantly whether a Missouri side shop actually crosses the river, and most of them assume not. You do not need a second account. You need videos filmed on that side, with the town said out loud, often enough that the question stops being asked.
    Do we need separate content for the City and the county?
    Not separate accounts, but do not blend the two into one voice. Locals hear the difference immediately, and a video that says the City over footage of a house that is clearly in Kirkwood costs you credibility. Name the place in each video, show both kinds of housing across the year, and say plainly which municipalities you serve and which you do not.
    Every winter somebody asks whether to leave a faucet dripping. What is the answer here?
    It depends where the pipe is, which is the part worth explaining. In a frame house the line usually sits in a cavity with insulation in front of it. In a solid brick wall there is no cavity, so the pipe is up against masonry that has been cold for a week and the answer changes. Show the wall rather than repeating advice written for a different kind of house.
    Customers blame the brand when a water heater dies early. Should we take that on?
    Yes, and it makes an easy video. Cut open a failed tank on camera, flush one that still works, hold up an aerator nobody has cleaned in years. Hard water shortens equipment life here and almost nobody explains it, so the owner concludes they bought a bad unit. Show the scale rather than describing it, because a photograph of what came out of a tank settles the question in a way a paragraph never does.
    Is an open trench too ugly to post?
    The trench is not what people are afraid of. The yard afterward is. Show the machine, the spoil pile, the plank over the gangway, and then show the same ground a week later with the walk relaid and the grass back. A homeowner deciding on a lateral replacement is trying to picture the end of it, and hardly anybody publishes that half.

    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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