Getting feedback has always been important for contractors and their customers. At one point, old-school paper surveys and reference sheets were all you needed. Nowadays, online reviews are an absolute must for any local service business. Not having enough Google reviews or a low review rating average can make or break success for plumbers in getting local leads.

But just getting reviews isn’t enough anymore for home service companies that want to maximize their online visibility.

Adding mini case studies to your online marketing presence can be a game-changer.

The limitations of online reviews for plumbers

While online reviews certainly should still be a priority in your marketing plan, they aren’t the only way to effectively grow your marketing presence.

Experiment and complete a Google search for your business name. Identify the pages that mention your name and show negative reviews. Those would be the best places to guide your happiest customers to dig you out of your negative review rut.

Unless another platform is super popular with your local community, your time is usually better spent getting Google reviews instead of actively getting other third-party reviews above and beyond what is absolutely necessary.

When it comes to first-party reviews on a website, they are better than nothing. However, many savvy potential customers dismiss anonymous reviews because they understand that those reviews aren’t “gated” and don’t require any specific sign-in or proof of use of a contractor.

What Are Mini Case Studies?

Just about every plumber with a website has a “gallery” page. At best, it's a single, continuous page with some subheadings to help break up the deluge of images that fill the page.

At worst, you've got a few pictures of toilets from the 1990s that load slowly like you're getting your Internet over dial-up.

These types of pages are almost not better than having nothing. Generally speaking, these are the slowest loading and likely amongst the least visited pages of a plumber's website.

Instead of a wall of images, a mini case study is like a report on how you've recently helped a customer.

A well-formatted mini-case study page should include:

• A collection of the best quality photos that exemplify this particular project;
• A brief description of the work completed;
• Bullet points to highlight the specific products and brands used to complete the project;
• A customer review, preferably complete with text, image, and video if possible; and
• An embedded map to show the neighborhood or general area where the work was completed.

Telling a story with your case study

The important thing when making a case study is to remember that you’re not preparing a clinical, lifeless description of the work you did.

You need to tell a story.

Stories have an introduction, a bit of drama in the middle and a resolution in the end.

Your story’s introduction should provide the key insight to a reader so that they understand what they’re getting into. Details about why you, as a plumber, knew to show up in the first place. Give a little background into the homeowners and what prompted their email or phone call with you. This introduction to your key characters includes telling a bit about the customer but also revealing yourself as the hero of the story.

The drama in the middle explains why they couldn’t fix the problem themselves, whether through DIY methods gone awry, other contractors who mishandled the situation, or a recognition that the job needed a professional to get done right.

It concludes with a resolution: the hero brings the story to a close by addressing the homeowner’s problems and saving the day.

If this were a fairy tale, the introduction would reveal the townspeople or the king and queen who needed help and the brave knight who visited the town. The middle drama would unveil the presence of a terrible dragon wreaking havoc upon the land. The resolution would show how the knight slays the dragon and saves the kingdom.

Since this is your story instead, the introduction would reveal the homeowners with slow and clogged drains. The middle drama would talk about how the homeowners tried their own DIY cleaning with store-bought chemicals but still couldn’t fix their drain problems. The resolution would reveal how your professional know-how and tools helped to complete a main drain cleanout to help the homeowners properly fix their slow drain problems.

The important thing when making a case study is to remember that you’re not preparing a clinical, lifeless description of the work you did. You need to tell a story.

Don’t forget that a good story includes pictures

Pictures of your work are a key part of telling your story online. Photos of your work vehicle pulled up to the property, you completing service and the happy homeowners at the end — select a few key photos that help you to tell your story and create more than just a wall of text for your website.

Why are mini case studies so good for my marketing?

Mini case studies are key for your online marketing for a variety of reasons. As a nearly endless source of content, this type of marketing output helps to expand your business presence and impress your potential customers.

• Well-optimized SEO targets;
• Perfectly shareable social media;
• Drives customers reviews; and
• Assists in potential client conversion.

Well-optimized SEO targets

When it comes to search engine optimization, you want to balance your optimization efforts between long-tail and short-tail targets.

Short-tail targets are shorter, typically much more popular search terms that a potential customer would search — like “plumber.”

Mini case studies are excellent examples of long-tail optimization. Because these mini case studies should specifically mention a physical location where the work was completed and the work itself, you’re effectively creating a long-tail optimized page.

For a New York state plumber, they may create a mini case study that focuses on “Poughkeepsie water heater replacement” — a less popular, but still potentially valuable target to capture local searchers.

Perfectly shareable social media

Mini-case studies are also very reusable. They are bite-sized pieces of content that are great for sharing on social media — either natively by copy-and-pasting your text and manually adding images or by sharing your case study link on your Facebook feeds.

Drives customers reviews

While you’re crafting your mini case studies, part of a good case study includes notes from the people you actually helped. That means you’ll need to ask for the review as part of your case study curation.

Directing your customer to Google to leave a review is beneficial to your business on that platform for the sake of local search engine optimization, and then you can get even more use out of that content by implementing it in your case study as well.

Assists in potential client conversion

Outside of the fact that it is great for SEO, good content for your social media presence, and a helpful way to keep you honest about getting more Google reviews — your potential clients get more value out of your mini case studies.

A prospective customer can check out your website, see these case studies, and identify with people whose problems you’ve solved. They can see themselves in the shoes of your past customers — and that means you’re demonstrating to them that you are, indeed, the expert that they’ve been looking for all this time.

Improve your online visibility, social media content library, review count and customer conversion by showcasing your past work

By taking a few minutes to prepare the right content for their websites and online marketing, plumbers have a nearly endless supply of marketing content highlighting their past projects.

Deploying that content then gives them the opportunity to earn more clicks on their website, gain more customers, and complete the cycle again.