Andrew Durrans was interviewed by ZB's Heather Du Plessis-Allan about plumbing matters. For a few days afterwards, he was rung by other plumbers, wanting to know if he really did advertise in print, as he'd said on the radio.
After all, print is dead, right? The whole world is going digital. At least, that's what Durrans discovered much of his competition think.
"I happened to mention that we were getting a lot of action from our print advertising with Yellow," Durrans, director of the Auckland Plumbers Group, says. "For the next three or four days, other plumbers were calling me and asking whether it was true."
The print vehicle is the Yellow directory, still very much in evidence after many years and counted as essential for his business by Durrans. It's not the only marketing the group undertakes with Yellow but, as he explains, it is the most effective.
"We've been with Yellow for years and in the last 5 years or so they have morphed into a marketing agency that specialises in digital, print and other forms of innovation. I believe strongly in having good relationships with customers and suppliers – so we work very closely with Yellow on our marketing."
What started a few years back as a pretty simple print advertising campaign with Yellow has now developed to include many aspects of marketing - Print, Google Ads, GDN, SEO, Website Blogs, Landing Page Optimisation, etc. Durrans meets with the team at Yellow on a monthly basis and monitors their marketing activity in an ever-changing market.
"We use unique telephone numbers when we list in the Yellow directory," he says. "So when we get a call on one of those numbers, we know where it has come from. Because, we can track it all, I can tell you that we get fewer calls per dollar from Google Ads than we do from Yellow. We are in no doubt where we get our best return on investment from."
Auckland Plumbers Group have Auckland central, north, east, west and south as their geographical market. Their services include all forms of everyday and emergency plumbing, gas fitting, drainlaying, drain unblocking, hot water and roofing, focusing on maintenance rather than the new construction side.
"So a lot of our customers are homeowners," he says, "and more likely to use the Yellow directory – and they do. Obviously younger people tend to use more modern methods but homeowners tend to be older people, by definition – and I want them to see our brand in there.
"Of course we use digital too; but I think there are many people who feel, well, a bit bombarded by digital ads. Only the other day, I decided to turn my email off for half a day. When I switched it on again, there were 67 emails waiting for me – and half of them were ads for things I didn't need nor want."
Durrans has owned Auckland Plumbers Group for nine years, during which time he has built the business up significantly. When he took over, the company had four plumbers on the road, servicing customers: "Now we have 13 on the road and support team in the office (in Onehunga).
"When people ask where our offices are, I say we have 13 of them – and they are always in different places. Plumbers simply don't need to be in the office; all the information they need and which comes from their job is transferred digitally, so we've really embraced the digital age that way as well."
Yellow is focusing on SMEs (small-to-medium enterprises), the powerhouses of our economy; 97 per cent of all New Zealand businesses have 20 employees or less and those 480,000 SMEs provide employment for roughly a third of all Kiwis and represent about 29 per cent of our GDP.
They are also some of the hardest hit by the Covid-19 crisis – and Durrans says Auckland Plumbers Group had had to withstand their business dropping to 25 per cent of normal volume.
"It was a really, really hard time but we got through it by pulling the team together and we all made sacrifices; everyone gave at least a little – and we came out of the other side with this strong commitment to each other and the company."
Because only 'essential' jobs could be undertaken during lockdown, the company had a long list of jobs for when the doors opened again and, with the input from Yellow, they have been busy ever since.