Marketing ideas are not what plumbing and heating companies are short of. Execution is. The folder of half-written posts, the newsletter that stopped in March, the follow-up sequence that was going to get built in the slow season — that is where most plumbing marketing dies, and it dies from a lack of time, not a lack of ideas.
That is the honest case for using ChatGPT in a contracting business. It does not have better ideas than you do about your market. It removes the blank page, which is the thing that has been stopping you.
Below are 50 prompts written for plumbing, heating and air conditioning companies, grouped the way the work actually gets divided up: social, ads, website and search, email, follow-up, and sales. Copy them, replace the bracketed parts, and use what comes back as a first draft. Each section starts with the part that matters more than the prompt itself, which is knowing what a good answer looks like.
Read this before you use a single prompt
Four things separate contractors who get something useful out of this from contractors who generate a lot of text nobody reads.
- Give it your facts first. Paste in your service area, years in business, technician count, your three most profitable services, your actual prices and two real customer complaints. Every prompt below improves once the model knows those. Generic input is where the generic output comes from.
- Ask for a draft, not a decision. It can write ten headlines. It cannot tell you which service is worth advertising in your market, and it will confidently guess if you ask.
- Never let it invent specifics. Prices, response times, license numbers, guarantees, review counts, years in business. If a number goes out in your name, it has to come from your records. This is the one mistake that can cost you real money.
- Fix the plumbing before the posting. If your phone is answered by voicemail after 5pm, or your website takes eight seconds to load on a phone, 50 prompts will not help you. More visibility on top of a leaky funnel produces more wasted leads.
One habit worth building: keep a single document with your company facts and paste it above every prompt. It takes ten minutes once, and it is the difference between output you have to rewrite and output you can send.
Social media content (1-8)
Social is where contractors most often mistake activity for marketing. Posts do not generate emergency calls. What they do is make you look like an established local company at the moment a homeowner is checking you out, which is usually after they already have your name from a search or a neighbour.
So the test for a social prompt is not whether the caption is clever. It is whether the post requires a photo or a video from an actual job. Text-only posts about seasonal maintenance perform the way you would expect. Prompts one and four below are the two to start with, because both of them end with a shot list.
1. You are a marketing manager for a residential plumbing company in [city]. Write 10 Facebook post ideas aimed at homeowners aged 35-65 who own their home. For each, give the hook, the post copy under 80 words, and what photo or video we should shoot to go with it. No stock imagery ideas.
2. Write a week of Instagram captions promoting air conditioning tune-ups before summer in [city]. Vary the angle across the seven: cost of a breakdown, comfort, energy bill, warranty, indoor air quality, scheduling before the rush, and a customer story. Keep each under 50 words and end with a clear next step.
3. Write a LinkedIn post for the owner of a [city] heating and air conditioning company explaining why homeowners should schedule furnace maintenance now. Write it in first person, plain language, no marketing cliches, 150 words, and make one specific point most homeowners have not heard.
4. Suggest 15 short-form video ideas that show a plumbing crew's actual work in [city]. For each, give the opening line spoken to camera, what the camera should be pointing at, and the length. Assume it is filmed on a phone by a technician with no editing skill.
5. Create a seasonal heating and air conditioning maintenance checklist a homeowner in [city] can follow, broken into spring, summer, fall and winter. Write it as six carousel slides with a headline and one sentence each, then a final slide with the next step.
6. Write five light, family-friendly social posts about plumbing emergencies that a plumbing company in [city] can post without sounding unprofessional. Nothing crude, nothing that mocks customers.
7. Write a 45-second video script showing a day in the life of a heating and air conditioning technician in [city]. Structure it as timestamps with what is on screen and what is said. The purpose is recruiting good technicians, so make the work look skilled rather than easy.
8. Write a Facebook post that teaches homeowners in [city] the early signs of an air conditioning problem, before it fails. Give three signs, what each one usually means, and when it is worth calling. Do not exaggerate urgency.
Ad copy for Google, Facebook and Instagram (9-15)
Ad copy is the highest-leverage use of these prompts, and the easiest place to waste money. Across the Google Ads accounts we manage, the blended cost per lead over the last twelve months was $74.61, and the gap between the best and worst quartile of accounts was more than 2x for the same trades at similar budgets.
That gap is rarely the copy. It is the landing page, the call handling and whether the account is built around the services that make money. Write the ads with these prompts, then spend your remaining time on the page they land on. Ask for one angle per variation, and label the angles, so a test tells you something.
9. Write 15 Google Ads headlines, 30 characters or fewer, for emergency plumbing service in [city]. Cover speed, availability, licensing and price transparency. Label which of the four each one leans on so I can test one angle at a time.
10. Write a Facebook ad for a furnace tune-up special in [city] priced at [price]. Give me primary text under 125 words, five headline options, and the single image or video I should pair with it. The audience is homeowners who have never used us.
11. Write three distinct ad copy variations for tankless water heater installation in [city]: one led by long-term savings, one by endless hot water, one by space saved. Same offer, same length, genuinely different arguments.
12. Write five urgency-driven Google Ads headlines for air conditioning repair in [city] in July, without using false scarcity, fake countdowns or invented discounts. Urgency has to come from the homeowner's actual situation.
13. Write a Facebook ad targeting homeowners in [city] who need drain cleaning. Lead with the symptom a homeowner would recognize, not the service name. Include three primary text options at different lengths.
14. Write four benefit-focused Google Ads headlines for heating and air conditioning system replacement in [city], aimed at a homeowner whose system is 15 or more years old and still working. The job is to make replacing on their terms feel smarter than waiting for a failure.
15. Write retargeting ad copy for homeowners in [city] who visited our air conditioning repair page and did not call. Give three versions: one that answers a price worry, one that answers a trust worry, one that answers an availability worry. Say which objection each one handles.
Figures from our own managed accounts: 87 Google Ads accounts and $6.1M in managed spend over twelve months. See the full breakdown in our plumbing and HVAC marketing benchmarks, with the sample size next to every number.
Website and search content (16-23)
This is where the ideas compound. A social post is worth something for a day, and a service page that ranks is worth something every month for years. It is also the category where you are most likely to get bad output, because the model does not know your market's search demand and will happily suggest a location page for a town nobody searches from.
Use these to draft, then check demand before you build. The same applies to AI answers: when a homeowner asks ChatGPT for a plumber, it draws on pages that answer questions plainly and on what your Google Business Profile and reviews say about you. Content written to answer a real question is what gets cited.
16. Write a 750-character Google Business Profile description for a plumbing and heating company in [city] that has been in business since [year]. Lead with what we do and where, name our three main services in plain homeowner language, and avoid keyword stuffing. Return two versions.
17. List 30 long-tail search phrases a homeowner in [city] might type or say when their air conditioning stops working. Group them by intent: emergency now, researching a repair, pricing a replacement, and looking for maintenance.
18. Write the first 150 words of a water heater repair service page for a plumbing company in [city]. Answer what we fix, how fast we get there and what it costs to find out, before any sales language. Sixth-grade reading level.
19. Write 10 questions homeowners in [city] genuinely ask before a furnace installation, then answer each in 40-60 words in plain language. Include the two questions companies usually avoid answering: what it costs and how long it takes.
20. Suggest 10 blog topics on seasonal plumbing maintenance for homeowners in [city], based on what actually goes wrong there by season. For each, give the title, the search intent behind it and the one question the article must answer.
21. Write meta titles under 60 characters and meta descriptions under 155 characters for these plumbing and heating service pages: [paste your page list]. Each title must name the service and the city. No clickbait.
22. Write a 150-word About section for a family-owned plumbing company in [city], operating since [year], with [number] technicians. Build trust with specifics: who owns it, how long, what we will not do, how we handle a job that goes wrong. No superlatives.
23. We serve these areas: [list your service areas]. Propose a location page for each, with the page title, the one locally specific detail worth including, and a note on which of these areas do not have enough demand to justify a page.
Email marketing (24-30)
Your customer list is the most under-used asset in the business. It is people who have already paid you, already let you in the house, and already know the name. One reactivation campaign to that list costs nothing per send and does not compete in an auction against every other contractor in town.
We have watched database work produce five figures of booked revenue from a list a contractor already owned and had never emailed. That is the reason database reactivation sits inside our own process rather than at the edge of it. These prompts are the fastest route into it.
24. Write a five-email follow-up sequence for homeowners in [city] who received a quote for [job type] and did not book. Space them over 21 days. Each email under 120 words, one purpose per email, no discount before the fourth, and a plain reply-to-this tone.
25. Write a reactivation email to customers of a plumbing and heating company in [city] who have not booked service in two or more years. Acknowledge the gap without guilt, give them one good reason to book now, and make it easy to reply.
26. Write an email offering a winter plumbing inspection to past customers in [city] in December. It must fit around the holidays without being sentimental. Under 150 words.
27. Create a monthly email newsletter template for a plumbing and heating company in [city]: five recurring sections, what belongs in each, and how long each should be. Built to be filled in inside 30 minutes by a service manager, not a marketer.
28. Write an email offering a free air conditioning efficiency check in spring to homeowners in [city] who are existing customers. Be clear about what is checked, what it costs and what happens if we find a problem.
29. Write eight subject lines for an air conditioning replacement promotion to a homeowner list in [city]. No all caps, no exclamation points, no false urgency, under 45 characters. Then tell me which two you would test first and why.
30. Write a thank-you email to send after a completed [job type] in [city] that asks for a Google review. Ask once, make the link the only action, and give them an easy way to tell us privately instead if the job did not go well.
Customer follow-up and retention (31-37)
Follow-up is the least glamorous category here and the one with the shortest path to money. Review velocity is a good example. Across 63 client Google Business Profiles we pulled in August 2026, the median location added 11 new reviews in 90 days, while the bottom quarter added one or none. Almost nobody separates on star rating, because nearly everyone sits between 4.7 and 4.9. They separate on how many reviews arrive and how many get a reply.
These are the prompts to hand to whoever runs the office, because they are the ones that turn a completed job into the next job.
31. Write three appointment reminder text messages for a plumbing company in [city]: one sent the day before, one on the morning of, one when the technician is en route. Under 160 characters each, include what the homeowner needs to do to prepare.
32. Write a review request email from a technician's point of view after a [job type] in [city]. It should read like the person who was in the house wrote it. One ask, one link, no template language.
33. Write the text for a referral program flyer a technician can leave behind in [city]: what the customer gets, what their neighbour gets, and how to refer, in under 100 words. Assume the reward is [reward].
34. Write three text message promotions a plumbing company in [city] can send in its slow season. Each has to give the homeowner a reason to act now that is true in the slow season, not an invented deadline.
35. Write a 60-second phone script for calling past customers in [city] about [offer]. Include the opening line, what to say when they do not remember us, two objection responses, and how to end the call without pushing.
36. Write the description of a maintenance plan for repeat heating and air conditioning customers in [city] priced at [price] per month: what is included, what is not, what it saves them, and why it is worth it if nothing breaks.
37. Write three thank-you card messages for customers in [city] who referred a friend. Handwritten length, under 40 words, no company jargon.
Sales and marketing strategy (38-50)
The largest category, and the one that most directly touches revenue. A marketing budget is wasted at the point where a call is answered badly, so the phone script in prompt 38 is worth more to most contractors than anything in the social section.
Two of these are deliberately written so the model cannot flatter you. The comparison table asks for criteria a homeowner can verify rather than criteria you win on, and the energy-bill outline asks for impact order rather than sales order. Both are more persuasive than the version that stacks the deck, and both are the kind of page AI search engines cite.
38. Write a phone script for the person answering calls at a plumbing company in [city]: the greeting, the five questions to ask in order, how to give a price range without quoting the job, and how to book the appointment before hanging up. Include what to say when the caller only wants a price.
39. Write a two-minute in-home pitch for a heating and air conditioning maintenance plan at [price] per month, delivered by a technician who has just finished a repair. It must not sound like a sales script, and it has to be honest about what the plan does not cover.
40. Write a 30-second introduction for the owner of a plumbing and heating company in [city] to use at a chamber of commerce or trade event. Make it specific enough that someone remembers what we do a week later.
41. Write a proposal template for a commercial heating and air conditioning installation over [dollar amount]: the sections in order, what belongs in each, and where to put the two things that win these jobs, which are the timeline and who is accountable.
42. Suggest 10 seasonal promotions for a plumbing and heating company in [city] that fill the schedule in the slow weeks without discounting core service work. For each, give the offer, the month, and who it should go to.
43. Build a comparison table a homeowner in [city] can use to evaluate three plumbing companies fairly: the criteria that actually predict a good outcome, and how a homeowner can verify each one. Do not write it so that we automatically win.
44. Write a 900-word blog post explaining what 24/7 emergency service really means for a homeowner in [city]: what happens when they call at 2am, what it costs, and what questions to ask a company that claims to offer it.
45. Give 10 title options for a downloadable homeowner's plumbing maintenance checklist for [city], and for the strongest one, an outline of what the checklist contains, by season, on a single page.
46. Write a 30-second YouTube ad script for a plumbing and heating company in [city]. Give the first five words spoken, what is on screen every five seconds, and the closing line. Assume the viewer can skip after five seconds.
47. Write a follow-up email to send the day after an in-home estimate for [job type] in [city]. Restate what we recommended and why, give the price, name the one thing they said mattered most, and make booking a single click.
48. Write replies to these Google reviews: [paste 5 reviews, good and bad]. Each under 60 words, no template phrasing, and in the negative ones, take responsibility without admitting to something that did not happen.
49. Write a blog outline for five ways a homeowner in [city] can lower their energy bill this winter. Order the five by actual impact, not by what is easiest for us to sell, and note which one needs a professional.
50. Write a press release announcing that a plumbing and heating company in [city] has added [new service or location]. Follow standard press release structure, include a quote from the owner, and give a local editor a reason to care.
Where ChatGPT will not help you
Being straight about the limits is the difference between a useful tool and an expensive distraction.
- It does not know your market. Search demand, what competitors charge, which suburbs are worth serving. It will produce a confident answer with no data behind it. Get those from your own numbers.
- It cannot fix your Google Business Profile. Categories, service areas, review velocity and photos are the largest single source of contractor phone calls in our data, at 43% of tracked calls in the peak month, and none of it is a writing task.
- It will not make a slow site fast or a bad form convert. Conversion is a build problem.
- It cannot answer your phone. The most expensive leak in most contracting businesses is a missed or badly handled call, and no amount of content changes that.
- It has no accountability. It does not notice when leads drop 30% in a month, and it will not tell you why.
Used honestly, that list is the argument for using these prompts on the work they are actually good at: getting a first draft written this week instead of next quarter.
Common questions
No. Google's guidance is about whether content is helpful and original, not about how it was produced. What gets penalized in practice is thin, duplicated pages that answer nothing, which is exactly what you get if you publish raw output. Edit it, add what only you know, and check every fact.
Prompt 38, the phone script, then prompt 24, the quote follow-up sequence. Both act on demand you are already paying for. Content and social can wait a week.
Not for these. The free version handles them. What matters far more is how much of your own information you paste in before you ask.
Feed it specifics it could not have guessed: a job that went wrong and how you fixed it, what you refuse to do, your actual guarantee, the two questions you get on every estimate. Sameness comes from empty input.
No. These prompts help you produce the assets faster. Whether homeowners see them depends on your Google Business Profile, your rankings, your ad accounts and your site. That is the system these ideas sit inside.
Skip the copy and paste
We built these prompts into a free tool inside the Growth Training Library. Enter your company, city and trade once, and every prompt fills itself in, ready to copy one at a time or all at once.
It comes with the rest of the library: Josh Nelson's book How to Triple Your Sales by Getting Your Digital Marketing Right, 10 recorded workshops, a keyword research tool, the Marketing Plan Builder and a Google Business Profile action plan. Delivered by email, instantly.
