The contractor marketing agency that knows your trade is not generic.
Search, ads and websites for contractors. The word covers a dozen businesses with different customers, different urgency and different economics, and the plan should reflect which one you actually run.
4.9 on Google30+ verified reviews
Contractor is not a business model. It is a category.
A plumber and a remodeler share a truck and a license and almost nothing else. One is sold in ninety seconds to somebody in a crisis, the other over nine months to a couple at a kitchen table. Marketing built for the average of those serves neither.
Urgency
Emergency trades are won on proximity, hours and reviews, almost entirely off your website. Planned trades are won on depth, photography and honest pricing, almost entirely on it. Where your work sits on that line decides where every dollar should go.
Ticket size
A four hundred dollar service call and a forty thousand dollar project justify completely different acquisition costs and completely different patience. Applying the same cost per lead target across both is the most common budgeting error we inherit.
Repeat rate
Some trades see a customer once a decade. Others see them twice a year on an agreement. That single difference changes whether the money belongs in acquisition or in retention, and most contractor marketing ignores it entirely.
Everything below is organised by trade for that reason. The shared parts are real, and we reuse them. The parts that differ are the parts that decide whether the plan works.
What every trade does share
Four things hold true whether you install furnaces or finish basements, and they are where we start with anybody.
The profile matters more than the website
For most local trades the map pack produces more calls than organic listings do, and a meaningful share of those calls never touch your site at all. Contractors who measure only website sessions consistently undercount what search produced and then cut the channel that was working.
Speed is a conversion feature
Every trade has customers loading a page on a phone in a bad spot: a basement, a driveway, a job site. A page that needs four seconds and three web fonts loses work in every category we have ever measured.
Publishing numbers beats hiding them
Ranges, not quotes. Every trade resists this and in every trade the contractors who did it convert better, because the alternative is a homeowner assuming the worst and calling somebody else to check.
Reviews are a ranking system
Volume, recency and wording all feed local results and all feed the human comparing three names. A steady trickle beats a burst, and the trades that close jobs same day have a structural advantage they usually waste.
A fifth thing is true and less comfortable: most contractors are buying leads when they should be fixing conversion. If half your quotes never get followed up, doubling the leads doubles the waste rather than the revenue. We look at that ratio before recommending a budget, because raising spend against a leaky process is the easiest way for an agency to look busy while nothing improves.
Beyond those four, the honest answer is that it depends on the trade. So pick yours.
Pick your trade
HVAC
Two demand spikes a year and ten quiet months between them.
Plumbing
The tightest proximity radius in the trades, and the shortest decision.
Roofing
Demand arrives as weather events, not as a season.
Remodeling
Nine months of consideration and one weekend of deciding.
Electrical
Four different buyers sharing one phone number.
Garage doors
One cold week that books a large share of the winter.
Auto glass
Competing against national chains, and where they are thin.
There is one more thing worth saying plainly, because it decides whether any of this works. Marketing cannot fix a business that does not answer its phone, does not follow up on quotes, and does not ask for reviews. We have watched good campaigns fail against all three, and the failure looks exactly like a marketing failure from the outside. Before we take money from a contractor we look at what happens after the lead arrives, and if that is the actual problem we will say so rather than sell you traffic that will land in the same hole. It is a short conversation and it has cost us work more than once.
Not listed? We have almost certainly built for something close to it. The four shared truths above still apply, and the rest we work out from how your customers actually buy. Start with search, the site, or what it costs.
Get your free growth plan.
A free website mockup, a 60-point audit of your current marketing, and a custom growth plan built for your market. No obligation. No pushy sales call.