Industries · Contractors & trades
Marketing run by someone who has held the tools.
Plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, flooring, renovations and painting. A decade of field experience behind the strategy — which is why the first questions are about your close rate, not your brand.
Figures from campaigns Mathew Brown has personally managed
A Tuesday, from the customer's side
07:20
The furnace stops
They search on a phone before they have had coffee.
07:23
Three numbers get called
In the order the map pack listed them.
07:24
Two go to voicemail
They do not leave a message. They call the third.
07:31
One books the job
It was rarely the best contractor. It was the reachable one.
- Years in the trades
- 10+Including behind the tools
- Average cost per lead
- $146Across trade campaigns
- Cost per issued appointment
- $423The number owners care about
- Leads per month
- 1,200+Sustained, in small markets
Figures from campaigns Mathew Brown has personally managed across the trades, not client results delivered by MAT under contract. The full breakdown is here.
What is different about marketing for a contractor?
The sale happens on a phone call or at a kitchen table, not on the website. So the marketing job is being found, being answered within minutes, and being followed up for a month. A contractor who replies in ten minutes routinely beats a better-marketed competitor who replies the next day.
That single fact reorders everything. Most agency proposals for contractors lead with brand, content and social presence. Those are not wrong, they are just fifth. The first four things are: can people find you when they search, does the phone get answered, does the quote get followed up, and can you say what a booked job costs.
The trades fluency here is not a marketing line. It changes which questions get asked in the first meeting — what your average ticket is, what your close rate is, whether your dispatcher can absorb more volume in August — and it means nobody has to explain why a furnace lead in July is worth less than one in October.
The report a trade business should get
Improving- Cost per lead
- $146tracked monthly
- Cost per issued appointment
- $423
- Marketing as % of net sales
- 15%
By trade
The economics are not the same in each one
- Plumbing
- Emergency work at 2am and planned replacements six weeks out are different campaigns with different economics. Running them as one is why cost per lead looks unstable.
- HVAC
- The most seasonal business in the trades. Budget has to move ahead of the weather, not with it — a heat wave means you are already late.
- Electrical
- Split between service calls, panel upgrades and new construction. Only two of those are worth advertising on, and it is rarely the third.
- Roofing
- Storm-driven demand, a competitive quote process and a buyer who will get three prices. Response speed decides more of it than the number on the quote.
- Flooring
- A showroom visit is the real conversion event. Campaigns should be measured on booked appointments, not on form fills.
- Renovations
- Long consideration windows and high ticket values. Follow-up over weeks matters more than lead volume ever will.
- Painting
- Low ticket, high volume, thin margins. Efficiency and scheduling density decide profitability more than lead cost does.
Running one campaign across every service a contractor offers is the most common structural mistake in this industry. It makes cost per lead meaningless, because a $180 drain call and a $14,000 bathroom are averaged into one number that describes neither.
How it works
Economics first, then response, then spend
Work out what a job is worth
Week 1Average ticket, close rate, and what you can afford to pay for a booked job at your margin. Everything downstream is set by this, and most contractors have never written it down.
Fix response and follow-up
Weeks 2–4Missed-call text-back, instant enquiry acknowledgement, and a quote follow-up sequence. Before any budget increase, because these three recover work you have already paid for.
Advertise the profitable services
Weeks 4–8Not everything you do. The two or three services with the best margin and the clearest search demand, each with its own landing page and its own cost-per-job target.
Report on cost per booked job
MonthlyOne page: cost per lead, cost per issued appointment, cost of net sales, and what changes next month. Delivered in language you would use on a job site.
Fit
Who we work with
This is a good fit if
- You are an owner-operated trade business, roughly $1M to $20M in revenue.
- You have capacity to take on more work, or a plan to add crews.
- Someone answers the phone during working hours and will act on an enquiry within the hour.
- You can tell us your average job value and roughly your close rate.
- You want one firm accountable for ads, site, follow-up and the phones underneath them.
This isn't the right fit if
- You are fully booked for the season and not looking to grow. Advertising into that just disappoints people.
- You want leads guaranteed at a fixed price per lead. That is a lead-broker product, and you would be competing with three others for the same homeowner.
- Nobody will track which quotes closed. Then no cost-per-job number can be trusted.
- You want the cheapest management fee available. We are not competing on that.
By vertical
Where your work sits
Each of these has its own page with the specifics — the sales cycle, what to measure, and where the money leaks in that particular business.
Construction
Six-figure tickets, months of research before the first call, and a bid process marketing has to survive.
Home improvement
Renovation and remodelling companies where the appointment, not the lead, is the thing worth counting.
Health services
Clinics and practices with booking constraints, privacy obligations and referral dynamics to respect.
Restaurants & hospitality
Repeat visits, delivery platforms and local search — where a Friday night is won or lost on a map listing.
Questions contractors ask
What makes marketing for contractors different?
The sale happens on a phone call or at a kitchen table, not on a website. So the marketing job is not persuasion — it is being found, being answered fast, and being followed up. A contractor who replies in ten minutes beats a better-marketed competitor who replies tomorrow.
Do you actually understand the trades?
Mathew spent over a decade around plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, flooring, renovations and painting, including working behind the tools. That is why the questions in the first meeting are about your close rate and your dispatch process rather than about your brand values.
What should a contractor spend on marketing?
Work backwards from a booked job. If a job is worth $2,000 at 30% margin and you close one in three quotes, you can afford a meaningful cost per lead. Percentage-of-revenue rules of thumb are a poor guide because job values differ so much between trades.
Google Ads or Local Services Ads?
Local Services Ads first for the trades Google covers, because they sit above search ads, charge per lead rather than per click, and carry the Google Guaranteed badge. Search ads alongside them for the services LSAs do not cover, and for anything with a longer consideration window.
How do I stop paying for leads outside my service area?
Negative keywords, location targeting set to presence rather than interest, and weekly search-term reviews. Most contractor accounts leak a meaningful share of budget to the wrong towns and to people searching for jobs rather than services.
Do reviews really matter that much?
For local visibility, yes — recency and response rate more than raw count. Steady weekly reviews beat a burst of thirty followed by silence. The reliable way to get them is an automated request when a job is marked complete, not a monthly manual chase.
We get plenty of leads but they are poor quality. Can you fix that?
Usually. Poor quality is normally a targeting or an offer problem — advertising a service you do not want, in an area you will not travel to, at a price point that attracts shoppers. We review actual call recordings rather than a dashboard quality score.
Further reading:automation for construction and trades ·SEO vs Google Ads for a local service business
We'll tell you what a booked job costs you now.
The free audit goes through your ads, your site, your search visibility and what happens to an enquiry at 9pm. Most contractors have never seen that number written down, and it is usually the finding that changes the plan.
You talk to Mathew.Not an account manager, and not a sales team.