What contractor marketing actually costs, and why nobody publishes a price

Every contractor asks it in the first two minutes: what does this cost. Every agency answers the same way, with a page that says “custom pricing” and a form. Some of that is evasion. Some of it is honest, and it is worth understanding which is which before you sit through four sales calls.

Why the number cannot be printed

A one-truck plumber in a county of forty thousand people and a twelve-truck shop competing in Phoenix are not the same job. Not because one deserves a discount, but because the work is different in kind. In the small county, the map pack has four competitors and a handful of searches a day; ranking is a matter of a clean listing, a few service pages and consistency. In Phoenix, the same result takes a page for every service in every suburb, a review engine that never stops, and paid search running underneath while the organic side catches up.

The same applies to your starting point. A company with a five year old website that already ranks needs a different first ninety days than one with a Facebook page and a phone number.

So the honest version of “it depends” is: it depends on how many people you are competing against, in how many towns, and how far behind you start.

Where a percentage of ad spend goes wrong

The most common pricing model in this industry is a management fee calculated as a percentage of what you spend on ads. It sounds fair. It aligns nothing.

Under that model, the agency’s income goes up when your ad budget goes up, and only when your ad budget goes up. Cutting a campaign that is not working costs the agency money. Shifting budget out of paid search and into content that will produce calls for years costs the agency money. Telling you that your ad spend is high enough and the problem is your booking rate costs the agency money.

None of that means every agency on that model is acting badly. It means you are paying them to give you advice that their invoice punishes.

A flat monthly fee agreed up front does not have that problem. What you spend on Google is what you spend on Google, and it lands in your account, in your name.

What actually moves the number

Four things, in order of how much they matter:

How many markets. One town is one set of pages, one Business Profile, one review flow. Six towns is six of everything, and the sixth is not cheaper than the first.

Which channels. Local SEO and content are labor now that pay later. Paid search and Local Services Ads produce calls in the first two weeks but stop the day you stop. Most contractors need both, in a proportion that depends on how urgently they need the phone to ring.

How much groundwork. A Business Profile with the wrong category, no service areas and eleven reviews needs weeks of work before any ranking effort has something to stand on. That is a real cost and it happens once.

Whether anyone answers. This is the one nobody quotes and the one that decides everything. If half your calls go to voicemail after five o’clock, more calls is not a plan, it is a bigger leak.

The questions that get you a straight answer

Ask these on the first call and you will learn more than any pricing page will tell you:

• Is the fee flat, or a percentage of what I spend on ads?
• Who owns the website, the domain, the ad account and the customer list if I leave?
• What is the first thing you would run for my market, and why that one before the others?
• How long before it moves, by channel?
• Line one of the monthly report: is it jobs booked, or impressions?

An agency that answers those in writing, before asking you for a card, is telling you something about how they work. One that needs a discovery call to say whether the fee is flat is telling you something too.