Good to know
Read this before marketing a contracting company
For a contractor, most of what marketing delivers is a phone call. Let it ring out and you've paid for a lead, then handed it to the next company on the list. Before any campaign starts, the team looks at who answers between seven in the morning and nine at night, what happens after hours, and how fast a web form gets a reply. If the answer is an owner in a crawl space with the phone on silent, the first fix is an answering service or a dispatcher, not a bigger budget.
Seasonality and the planning calendar
HVAC demand follows the weather. The first heat wave of summer and the first cold snap of fall jam the phone lines for days, and those calls go to companies whose ads, pages and reviews went live weeks earlier. Roofing runs on storm season and the insurance claims that follow it, landscaping on spring and fall cleanups, remodeling on the months before the holidays. The plan works backward from those peaks: budgets climb ahead of the season and ease off in the shoulder months.
Emergency jobs versus planned projects
People buy a midnight pipe repair and a kitchen remodel in very different ways. The emergency customer searches once, calls the first company with a visible phone number and never reads a blog post. The planned project goes through weeks of research, photo galleries, estimates and financing questions. So the account splits along that line. One side gets call-only ads and emergency pages, the other gets remodeling galleries, quote forms and follow-up email, and neither budget gets spent on the wrong kind of buyer.
Tracking leads to booked jobs
ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro and Jobber already know which calls turned into booked jobs and what each job was worth. Connect call tracking and web forms to that software, and you stop reporting clicks and start reporting booked jobs by source. Once the connection is in place, the monthly report can say which campaign booked replacements and which one booked only tune-ups, and the budget follows.