Worth knowing
Worth knowing before you start marketing a contracting company
Most of what marketing brings a contractor is a phone call, and a call that rings out is a lead you paid for and handed 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 a phone on silent, the first job 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 fill the phone lines for days, and the companies that get those calls are the ones whose ads, pages and reviews were in place 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 is built backward from those peaks, with budgets that rise before the season and ease off during the shoulder months.
Emergency jobs versus planned projects
A burst pipe at midnight and a kitchen remodel are bought in 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. The account is split along that line: call-only ads and emergency pages for one, remodeling galleries, quote forms and follow-up email for the other, so neither budget is 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. Connecting call tracking and web forms to that software is the difference between reporting clicks and 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 moves accordingly.