Marketing for Contractors: What Works and What Wastes Money

Contractors get sold marketing harder than almost any other kind of small business. Somebody always has a spot open in your area, a package that guarantees leads, or a price low enough that it seems worth trying once. Very little of it arrives with an explanation of how the work is supposed to show up.

This is the companion to our article on SEO for contractors, which covers the search half in detail. This one is the wider question: where trades work actually comes from, what deserves the first dollar, and which channels quietly eat a budget without ever producing a job. It comes from running marketing and search for trades businesses in Burlington and Camden County, including a remodeling contractor in Marlton whose site we still support.

First, find out where your work already comes from

Most contractors cannot answer this with any precision, and every decision below depends on it. You do not need software. You need one place, a notebook or a whiteboard in the office, where every single inquiry gets a line: the date, the job, and how they found you.

Ask two questions rather than one, because the honest answer is usually two things. Who told you about us, and how did you get our number. A homeowner will say "Google" when what happened is that a neighbor mentioned your name and then they searched for it. Those are completely different facts. The first says your referral engine is working. The second says your profile is doing its job of catching the name once it is spoken. Treat them as one and you will fund the wrong thing.

Give it ninety days. Patterns show up much faster than people expect, and they are usually uncomfortable: most of the work comes from a small number of sources, and at least one line item you pay for every month will have produced nothing.

The channel contractors underrate most is the phone, including after hours

Before you spend anything on getting found, deal with what happens when you already are. A missed call from someone with a burst pipe is not a missed call, it is a job that went to whoever answered next.

The best evidence on this is not from the trades. A 2011 Harvard Business Review study looked at more than a million sales inquiries across forty-two US companies. Firms that got in touch within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to reach a real conversation with a decision maker as firms that answered an hour later, and more than sixty times as likely as firms that waited a day. Most of those companies were selling to households rather than to other businesses, which is nearer your situation than it sounds, but it was not a study of the trades and the figures are fifteen years old. Take the multiple as a direction rather than a promise. The mechanism is the one you already know from your own callbacks. The homeowner is contacting three people, and the first one who picks up starts the conversation with an advantage nobody else can buy.

What that means in practice is unglamorous. Somebody answers during working hours, even if that somebody is an answering service that takes a name, a number and a description. Anything that arrives as a form or a text gets a reply the same day, not on the weekend. If you are under a sink and cannot talk, a text that says you will call at five o'clock holds the job better than silence does.

The same applies at the quoting stage, and it is where more work is lost than most contractors realize. A quote that arrives while the homeowner still cares beats a cheaper one that arrives eight days later, when they have already met somebody they liked.

What actually works, roughly in order of return

Ordered by what a dollar tends to return for a small trades business, not by what is most fun to buy.

The customers you already have. The cheapest work you will ever win comes from people who have already paid you once and were happy. Almost no contractor does anything with this list. You do not need a newsletter. You need a reason to make contact once or twice a year that is genuinely useful: a note before the season when their kind of job gets booked out, a reminder about the thing you told them to keep an eye on, a message when you are working on their street anyway. Referrals come out of the same list, and they arrive pre-sold in a way no advertisement can match.

Your Google Business Profile. For local service searches the map results sit above the organic listings, the profile is free, and it can be improved without touching your website. That makes it the highest return per hour available to you. We cover exactly what to fill in and in what order in the contractor SEO article and on our local SEO page, so it is enough to say here that it comes before anything you pay for.

Reviews, asked the same way on every job. Reviews work twice, once on where you rank in the map results and once on whether the person reading them picks up the phone, which is why they are worth more than anything you can pay for. There is a right way and a wrong way to collect them, and the wrong way costs you the reviews you already have, so the method is written out in full after this list.

Photographs of your own finished work. Trades are one of the few industries where you manufacture marketing material simply by doing the job. Before and after shots, taken in landscape with the lights on, cost two minutes per job and give you something for the profile, the service pages and every conversation with a hesitant homeowner. Stock photography of a kitchen nobody has stood in does none of that.

Local Services Ads, once your phone is covered. What earns them a place on this list is the vetting rather than the placement. Google will not issue the badge until it has run its checks on the business, which is trust you cannot fake and a competitor cannot pick up in a week. What that badge is called now, and what a lead actually costs you, are worth a section of their own.

Signage, on the truck and at the job. Unfashionable and still effective, because trades work clusters. Neighbors watch a dumpster appear and a crew arrive, and the sign in the front yard of a house you are already working on reaches exactly the people whose houses are the same age with the same problems.

How to get more Google reviews as a contractor

Ask on every finished job, the same way each time, then text that customer your profile's own review link so they write it on their own phone. That is the whole method. Volume comes from asking consistently rather than cleverly.

Ask everybody, not the ones who seemed pleased. Screening by who looks happy is review gating, and Google has banned it since 2018. It also protects your average rather than threatening it. Across four large online retailers, customers who were prompted rated up to half a star higher than the ones who reviewed unasked, because the person who volunteers unprompted is disproportionately the angry one. That is retail data rather than roofing, so take the half star as a direction rather than a promise, but the bias behind it does not change by trade.

Do not hand over your own phone with the review page open. It is signed into your Google account, so either the review posts as you, which is a fake review, or your customer has to sign into Google on a stranger's device. Generate the link and the QR code once, at a desk, from Read reviews and then Get more reviews.

The rest is what not to do. No incentive of any kind, not a discount, a gift card or a drawing, and not for an honest review either, because the ban covers any review at all. No review targets or per-review bonuses for the crew, which is a quota with money on it and is what pushes somebody into asking only the happy customers or writing the reviews themselves. No reviews from staff, subcontractors or family. Google can pause new reviews on your profile, remove the ones you already have, and post a banner saying fake reviews were taken down.

Reply to the negative ones, briefly, without naming the customer or the job, and never make a refund conditional on a review coming down. Replying earns you more reviews as well. Hotels that started answering theirs went on to receive twelve percent more of them and gained about a tenth of a star. Hotel data again, but the mechanism is the one you want, because people stop leaving throwaway one-liners once they can see somebody reads them.

Local Services Ads, and what happened to Google Guaranteed

Local Services Ads are pay per lead rather than pay per click, and when they run they sit above the text ads and the map results. The badge on them is now called Google Verified. It replaced Google Guaranteed in October 2025, along with Google Screened and License Verified by Google, and the money-back guarantee went with it. If your site or your truck still says Google Guaranteed, take it down, because that program no longer exists.

Google vets the business before it issues the badge: business registration, and your license and insurance where your category and your state require them. In the urgent trades, garage doors, locksmiths, HVAC, plumbing and electrical among them, the whole field crew is screened rather than only the owner, subcontractors included. Allow three or four weeks. Ads can start running before the badge lands, on preliminary checks alone, and they rank below verified providers until the rest clears.

You are billed per valid lead, which means an answered call, a voicemail, a text or a booking request. Manual disputes ended in 2024. There is a Rate this lead survey now and automatic credits the system decides, so you can flag a bad lead but you cannot ask for the money back. Wrong job type and wrong service area are no longer credited, and neither is a price shopper or somebody who went quiet after you called back. Keep the service area tight, because the leads you would most want refunded are exactly the ones already written off.

Google does not run a lead marketplace, and that is the structural difference from Angi and Thumbtack. A phone lead is a call the homeowner placed to the forwarding number on your ad, and a booking is an appointment made with you, so neither is an inquiry sold on to anybody else. Message leads are the exception. Since November 2025 a homeowner can message several contractors in one action, and each of you is charged, though the message is labeled to say they contacted multiple businesses. You can turn message leads off if you want every lead to reach only you, and accept that you will get fewer of them.

An LSA budget makes sense once somebody answers the phone every time in business hours, you know what a won job is worth, and the service area is as tight as the jobs you would actually drive to. Before that it does not. A missed call may count against your responsiveness, which feeds where you rank, and your rating and review count feed that ranking too. The free work comes first.

What wastes money, and whether Angi and Thumbtack leads are worth it

Shared lead marketplaces, as your foundation. Whether Angi and Thumbtack leads are worth it comes down to mechanics that nobody selling them explains. You pay for each lead, commonly somewhere between fifteen and a hundred dollars depending on the trade and the job, and the same inquiry is sold to several contractors at once. So you are paying for the right to race two or three other people to the phone, and the homeowner is comparing you on speed and price rather than on anything you have built. Some of these platforms also charge an annual membership on top. As a way to fill an unexpectedly quiet couple of weeks, fine. As the foundation of a business, it is renting somebody else's customer relationship at a price they control and can raise.

Boosting posts. Social media is reassurance, not discovery. It is a reasonable place for finished-job photographs, so that somebody who has been given your name can see you are real. Nobody scrolling on a Tuesday evening decides to spend thirty thousand dollars on a kitchen because a boosted post appeared.

Search ads with no geography and no negative keywords. Ordinary Google Ads can work, but the default setup pays for clicks from outside your radius, from people looking for instructions on doing the job themselves, and from jobs you do not want. If nobody is reviewing search terms and adding negatives every month, you are funding a very expensive random number generator.

Content written to hit a word count. A weekly article about nothing does not help. One genuinely useful page about the job you most want more of, written once and kept accurate, does.

Sponsorships, magnets and merchandise. Sponsoring the local team is a decent thing to do and the goodwill is real. It is also almost impossible to attribute, so fund it out of profit and community feeling rather than out of the budget you are relying on to keep the crew busy. The distinction matters when a quiet month arrives and you need to know which line actually produces work.

Rebuilding the website because it looks dated. If the site is fast, you can edit it yourself, and it turns visitors into calls, then how it looks is rarely what is holding you back. We wrote separately about what actually drives the cost of a website, and about the fact that a small business site is usually a handful of pages worth reading rather than forty pages of filler.

Angi vs Thumbtack, and the difference that matters

Angi sells subscription packages alongside per-lead pricing, and Angi sets the lead price. Thumbtack has no membership and bills you per lead, at a price you set yourself above a minimum Thumbtack sets. That difference decides what a test costs you, and what stopping costs you.

• What you join. Angi's terms say a subscription renews automatically for further one-year terms, and that the fee can rise by up to ten percent at renewal. Thumbtack has nothing to join, and in its own words there is "no charge to join, no annual fees, and no membership fees."

• What a lead costs. Angi sets the price, and it varies by job, location and demand. On Thumbtack you set it yourself, service by service, above a minimum Thumbtack sets, under a weekly budget you cap.

• Who else gets the same lead. No more than five contractors, by Angi's own account. Five in the first four hours on Thumbtack, then more.

• What it costs to stop. Any early termination fee with Angi is set in the contract you sign. Angi does not publish a figure, and its terms say prepaid fees are not refunded. Thumbtack charges no fee to leave, and lowering or pausing the budget stops the spending.

Sources: Angi's own help documentation, Angi Inc's SEC filings and Thumbtack's help documentation, checked August 2026.

Angi changed how its leads are handed out in January 2025. In its own filings the company says it has "implemented homeowner choice on nearly all experiences" in its US business, so a homeowner now picks which contractors they are connected to rather than a system matching them automatically. On what Angi calls double opt-in leads, sold one at a time rather than inside a package, you are charged when both you and the homeowner show interest in connecting. That is one of four ways Angi sells leads, not a description of all of them.

What none of it did was make anything exclusive. Angi's own documentation says a homeowner's request goes to no more than five contractors, and that you are "charged for leads whether or not you open or respond to them," though it does run a credit process for leads it accepts as invalid, such as duplicates or the wrong ZIP code.

Thumbtack runs the other way around. You set the amount you will pay for a lead, service by service, above a minimum Thumbtack sets and can adjust, and a weekly budget caps what can be spent before you decide to spend more. That covers leads where the customer contacts you first. On what Thumbtack calls Opportunities, where you message first, it says you pay only if the customer replies. Either way you are told how many other contractors that customer has contacted.

Contractors posting in Thumbtack's own community forum report paying anywhere from roughly ten dollars to well over a hundred and fifty. Those are self-reported figures from different years, markets and trades, so read them as the outer edges rather than a rate card, and under the current pricing part of that spread is contractors choosing what to bid.

Neither of those numbers is worth much next to your own, which is the only one that settles it. If you are going to test one of them, test Thumbtack, because the money at risk is capped by the weekly budget you set. Angi earns a subscription only when three things are true at once: a trade where one won job covers a lot of leads, somebody who answers within minutes, and enough months of tracking to know whether the fee pays for itself. Short of that, both are premature.

Marketing while you are busy is what prevents the quiet month

This is the pattern that costs contractors the most money, and it has nothing to do with which channel you pick. Work is good, so the marketing stops. Six or eight weeks later the pipeline is empty, and that is when the panic buying starts: leads at the worst price, a discount you did not want to offer, a job you would normally have turned down.

The lag is the whole problem. Nearly everything above takes weeks to turn into work, so the effort has to happen during the busy stretch, when it feels least necessary. The way to survive that is to keep the habits small enough that a busy week cannot kill them. Photographs on the jobs you are already doing. A review asked for at the end of each one. A note to the last customer whose street you are back on. None of that takes an evening, and it is why it still gets done in August.

A budget that makes sense

There is no percentage that fits every trades business, and anyone who quotes you one is guessing. What matters more is the order, because the early money is far more productive than the late money.

Spend first on being able to respond, because it costs the least and protects everything else. Then on the profile, the reviews and the photographs, which are mostly time rather than money. Then on the website, if the website is genuinely the constraint. Paid leads and ads come last, and only once you can say what a won job costs you, because scaling spend without that number is just increasing the size of an unknown.

How to track calls and compare channels, without buying software

Four numbers will tell you nearly everything, and a whiteboard holds them better than a system nobody updates.

• Inquiries received, and how many were actually answered.

• Quotes sent, and how long each one took to go out.

• Quotes won.

• Where each one came from.

From those you get the only figure that settles arguments: what you spent on a source divided by the jobs it won. A channel that produces two jobs a month at four hundred dollars a job is worth more than one producing ten inquiries that never become anything, and without the numbers the second one will feel busier and more successful.

Where to start on Monday, and what replaces the lead sites if you switch them off

In this order, because the top of the list costs nothing and most contractors have not done it.

• Start writing down every inquiry and how it found you.

• Decide who answers the phone, and what happens to a call that comes in while everyone is on a job.

• Claim and complete the Google Business Profile, categories and services first.

• Ask your last three finished customers for a review, by phone or in person.

• Photograph the job you are on this week, before and after.

• Pick the line item you are least sure about, and give it sixty days to prove itself against the numbers you are now collecting.

That sequence deliberately front-loads the things you can do yourself between jobs. The parts worth paying for tend to be the website and the search work, because those are the ones you cannot fix from a phone in a van.

If you want a straight answer about which of these is actually holding your business back, that is what the free consultation is for. We build and run search and websites for trades businesses across Burlington and Camden County, and we will say so plainly when the honest answer is that your money is better spent somewhere else this quarter. You can get in touch here.