Every contractor we talk to asks the same question in a slightly different way. Some ask what a website costs. Some ask what they should pay for Google Ads. Underneath it, they all want to know the same thing: how much of the money coming in should go back out to keep the phone ringing?
There is no single right number, but there is a way to reason about it that beats guessing. Here is how we think about it, plus the mistakes that make a contractor's budget disappear without producing work.
Start with a percentage of revenue, not a dollar figure
Picking a marketing budget out of the air is how contractors end up spending $300 a month and wondering why nothing happens, or $4,000 a month and having no idea what it bought.
The general benchmark used across small businesses is somewhere in the range of 5% to 10% of revenue, with newer companies at the top of that range and established companies with strong referral flow at the bottom. Trades businesses tend to land toward the lower end of the range once word of mouth is doing real work, and toward the higher end when they are new, expanding into a new service, or moving into a new part of town.
Run it against your own numbers before you react to the percentage:
- Doing about $300,000 a year. Roughly $1,250 to $2,500 a month. That is enough to run a good website plus one channel properly. It is not enough to run three.
- Doing about $750,000 a year. Roughly $3,000 to $6,000 a month. Now you can hold a real ad budget and still fund the slower-burning work.
- Doing $2 million and up. The percentage matters less than the discipline. At that size the question stops being "can we afford it" and becomes "which of these is actually producing jobs, and which one are we paying for out of habit."
One caveat worth saying out loud. If you are booked eight weeks out and turning work away, your marketing budget should probably go down, not up. Spending money to create demand you cannot serve is a good way to make customers angry. Spend it on hiring instead.
Spend it in this order: website, profile, ads, SEO
The order matters more than the amount. Money spent out of order gets wasted, because every channel downstream depends on the one before it.
1. The website, first, always
Your website is where every other dollar lands. Ads point at it. Google Business Profile points at it. Referrals check it before they call. If the site is slow, hard to read on a phone, or does not make it obvious what you do and where you work, every dollar you spend driving traffic to it leaks out.
This is the one place where being cheap costs the most, because the loss is invisible. Nobody calls you to say your site was confusing. They just call the next guy. If you are weighing what to spend here, our Cincinnati website cost guide breaks down what different budgets actually buy.
2. Google Business Profile, which is free
For a local contractor, the map is the front door. When a homeowner searches "roof repair near me" or "plumber Mason Ohio," Google puts three businesses in a map above everything else, and those three get most of the calls.
Your Business Profile drives that, and it costs nothing but attention. Right categories, honest service area, photos from real jobs, a steady flow of reviews. Contractors who skip this and go straight to paid ads are paying for clicks they could have gotten free.
3. Google Ads, once the first two are solid
Ads are the fastest way to turn money into phone calls, and the fastest way to turn money into nothing. They work when the site converts and the offer is clear. They fail when they are pointed at a homepage that makes the visitor go hunting.
Search ads are worth the money for contractors because the intent is unambiguous. Someone typing "water heater replacement Cincinnati" at 9pm has a broken water heater. That is a different person from someone scrolling Facebook. Our Cincinnati Google Ads cost guide covers what the clicks actually run in this market.
4. SEO, funded as the long game
SEO is the slowest and, over a few years, usually the cheapest lead source you will have. It also cannot be rushed, which is why it goes last in the spending order and never last in the planning order. Start it once the first three are steady, fund it consistently, and judge it in quarters. Half-funding SEO for three months and quitting is the same as not doing it, except you also spent the money. That work is what our SEO service is built around.
Where contractors burn money
We have opinions here, and they cost some people a sales conversation. Worth it.
- Boosting Facebook posts. The boost button is designed to be easy to press, not to produce jobs. It optimizes for cheap engagement, so you buy likes from people three counties away who will never hire you. If you want to run Meta ads, run them properly, with a real objective and a real audience. Otherwise put the money into search, where people are already looking for you.
- Buying shared leads. The lead platforms sell the same homeowner to four contractors, so you are in a price race before you say hello. The lead costs money whether it closes or not, and it belongs to the platform, not to you. Spending the same money to build something you own produces a customer list instead of a receipt.
- Paying for impressions. Any proposal that sells "impressions" or "reach" without a number attached to phone calls should be read very slowly. Impressions are not customers.
- Sending ad clicks to the homepage. If someone clicks an ad about gutter replacement, they should land on a page about gutter replacement with a form on it. Dropping them on a homepage and asking them to find their way makes you pay for the click twice.
- Rebuilding the logo instead of the pipeline. Branding is real work and it matters. It is rarely the reason a contractor's phone is quiet.
What a realistic monthly budget actually buys
Roughly, and before anyone quotes anything:
- Under $500 a month. Realistically this covers keeping a good website healthy and running your Business Profile properly. That is not nothing. For a contractor with strong referrals, it can be enough. It will not generate new demand on its own.
- $1,000 to $2,000 a month. Enough to add one paid channel and run it seriously, with a landing page that matches the ads and tracking that tells you what closed. Most single-crew contractors we talk to sit here.
- $3,000 to $5,000 a month. Ads plus real SEO plus content, running at the same time. This is where the compounding starts: paid brings work in now while the organic side builds a floor under you, so you are not renting every lead forever.
- $6,000 and up. Multi-crew, multi-service, or multi-market. At this level the reporting is the product. If you cannot see cost per lead by service and by channel, you are flying on feel.
Split it however the season demands. Roofing money moves with storms. HVAC money moves with the first hot week and the first cold one. A budget that ignores your own calendar is a budget you will abandon in March.
How you know it is working
This is the part most contractors never get set up, and it is the part that settles every argument.
The number that matters is cost per lead, and after that, cost per booked job. Not clicks. Not impressions. Not followers. If you spent $1,200 last month and got 20 calls, that is $60 a lead. Whether $60 is good depends entirely on your average job value and your close rate. For a contractor whose average job is $800, $60 a lead is a real conversation. For one whose average job is $14,000, it is a bargain and you should ask why you are not spending more.
Three things have to be in place before that number means anything:
- Calls are tracked. If you cannot tell which calls came from which channel, you are guessing about the majority of your leads, because most contractor leads still come by phone.
- Forms are tracked. Every form fill should be recorded with the page it came from and the search or ad that produced it.
- Somebody marks what closed. This is the step everyone skips. A lead source that produces ten cheap tire kickers is worse than one that produces two real jobs, and you cannot see that difference until someone writes down which leads turned into work.
Getting that loop running is the whole point of what we do on the lead generation side. It is also the reason we can tell a client to cut a channel, which is not a conversation an agency selling impressions ever has to have.
The short answer
Budget something like 5% to 10% of revenue. Spend it in order: website, Business Profile, ads, SEO. Do not boost posts, do not buy shared leads, do not pay for impressions. Measure cost per lead and cost per booked job, and be honest about what you find.
If you want a second opinion on what you are currently spending and what it is producing, that is a free conversation. We will tell you if the answer is "spend less," which happens more often than you would expect.
Related reading: marketing on a budget in Cincinnati, and our lead generation funnel playbook for service businesses.