Five channels produce almost all the leads for a New Zealand trade business: Google Ads, your Google Business Profile, a website that converts, Facebook and Instagram, and follow-up to the customers you already have. Start with the last one. It is the cheapest of the five and it usually books work inside a fortnight.
The order matters more than the list. Most tradies who tell me they need more leads do not have a lead problem, they have a leak. Quotes go out and never get chased, enquiries sit in an inbox until a faster competitor wins the job, and a database of past customers sits in the job management software doing nothing. Plug the leak, then buy traffic.
How to advertise as a tradesman
Advertise where someone has already decided to hire a tradie. In practice that means Google Search: “plumber tauranga”, “electrician near me”, “blocked drain te puke”. Those people are choosing who to ring in the next ten minutes. Everything else, including Facebook, Instagram, letterbox drops and van signage, is you interrupting someone who was not thinking about you.
That does not make the other channels useless. It makes them second. Get the high-intent searches sorted first, because those leads close at a far higher rate and you need fewer of them.
A search campaign for a trade needs five things, and it fails without any one of them:
- One service and one town per campaign. Splitting $600 across four services and four suburbs gives each combination about eight clicks a month, which teaches you nothing.
- Ten to twenty keywords in exact and phrase match, not broad match.
- A negative keyword list from day one, blocking “jobs”, “salary”, “apprenticeship”, “DIY”, “course” and every service you do not offer.
- Ad scheduling set to the hours somebody actually answers the phone.
- A landing page that names the service and the town with a tappable phone number above the fold.
For most trades the honest floor is $900 to $1,500 a month in ad spend, roughly $30 to $50 a day, with a management fee on top of that if someone else is running it. Below that you can still run ads, you just have to narrow the target until the budget is enough to matter inside it. We went through that maths in is $20 a day enough for Google Ads.
If you want the trade-specific version, including which searches are worth bidding on in each trade, that sits on our Google Ads for tradies page.
How to get clients as a tradie
The fastest clients are the ones already in your phone. Past customers and unsold quotes cost nothing to reach, they already know you, and they convert several times better than a stranger who clicked an ad. Before you spend a dollar on advertising, work through both lists.
We have run exactly this for an exterior cleaning business in Christchurch: one seasonal email and SMS campaign to a dormant list of 2,000 past customers produced 55 bookings and $17.5K of revenue, with no extra ad spend. For SWISH Property Services, cleaning up a 3,000-record database and putting monthly email and automated SMS behind it lifted rebookings by 150 per cent. Same idea both times. The list was already theirs.
Nobody has a lead problem in a database they have never contacted.
Setting that up is a one-off cost plus a small monthly platform fee, and it is almost always the cheapest thing on this page. Compare it to a month or two of ad spend and management aimed at people who have never heard of you.
The second thing is response speed, and it is free. Most enquiries are sent to two or three tradies at once, so the first sensible reply wins a lot of jobs on speed alone. If you cannot answer the phone from a roof, the fix is a call answering service, a text auto-reply with a callback time, or job management software that lets you quote from the van.
The third thing is asking for reviews properly. Reviews are what make every other channel cheaper, because the same ad and the same page convert better when there are 80 recent five-star reviews behind them. JunkBoss had 350+ Google reviews before we touched anything, and turning those into a proper website and local presence is what put them in the top three for rubbish removal across the Bay of Plenty. If you have the reviews and nobody can see them, that is the cheapest fix on this page. More on the asking part in how to get more Google reviews.
The five channels that actually work for NZ trades
Here they are with what each one typically costs. All figures are NZD. The cost-per-lead ranges are what we see across Bay of Plenty and wider New Zealand service accounts, not a published benchmark, so treat them as a starting point rather than a promise.
| Channel | Best for | Cost per lead we typically see | What it costs to run |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email and SMS to your own database | Rebooking past customers, chasing quotes that went quiet | Under $5 | A one-off setup, plus a small monthly platform cost |
| Google Business Profile and the local pack | People searching your trade plus your town | No media cost | Your time, plus a steady flow of reviews |
| Google Search ads | People ready to hire this week | $40 to $90 | Ad spend from $900 a month, plus a monthly management fee |
| Your website | Turning every other channel into an enquiry | No media cost | A one-off build, plus $40 to $100 a month for hosting and care |
| Facebook and Instagram ads | Seasonal offers, before-and-after work, staying visible | $15 to $45 | Ad spend from $500 a month, plus a monthly management fee |
Read that table twice, because the cheap rows are the ones tradies skip. Facebook leads look cheapest on the ad platforms, and they are, but they are colder. A $20 Facebook lead that closes one in ten costs you $200 a job. A $70 Google lead that closes one in three costs you $210 and arrives ready to book. Cost per lead on its own tells you almost nothing. Cost per booked job is the number.
What it takes to make this work as a system rather than five separate experiments is covered on our lead generation in Tauranga page: tracking first, then whichever part of the funnel is closest to producing money.
What is the 70/20/10 rule in marketing?
Spend 70 per cent of your budget on what you already know works, 20 per cent on things that are close to working, and 10 per cent on experiments. It is a way of growing without betting the business on a hunch, and it stops the other common failure, which is running the identical campaign for three years because nobody wants to touch it.
For a trade business on $1,500 a month it looks like this.
| Bucket | Share of $1,500 a month | Where it goes for a typical tradie |
|---|---|---|
| 70 per cent proven | $1,050 | The Google Search campaign and the service that already produces most of your booked jobs |
| 20 per cent promising | $300 | A second service or second town, or Facebook retargeting of people who visited your site |
| 10 per cent experimental | $150 | A new offer, a new creative angle, or a seasonal campaign you have never run |
Two rules for using it. Nothing goes in the 70 bucket until it has produced booked jobs you can count, not clicks. And the 10 per cent is allowed to fail, which is the entire point. If your experiments never fail you are not testing anything.
If you are running $600 a month total, skip the rule. At that level you have one bet, so put all of it on the service you most want more of and revisit the split when the budget grows.
What to do first if you have no budget
Three things, all free, all doable this week. Nobody needs an agency for any of them.
- Finish your Google Business Profile. Correct categories, every service listed, real photos of finished jobs, service area set, and hours that match when you answer. A half-filled profile is the most common reason a tradie does not show in the local pack.
- Text your last 50 customers. Not a campaign, just a plain message about the service they are due for. This is the highest-return hour you will spend all month.
- Chase every quote from the last 90 days that never got an answer. One message each. A surprising number of them chose nobody at all.
Then, when there is money to spend, spend it in this order: fix the page people land on, then buy search traffic, then add Facebook and Instagram. Ad spend goes last because it is the only one that costs you again every single day.
That order is the whole job, and it is what our marketing for tradies work is built around: find the part that is actually costing you money, fix that one properly, then move to the next. If you would rather not work out which part it is on your own, book a free 15-minute call and tell me what your last three months looked like. I will tell you straight where your next dollar should go, even if the answer is that you do not need me yet.
