These three trades live on seasonality and visible results, so plan your ad budget around your calendar rather than a flat monthly number, and put before-and-after photos in front of local homeowners. Plan on $500 to $1,500 a month of ad spend, plus a management fee on top of that if someone else is running the campaigns.
Painting, landscaping and roofing are the trades where demand moves with the weather and the finished result sells itself in a single photo. That combination changes what your marketing should look like, and it changes when you should spend.
Seasonal trades need seasonal campaigns
Set your ad budget by month, not by year. Painters and landscapers peak from about October through February, roofers spike after the first real storm of the season, and all three go quiet at times you can predict twelve months out. A flat monthly spend underfunds you in the peak and burns money in the dead weeks.
The other half of it is lead time. People book a painter or a landscaper six to eight weeks before they want the work done, so your ads need to be live before the demand shows up in your inbox. Here is roughly how the year runs for each trade in the Bay of Plenty and most of the North Island.
| Period | Painters | Landscapers | Roofers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug to Sep | Book the spring exterior run, quote hard | Push design and build enquiries for summer | Keep search live, catch post-winter leaks |
| Oct to Feb | Peak. Biggest budget of the year | Peak. Biggest budget of the year | Steady re-roofs, book while the weather holds |
| Mar to May | Shoulder. Sell interiors and rentals | Shoulder. Sell tidy-ups, planting, maintenance plans | Rising. Storm repairs start |
| Jun to Jul | Interiors only. Cut spend, work the database | Quiet. Work the database, presell next summer | Spiky. Hold budget headroom for storms |
Budget follows the same shape. These are the ranges we typically recommend for a single town and two or three services, not a published benchmark. All figures are NZD and exclude management.
| Trade | Peak-month ad spend | Quiet-month ad spend |
|---|---|---|
| Painter | $900 to $1,500 | $300 to $600, interiors only |
| Landscaper | $900 to $1,500 | $300 to $500, plus database campaigns |
| Roofer | $600 to $1,200, held steady | $600 to $1,200 with room to double for a storm week |
Management is a separate monthly fee, and across the NZ market it typically runs $500 to $1,500 a month + GST depending on how many services and towns are running. It does not drop just because your spend does, because the work in a quiet month is pointing the campaign at whatever still sells. We do not publish a rate for it, so book a free 15-minute call and you will get a straight number for your trade and your patch. Which searches are worth bidding on in each trade, and how the campaigns get structured, is on our Google Ads for tradies page. If you are starting from nothing, how to get more leads for a trade business covers the order to build things in.
Marketing for painters: the before-and-after advantage
A painter’s best ad is a photo of the last job. Nothing you write competes with a tired grey weatherboard on the left and a crisp finish on the right. Put that in front of local homeowners and your cost per enquiry drops without touching a bid.
Getting usable photos is a habit, not a skill. Same angle, same height, roughly the same time of day, taken before you start and after you finish. One wide shot for the transformation, one close shot for the cut lines. Note the suburb, because local place names in an ad do real work. Ask permission once at the quote stage and get it in writing.
For a painter, the marketing budget and the camera roll are the same asset. If you are not photographing every job, you are throwing away next season’s ads.
Those photos earn their keep in three places: your website gallery, your Google Business Profile posts, and paid social. Painting is the one trade in this group where Facebook and Instagram ads that show the work usually beat search, because you are creating demand for a job people have been putting off rather than answering an emergency. Start from $500 a month in ad spend, plus management on top. What moves that cost up or down is set out in how much Facebook ads cost in NZ.
Search still matters, it just carries less of the load. “Painters tauranga”, “house painters near me”, “interior painter mount maunganui” are people who have already decided they want a quote. Keep a small always-on search campaign for those terms all year, then put the seasonal push into social where the photos can do their job.
Winter is what separates the painters who survive from the ones who lay people off. Interiors, rentals, property managers and body corporates are all weather-proof work, and they are almost never marketed properly. A single page on your site about interior repaints for rentals, plus one email a year to every property manager you have worked with, is a cheaper winter plan than any ad campaign.
Marketing for landscapers: how to sell a bigger job
Stop marketing the tidy-up and start marketing the project. The gap between a small clean-up and a full design and build is not usually a different customer, it is what you showed them and how long you were willing to follow up.
Three things move enquiries up in value.
- Show finished projects, not finished tasks. Wide shots of a whole transformed yard beat close-ups of good paving. Put a one-line scope under each project: “New deck, retaining, planting and irrigation, Papamoa, six weeks.” That sentence tells a homeowner you can handle their job.
- Give a starting-from figure for each project type. Not a price list, just a floor. It filters out the people who wanted a mow and pre-qualifies the ones who did not. You will do fewer quotes and win a higher share of them.
- Stage the work. A customer who cannot say yes to the whole yard can often say yes to stage one. Offering the project in phases turns a no into a deposit, and stage two is the easiest sale you will ever make.
Then there is the follow-up, which is where most of the money leaks out. Big landscaping jobs take two weeks to three months to decide. A quote sent once and never chased is a job you paid to generate and then gave away. This is what email and SMS remarketing is for, both for quotes in progress and for the customer list you already own. One seasonal email and SMS campaign to a dormant list of 2,000 past customers of a Christchurch exterior cleaning business produced 55 bookings and $17,500 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. Setup is a one-off cost plus a small monthly platform fee.
Your website has to carry the gallery, because that is the whole pitch. Across the NZ market a lead generating trade site sits in the $2,500 to $4,500 band, and where you land inside it depends on how many project types and towns need their own page, with another $40 to $100 a month for hosting and small changes. What gets built and in what order is on web design for tradies. The long sales cycle problem is the same one residential builders have, and it is worked through in more detail in marketing for builders.
Marketing for roofers: storm-season demand spikes
You cannot create roofing demand, you can only be ready for it. In the week after a serious front, searches for roof repair in your area multiply, and the roofer already live in Google Search with budget headroom takes those calls. Everyone else spends three days getting a new campaign approved while the phone rings somewhere else.
Four rules make the difference.
- Never pause the account. Keep search running year round, even at $20 a day in July. A paused account restarts cold and loses days relearning what converts.
- Watch the forecast, not the report. When a front is coming, lift the daily budget before it lands. Storm demand is over in about a week.
- Run a budget you are willing to double. If $40 a day is normal, be ready to sit at $80 or $100 for seven days. That decision has to be made in advance, not argued about on the Tuesday.
- Answer the phone. A storm week is won on availability alone. Voicemail on a leaking roof is a lost job and a bad review waiting to happen.
Split the account in two, because roofing is two businesses. Urgent repair terms like “roof leak” and “emergency roof repair” want their own campaign, their own page and a tappable phone number at the top. Planned work like “re-roof”, “roof replacement” and “colorsteel roofing” is the opposite: long decision, high value, won on proof and follow-up exactly like painting and landscaping. Sending both to one homepage is why plenty of roofers feel their ads only half work.
Roof treatment and exterior cleaning sit neatly alongside the repair work, and they smooth out the season. SWISH Property Services sell softwash, roof moss treatment, water blasting and gutter vacuuming from separate service pages, each with its own quote form and its own pricing guidance. Splitting services out like that is what makes ads cheap to run, because every ad can land on a page that matches the search word for word.
All three trades come down to the same three moves: spend when the demand is actually there, show the work, and chase the quotes you have already paid to generate. Which one to fix first depends on what your last three months looked like. The order we recommend is set out in marketing for tradies, or book a free 15-minute call and tell me where the season is hurting. If the honest answer is to hold your money until spring, I will tell you that on the first call rather than after a deposit.
