Marketing for tradies, by people who’ve run service businesses

It depends which of the five parts you are fixing, and most tradies only need one to start. The ad spend is the part you can budget for today, because it goes straight to Google or Meta: we recommend $900 to $1,500 a month on Google Ads, roughly $30 to $50 a day, or from $500 a month on Facebook and Instagram. On top of that, ads management is a flat monthly fee, a lead-generating website is a one-off, email and SMS follow-up is a one-off setup plus the platform cost you pay the provider, and ServiceM8 setup is a one-off that moves with how much data and training is involved. Book a free 15-minute call, tell Mitch what is going wrong, and you get a straight number for the one thing worth fixing first rather than a menu.

Fastest to slowest: ring your past customers, then get in front of people already searching for your trade, then build a presence that earns work over time. Most tradies skip straight to the third one. Paid search gets you jobs this month, your existing database gets you jobs this week, and referrals plus local search compound over a year. The full breakdown of the five channels that work for NZ trades, with cost-per-lead ranges, is in how to get more leads for a trade business in NZ.

Pick one service and one town, and go narrow rather than wide. The most common way to waste $1,000 is advertising everything you do across a whole region at once. On $30 to $50 a day you can run one focused campaign on your best-margin service, prove it produces quoted jobs, then widen out. Before you spend anything, make sure the number on your site is tappable and someone answers it during the day, because ads generate calls and voicemail loses them. See Google Ads for tradies for how the campaigns get built.

It means putting 70% of your budget into what is already proven to work, 20% into things showing promise, and 10% into experiments. For a trade business that usually looks like 70% on the Google Ads campaign producing quoted jobs, 20% on Facebook and Instagram or database campaigns, and 10% on something untested. It is a sensible split once you have a proven channel. If you do not have one yet, put everything into finding it first, which is the argument made in how to get more leads for a trade business in NZ.

Builders, plumbers, electricians, roofers, painters, landscapers, cleaners, window cleaners and exterior cleaning crews, plus most local service businesses that live on a steady flow of enquiries. We have written the per-trade versions up as marketing for plumbers, marketing for electricians, marketing for builders and marketing for painters, landscapers and roofers.

Sometimes, and we will tell you honestly. If your current site loads fast on mobile data, states your service area and has a tappable phone number near the top, it is usually good enough to start with and we would rather put the money into spend. If it takes six seconds to load or buries the phone number, ads will just pay to send people to a page that loses them. Either way, see websites for tradies for what a trade site needs to do.

Yes, and for a lot of trade businesses that is the actual bottleneck. Mitch is a ServiceM8 Certified Partner, so quoting, scheduling, job cards and invoicing can be set up, migrated and taught to your team. A standard setup is a one-off, and it moves depending on how much customer and job history has to come across and how many people are on the tools and need training. You get the number on the first call. See ServiceM8 setup and support. If you have not picked a system yet, start with the best job management software for NZ trades, then ServiceM8 vs Tradify vs Fergus for the head to head.

Google Ads first for almost every trade, because it catches people who have already decided to hire someone. Facebook and Instagram earn their place once search is working, or first when the job is visual and planned rather than urgent. The full comparison, with what each one costs, is in Facebook Ads vs Google Ads in NZ.

No lock-in, everything is month-to-month, and you deal with Mitch from the first call onwards. No account managers, no offshore teams, no handing your account to a junior once the paperwork is signed. Ad accounts stay in your name with your billing on them, so if you ever leave you keep the account and the history.