How much should a tradesman spend on marketing?
Ask ten agencies how much you should spend and you will get ten numbers, all of which happen to match their fees. This guide gives you a way to work it out from your own business instead: what a job is worth, how many you need, and what that means you can afford to pay to get one. Bring a pen.
Forget percentages of turnover
The textbook answer is to spend a percentage of turnover on marketing, usually somewhere between 5 and 10 percent. That is useless for a tradesman. A one-van electrician turning over £60,000 does not have £6,000 lying about, and a percentage tells you nothing about whether the money is working.
Start from the other end. What does a job earn you, and what would you happily pay to get one more?
Step one: what is a job worth to you?
Not the invoice. The profit. Take your typical job, knock off materials, fuel, any labour you pay, and your own day rate. What is left is what the job is actually worth to the business.
A worked example. A heating engineer does boiler swaps at around £2,400 a time. Materials and the lad cost £1,500. Two days of his own time at £200 a day is £400. That leaves £500 profit on a typical swap. That £500 is the number that matters.
Step two: how many enquiries make a job?
Be honest here. Out of ten people who ring, how many do you quote? Out of ten you quote, how many say yes? Most trades land somewhere between one in three and one in five from enquiry to signed job once you count the time-wasters, the price shoppers and the ones who go quiet.
Our heating engineer reckons he quotes seven out of ten callers and wins three of those seven. Call it three jobs from ten enquiries. So each enquiry is worth roughly £150 of profit to him, on average, before he spends anything getting it.
Step three: what can you afford to pay per enquiry?
This is the key figure. If each enquiry is worth £150 in profit, paying £30 to get one is a bargain, paying £100 is tight but workable, and paying £160 means you are working for free.
A sensible rule is to aim to spend no more than a third of the profit an enquiry brings in. For our engineer that is about £50 per enquiry. Anything an agency or an ad campaign delivers under that is making him money.
| Trade (worked example) | Profit per job | Jobs per 10 enquiries | Profit per enquiry | Comfortable cost per enquiry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heating engineer, boiler swaps | £500 | 3 | £150 | Up to £50 |
| One-van plumber, small repairs | £120 | 5 | £60 | Up to £20 |
| Roofer, re-roofs | £2,000 | 2 | £400 | Up to £130 |
| Three-van building firm, extensions | £8,000 | 1 | £800 | Up to £260 |
Step four: turn that into a monthly number
Now decide how many more jobs a month you actually want. Not 'as many as possible', because you cannot do them all. If the heating engineer wants two extra swaps a month, he needs about seven extra enquiries. At £50 a time that is a budget of around £350 a month, and if the marketing produces those two jobs he clears £1,000 profit on them. Spend £350, bank £1,000. That is a decent trade.
For the one-van plumber doing small repairs the sums are tighter. Each enquiry is only worth £60, so he can only justify about £20 per enquiry. He needs a lot of enquiries at a low cost, which points him towards reviews, a strong Google listing and a cheap fixed-fee system rather than paid ads. For the roofer, the opposite: each enquiry is worth so much that a few hundred pounds on ads is cheap if it produces one re-roof.
Where fixed fees fit
A lot of trades agencies charge a flat monthly amount rather than per lead. Published examples from firms we have profiled run from around £149 a month at the low end, through £299 a month for a flat website-and-local-SEO system, up to £850 a month and beyond for specialist outreach. Those numbers are not results; they are what the service costs.
The test is the same. Divide the fee by the enquiries it produces over a few months. If the £299 system brings in 15 enquiries a month, that is £20 each, which works even for the small-repair plumber. If it brings in three, that is £100 each, which only works for the roofer. Our pieces on agencies that suit sole traders and agencies for growing trade firms sort the options by roughly this logic.
The zero-cost layer comes first
Before any of these monthly figures, there is a layer that costs nothing but time: your Google listing, your reviews, your photos, your phone handling. For many one-van firms this layer alone produces enough enquiries, and it sets the floor that any paid marketing is measured against.
If you have not done that work yet, do it before you spend. We list the jobs in seven things to do yourself before paying any agency. Spending £300 a month on ads while your listing has two reviews is paying to send people to a shop with the lights off.
How to keep yourself honest
Whatever you spend, track three things on a bit of paper or a spreadsheet each month: what you spent, how many enquiries came in that you can trace to it, and how many turned into jobs. Ask every new caller how they found you and write it down.
After three months you will know your real cost per enquiry and your real cost per job. Compare them to the comfortable figures in the table. If you are over, something changes: the agency, the channel or the budget. If you are under, consider spending more, because you have found something that works and most trades never do.
The hard part is not the maths. It is asking the question. An agency that cannot or will not help you measure cost per job is telling you it does not want to be measured, and our guide to spotting a cowboy agency has more on that.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a typical marketing budget for a one-van tradesman?
There is no single figure. Working from the sums above, most sole traders land somewhere between nothing (if reviews and word of mouth are enough) and £150 to £400 a month on a fixed-fee system or modest ads.
Should I spend on ads or on a website first?
Neither until your Google Business Profile and reviews are in order. After that, it depends on your profit per enquiry: high-value trades like roofing can justify ads sooner, low-value repair work needs cheap enquiries from reviews and local search.
What is a good cost per lead for a tradesman?
Whatever is comfortably below a third of the profit each enquiry earns you. For a £500-profit job won from one in three enquiries, that is about £50. For a £120-profit repair job it is nearer £20.
How long before I know if marketing is working?
Give it three months and track spend, enquiries and jobs every month. Less than that and the numbers are too small to trust.