How Much Should Your Trades Business Spend on Marketing (And Where It Should Go)

You do not need a percentage to set your marketing budget. You need an order of operations, a starting amount you can afford to lose for ninety days, and one number you measure yourself: cost per lead.

Online advice contradicts itself because different businesses, markets, and goals produce different answers. Do the free work first. Then put paid spend into one channel you can judge. Once you know what a lead costs, that number tells you whether to keep spending, change course, or stop.

1. Finish your Google Business Profile before you buy leads

Do not send paid traffic toward an unfinished business presence.

Open your Google Business Profile on your phone and check the basics as if you were a homeowner trying to hire yourself. Make sure your hours match reality, including after-hours availability if you offer it. Set the service area to where your truck actually goes. List each service separately in the words a homeowner would use.

Add real photos of finished work, trucks, crews, and jobs in progress. Skip stock photos. The goal is not to make the profile look busy. The goal is to help a local customer quickly see what you do, where you work, and how to reach you.

Call the profile finished when a customer can answer those questions without calling you first.

2. Make reviews part of closing out every job

A review habit works better than a review campaign.

Pick one point in the job closeout process to ask. For example, ask after the customer has seen the completed work and before you leave the property. Use the same simple sentence every time so the ask does not depend on whether you remember it at the end of a long day.

Use this sentence: Please leave us a Google review if you were happy with the work today. It helps local homeowners find us.

Keep the link to your review page easy to send from your phone. The important part is repetition. Add the ask to the same checklist as collecting payment, cleaning up, and confirming the customer has what they need.

3. Put your first paid dollars in one place

Do not spread a small marketing budget across several channels just to feel present everywhere.

Start with Google Local Service Ads. Make it the one paid channel you watch closely before adding another. You need a clear place to see incoming leads, answer them, and decide whether the work is worth the spend.

Set a starting amount that will not put pressure on payroll, materials, or the next truck repair. Treat the first ninety days as a learning period, not a promise that every dollar will work immediately.

You are buying information as well as leads. You are learning what your business pays to get a real inquiry in your service area.

4. Change the report from clicks to conversions

Clicks do not tell you enough. A click is not a phone call, form submission, or booked job.

In your ad reporting, change the displayed metric from cost per click to cost per conversion. That gives you your cost per lead.

Write the number down every week. If you spent $300 and received 10 leads, your cost per lead was $30. That does not tell you whether the channel is profitable by itself, but it gives you a number you can manage.

Then add two details from your own business: how many leads turn into paying jobs and what those jobs are worth on average.

Here is a simple example. If 10 leads cost $300, three become jobs, and each job brings in $500, you spent $300 to produce $1,500 in booked work. Replace those numbers with yours. The point is not the example. The point is that your own lead cost, close rate, and job value should set the next decision.

Let cost per lead set the budget

Your marketing budget for a small business should not start with a rule someone else wrote for a different company. It should start with an amount you can afford to lose for ninety days while you learn what leads cost in your market.

Check your cash position before setting that amount. If you are not sure what the business can safely carry, review the numbers that show whether a trades business is financially healthy first.

After thirty days, look at the cost per lead and the quality of those leads. Are they within your service area? Do they call for work you actually want? Are you closing enough of them to justify the spend?

Keep funding what produces work you can profitably complete. Pause what does not. Increase the budget only after you can see that the leads are being answered, tracked, and turned into jobs.

Answer paid leads while they are still warm

A paid lead cannot help your business if nobody follows up.

Decide who answers calls, who returns missed calls, and where new inquiries go when you are on a ladder, driving, or already with a customer. That handoff is one of the operating systems that matters as a business grows. See the three systems you need before $1M for a practical look at building those systems.

The answer to how much you should spend is not a magic percentage. Finish the free work. Build the review habit. Start with one paid channel. Track cost per lead. Then let the results from your own business determine the next dollar.

For more practical operations guidance, visit Field Notes.