Hiring a marketing agency as a contractor, or doing it yourself
What marketing should cost a remodeler, the red flags in a contractor lead pitch, what to keep in house, and why any real offer starts with a trial.
Contractors get pitched more aggressively than almost any other trade, because the ticket is large enough to justify a hard sell. The pitch is usually some version of exclusive leads, guaranteed appointments, or page one in ninety days, and it arrives with a twelve-month agreement attached.
Some of it is real work. A lot of it is a lead broker selling the same homeowner to four contractors and calling it exclusive. Here is how to tell which is which, what a fair price looks like, and what you should keep in your own hands regardless.
What this actually costs
Rough market rates in 2026 for a residential remodeler:
- Google Ads management: $600 to $2,000 a month, or 10% to 20% of ad spend. Ad spend is separate and should be $2,000 to $6,000 a month in a mid-size metro.
- Meta ads management: $500 to $1,500 a month plus $600 to $1,500 in spend.
- Local SEO and Google profile: $500 to $1,500 a month.
- Website build: $3,000 to $9,000 once, or $150 to $400 a month managed.
- Review generation and follow-up automation: $200 to $600 a month.
- Shared or per-lead leads from a broker: $80 to $250 per lead, sold to three or four contractors at once.
A reasonable total marketing budget for a remodeler is 5% to 10% of revenue, weighted toward the high end while you are growing. On $1.5 million in revenue that is $75,000 to $150,000 a year across everything, which is roughly two to four signed projects at a $24,000 average. Run it against your own numbers in the calculator.
Red flags
"Exclusive leads" that are not. Ask directly: is this lead sold to anyone else, and will you put that in writing. Most brokers will not. If four contractors get the same form fill, you are in a price race before anyone has met the client.
Guaranteed rankings or guaranteed appointments. Nobody controls Google's ranking. Appointment guarantees are usually met by booking anyone who agrees to a time, which fills your calendar with people who have $9,000 for a kitchen. If a guarantee exists, ask what counts as an appointment, in writing.
A twelve-month contract with a 60-day cancellation window. For a remodeler, some patience is legitimate: a 90-day sales cycle means nobody can prove revenue in 30 days. But that argues for a 90-day term, not a year.
No access to your own accounts. Your Google Ads account, Meta business manager, Google Business Profile, domain and website must be owned by your business, with you as admin. Agencies that build inside their own accounts are holding your history hostage. This is the most common way contractors lose five years of data.
Reporting that shows impressions and clicks. Impressions are not the product. Ask for calls, form fills by budget band, booked site visits, and signed contracts traced to source.
A portfolio full of other trades and none of yours. Remodeling has a 60 to 180 day cycle and a five-figure ticket. Somebody whose whole book is HVAC tune-ups will optimize for cheap leads and cut the campaign that was producing your kitchens.
Pressure to sign on the first call. No exceptions to this one.
What to keep in house
Do not outsource these no matter who you hire:
- Asking for reviews at the final walkthrough. No vendor can stand in the finished kitchen. The system can be automated, the ask cannot. See the reviews guide.
- Photographing the work. Nobody else is on site the day the kitchen is finished. Ten minutes with a phone, same angles as the before shots, every job.
- The first phone call. The qualifying conversation about budget and timeline decides your close rate more than any ad does.
- Account ownership. Admin on everything, always.
What is genuinely worth paying for
- Google Ads management, because the negative keyword and budget-band work is tedious and expensive to get wrong.
- A real website with project pages, which most owners will not build and will not maintain. The website guide has the spec.
- Follow-up automation, because the eleven days of silence after a proposal is where remodeling revenue dies.
- Content and AI-search pages, the cost pages and question pages that get cited, which take writing time you do not have.
The doing-it-yourself version
If your budget is under $2,000 a month, do it yourself in this order. Each step is worth more than the one after it.
- Google Business Profile: correct primary category, services with descriptions, Saturday hours, email published, project photo sets monthly. Two hours to set up, thirty minutes a month.
- Reviews at every final walkthrough plus the backlog campaign. One afternoon, then ongoing.
- A six-page website with project pages, published ranges, license in text and a budget-qualified form. One week.
- Missed-call text-back and a written follow-up sequence. One afternoon, $30 to $100 a month.
- Four cost pages, one per room type, in plain sentences. Two days.
- Only then, ads.
That order matters. 23.8% of contractors link no website, 14.3% have no reviews, and 51.3% have fewer than 10. Buying traffic before fixing those is paying to send homeowners to a profile that talks them out of calling you. The full picture is in the benchmark report.
Why a trial is the fair structure
A contractor should not have to sign a year to find out whether a channel produces qualified estimate requests. That is why everything on this site is offered as a free 14-day trial: pick a service, we build it in your accounts, it runs two weeks at no cost, and there is no card on file.
Be clear-eyed about what two weeks can prove. It can prove that qualified people are asking for estimates, that the phone gets answered, that the profile improved. It cannot prove that a kitchen closed, because kitchens take three months to close. Any vendor who claims otherwise for a remodeling company is describing a trade they have not worked in.
Frequently asked
Should I hire someone local? It matters less than whether they have run remodeling accounts. Ask for two contractor references with a 60 day or longer sales cycle and call them.
What if I already signed a bad contract? Read the cancellation clause, then secure your assets first. Get admin on your Google Ads, Meta, profile, domain and website before you give notice. Losing the account history is worse than the remaining months of fees.
How long before I know if it is working? Leading indicators at 30 days: qualified form fills, calls over 90 seconds, booked site visits. Revenue at 90 to 120 days. Judging a remodeling account on 30-day revenue is how good campaigns get killed, as covered in the Google Ads guide.
If you want to test any of it before paying, that is what the free 14-day trial is for. Text or call (385) 832-6175.