While the act of making a phone call can be accomplished, securing the desired customer on the other end of the line is significantly more difficult.

If the only interest of a lead is in the lowest-priced product available, lead volume is merely a vanity metric.

Home service contractors and construction contractors have been sold the same story by top contractor marketing agencies for many years. Agencies offer leads in the form of increased web traffic, improved search rankings, and increased submissions from lead forms through the provision of leads; however, leads alone do not get contractors paid.

Roofers, plumbers, HVAC professionals, and general contractors need jobs; they don't need website visitors.

The market is changing; the trend is moving away from quantity, and now focuses more on quality of leads. With an increased degree of online research before contacting contractors by homeowners and commercial buyers alike, contractors must now establish a digital presence based on trust, proof, and high local visibility in order to secure those projects.

In researching the market, we wanted to identify the companies who are truly producing real business results.

The Shift in Trade Marketing

Most generalist marketing agencies do contractors a disservice, as they use the same standard methodology (playbook) on contractors as they do for software companies, which works very well for software but causes local service companies to strike out.

A commercial builder will have a twelve-month bid cycle and will require a different strategy from that of a residential roofer who is trying to respond to a storm event.

To grow, companies need specific trade-based knowledge. Marketing agencies need to understand the buyer cycle. They should distinguish between a multi-location commercial operation and a local family-owned remodeling company.

The best partners have focus in the areas of local SEO, Google Business Profile optimization, and lead validation. In addition to form fills, they assess call recordings, analyze the cost per lead, and identify the marketing expenditure associated with the signed contract.

They are also fully transparent. In the contractor marketing agencies sector, most companies do not disclose their charges until a salesperson calls on you; however, the best companies will publish their minimum charges and clarify all of the services included with each package.

Top Contractor Marketing Agencies Evaluated

An evaluation of the leading contractors in the marketing industry will require you to look beyond generic claims. We assessed the leading agencies based on their area of specialization, on available supporting materials, and how they generate leads.

1. Red Door Marketing Co

Red Door Marketing Co is notable for their transparency with pricing and the clear evaluation of their work.

They provide a list of minimum charges, i.e., Google Ads cost $2,000/month, SEO is $1,500/month, and they provide website design for $5,000. Their full-service offerings are usually in the range of $3,500-$12,000/month.

With regard to evidence, they report adding 4-8 times more organic traffic to contractors in residential roofs after one year compared to those without. In terms of commercial tenant build-outs, they cite a decrease in the cost of obtaining qualified leads of between 40-60%.

2. Findable Digital Marketing

Findable Digital Marketing helps companies grow through their clear pricing guide.

This includes a consulting fee of $800, the construction of a foundation for a website ($10,000), and continuous services to support a company's growth (beginning around $3,000/month). For their Texas division, they state that services range from $3,000-$5,000/month.

For example, a recent example shows a general contractor tracked a five-time increase in website traffic, four-fold increases in new leads, and an ROI of approximately $1.7 million in the 12 months following engagement with Findable Digital Marketing.

3. Hook Agency

For contractors, Hook Agency has a strong focus on SEO, custom web design, and video content creation. Hook Agency has become known in their local area and has garnered an impressive score of 4.9 stars with over 170 reviews.

In addition to this, Hook Agency's marketing philosophy focuses on building trust with homeowners before they ever contact the contractor. Hook Agency had one example of a commercial contractor that was able to get their website to the top of the search engine results within 12 months.

4. Construction Marketing Services

Construction Marketing Services is a marketing agency that is specifically built for the construction industry.

In addition to being constructed for the construction industry, Construction Marketing Services excels in providing clients with pricing transparency, which is very uncommon in the construction marketing space.

Construction Marketing Services has an entry-level SEO service that starts at $600/month, and a pay-per-click service for $500/month, and their social media services have a basic tier that starts at $1,000 for a basic package and $2,500 for the standard tier and can scale to $6,000 for a professional package.

5. Blue Corona

Blue Corona takes a data-driven approach to marketing and is backed by a company with 92 employees, who earn millions in revenue, making Blue Corona qualify for handling the complexities of multi-channel tracking.

They utilize advanced conversion tracking that allows clients to view which ads are converting to signed contracts.

A residential remodeler used the advanced tracking offered by Blue Corona to identify where advertising dollars were wasted and refocused those funds into the marketing channels that were generating paying customers.

6. Venveo

Venveo is a marketing agency that targets builders and contractors directly. Modernizing the digital presence of construction firms, most construction companies have historically relied on word of mouth as their primary avenue of marketing.

Venveo has helped one commercial builder increase the number of qualified leads by over 200% through the renovation of their website and improved search engine optimization.

7. Gorilla 76

Not all contractors provide services to homeowners. Gorilla 76 focuses on the industrial and heavy construction industry. Contractors in this sector typically have long sales cycles and a wide variety of services.

By helping an industrial contractor position their company in a better light, Gorilla 76 helped them find better clients and drastically decrease the amount of low-priced, price-based bids they received.

8. Construction Marketing

Construction Marketing, as its name indicates, specializes solely in the construction industry.

They provide SEO, web design, and content marketing specifically for builders in the construction industry. They created trade-specific content to assist a home builder in increasing web traffic by 50% or more within a few months.

9. SmartSites

SmartSites is a larger agency, but has also found a niche in the home services sector.

They focus primarily on paid media and website performance and conversion rate optimization. Their objective is to reduce the overall cost per lead for contractors and increase the number of contact forms completed.

10. Contractor Dynamics

Contractor Dynamics takes an entirely different approach from the above companies. They are not a marketing company; they are an educational/training organization. They teach contracting businesses how to create their own marketing and brand.

They collaborate with a wide range of companies, from fledgling start-ups to large corporations with annual revenues exceeding $100 million. They have received a perfect score of 5.0 across 34 reviews.

11. Contractor Growth Network

Contractor Growth Network offers a combination of business consulting and digital marketing specifically tailored for residential contractors.

They assist contractors with website creation, search engine optimization (SEO), and increasing their presence within their local market. They have a stellar reputation with a perfect 5.0 score from 99 reviews.

12. BuildWitt

BuildWitt is not intended for your average plumber in your area but is a specialty media, creative, and consulting agency focused solely on heavy construction and mining.

They are concentrated on building brands, creating stories, and recruiting for large earthmoving companies.

13. Straight North

While Straight North serves multiple industries, it has a special focus on the construction industry. A key differentiator for Straight North is its ability to validate leads.

Rather than simply forwarding every incoming lead form and phone call, their proprietary technology filters out spam, sales pitches, and unqualified leads from the pool.

This ensures that contractors' sales staff is only spending valuable time communicating with legitimate potential customers. Their current rating is 4.4 stars.

14. KPI Creatives

KPI Creatives specializes in helping contractors improve their brand awareness through high-quality content marketing. Contractors often struggle with producing good quality content as their product/service is very physical in nature.

KPI bridged that gap by building content libraries to help contractors answer frequently asked customer questions. Within a few months of implementing its products, one of its customers began to receive a steady stream of inbound leads.

15. The Marketing Blender

The Marketing Blender focuses primarily on local search visibility. Many service businesses put more emphasis on Google Maps than on general search results.

By optimizing their Google Business Profile, contractors can easily be located by potential customers within their service area by driving calls to the contractors instead of directing visitors to their website.

16. Ironpaper

Ironpaper specializes in assisting engineering companies and large commercial contractors with account-based marketing (ABM) and lead generation.

Through the creation of B2B groups and lead generation systems for long sales cycles (at least several months) which require building trust.

17. Brandpoint

Brandpoint combines the best practices of technical search engine optimization (SEO) with the deep art of storytelling. Contractors often appear to be equal on paper, and Brandpoint articulates the value of their clients' work through effective storytelling.

They develop the story around the work they have performed and the capabilities they have demonstrated and use best practices of SEO to help their contractors gain visibility for those stories.

How to Match an Agency to Your Trade

Finding an agency to match your trade is essential to maximizing the effectiveness of your marketing budget. A homeowner's process for buying a new roof is very different from the process a facility manager uses to hire a commercial paving contractor.

It is imperative that the chosen agency matches the sales model in which you operate.

• Emergency Services: Emergency services include plumbing, HVAC, and roof repair contractors. You need to be positioned for maximum visibility immediately following the failure of the system. Therefore, the strategy must concentrate on local search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising, and call tracking at the time of the emergency. An individual will call the first company they think is credible, rather than reading through multiple pages of blogs.

• Residential Design and Remodeling: Homeowners are looking for visual references to see your previous work to provide them confidence in you as a contractor; therefore, the agency must invest in creating a highly visual website, project portfolios, and visual social platforms to reach homeowners through nurturing campaigns over time.

• Commercial and Industrial: Client price shopping is detrimental to your time in this industry. You need an agency versed in account-based marketing, LinkedIn targeting, and producing tailored content to speak directly to engineers, architects, and property managers.

True Cost of Contractor Marketing Agencies

Contractor marketing agencies have the greatest challenge of providing clarity around price. Because of this, clients have the additional pressure of sitting through numerous sales calls before determining whether they can afford a contractor's marketing service. Increasingly, the top-performing agencies are making strides toward correcting this.

With transparent pricing, a homeowner can plan their marketing budget designed to achieve the expected customer acquisition cost (CAC).

For example, if a marketing agency has a growth package at the price of $3,000 monthly, and if you have an average profit of $1,500 for a roofing job, it will require the agency to generate two closed jobs just to break-even. Conversely, if the agency can create ten closed jobs, then the homeowners will have a positive return on investment.

When assessing the cost of a project, remember to separate your one-time projects from your monthly retainer payments. Investing in a basic website will typically run between $5,000 and $10,000, which is a single investment. Ongoing traffic generation will generally run between $1,500 and $5,000 monthly, depending on your aggressive growth goals and the number of markets you serve.

Final Words on Top Contractor Marketing Agencies

The days of building a cheap website and slapping on some ads are long gone. Over 70 percent of homeowners will research contractors online before calling them, which is why hiring one of the top contractor marketing agencies is so critical. They will read reviews, view photos of past work, and make judgements about your company's professionalism based on its online presence.

Agencies that are successful in this space treat marketing as a measurable science. They track the entire consumer journey and can tell you exactly what search term led to a phone call. They integrate their systems with those of your field service management software to see if that phone call resulted in an invoice being paid.

If your agency's sole focus is on clicks, impressions, or organic traffic, it is living in the past. Choose an agency that understands your particular industry, provides transparent pricing, and proves their worth with real numbers.

Critical Questions When Hiring an Agency

Why do high traffic numbers often lead to poor lead quality?

Traffic figures indicate the number of people who viewed your website; they do not tell you what each person's intention was. When an agency writes generic and broad articles, it is possible to receive thousands of visitors from every state in the country who do not live near you or have the ability to hire you.

The quantity of people visiting your website without a clear geographic target area and/or superior buyer intent only clutters your pipeline, and wastes time on your sales staff filtering through bad leads, adding to your overall costs of doing business.

How can local service areas alter the way searches are conducted?

Service providers that operate locally cannot rely on national level search terms. Local service provider's search strategies need to be based on their physical location. They need to manage their Google Business Profile aggressively, continually collect reviews from areas they service, and create unique pages specific to every city or county they service.

If your agency is not able to create a complete visual representation of your exact driving radius and the zip codes that you are targeting, your ads will be served to people that you cannot service.

What is the true cost of keeping agency pricing hidden until the proposal stage?

Keeping your agency's pricing hidden wastes time for both the contractor and the agency. When base retainers are kept confidential, contractors may spend weeks in meetings with an agency only to discover that the service provider's fee is three times higher than their budget.

This delays the contractor's ability to implement services in a timely manner. Agencies that publish their pricing become true partners with contractors. They enable contractors to calculate their own margin before the first phone call and ensure that the partnership is built on a foundation of sound financial values.