Digital marketing for tradies, in the order that pays
Digital marketing for tradies is mostly a sequencing problem. The channels are not the hard part. Doing them in the wrong order is how the budget disappears before anything works.
Cheapest and fastest first.
Every channel has a cost per booked job and a time to first result. Running them in that order means the early wins pay for the slower ones, instead of you funding a twelve-month play out of pocket.
- Your Google profile. Free, fastest to move, and where most local searches end.
- Reviews. Nearly free, and they lift every other channel at once.
- Google Ads. Instant, costs money every day, switches off the moment you stop.
- The website and SEO. Slowest to start, cheapest per job once it runs.
The money goes out in four places.
- Paying for clicks from suburbs you would never drive to.
- A phone number nobody answers between jobs.
- Quotes that take three days when a competitor sends one in an hour.
- Spending on awareness when the problem is that nobody rings twice.
Worth doing, rarely worth paying for.
Job photos on a profile and a page do real work: they prove the standard and they feed the local signals. Paying an agency a retainer to post them for a trade business almost never returns the money. Take the photos on the job, send them once a week, and spend the retainer on something that gets found.
Cost per booked job, nothing else.
Pick one number and hold it. Every channel gets judged on what it costs to put a signed job on the board. It makes the comparison honest across things that look nothing alike, and it kills the argument about whether impressions matter.
Straight answers.
What should a tradie spend on marketing?
Start from the job you want more of and what it is worth. A channel that books jobs below your margin can scale; one above it cannot, no matter how good the report looks.
Do tradies need social media?
For proof, yes. As a paid channel, almost never. Photos of finished work carry more weight than anything written about the business.
Ads or SEO first?
Ads if you need the phone to ring this month. SEO underneath it either way, because it gets cheaper per job the longer it runs.
What about lead-buying platforms?
They sell the same job to several trades, so you compete on price from the first call. Useful to fill a gap, bad as the only channel.
Not sure which one to fix first?
Tell me what you're spending and what's booking, and I'll tell you where the next dollar does the most.