Most advice for tradesmen assumes you have an afternoon spare, a budget and an interest in the subject. You have none of those, and should not need them.
So this page treats marketing for tradesmen as a time budget rather than a strategy. The free hour first, then the paid things worth it. There are real numbers in here from an account we run, because anyone giving marketing advice should show what it produced.
For most trades businesses the work arrives from four places: people you have already worked for, people they told, the Google map result when someone searches your trade and their town, and the lead platforms you pay per enquiry. The first two are cheapest and least controllable. The third is the one almost nobody has set up properly. The fourth is the one most tradesmen overpay for.
The cheapest work you will ever get, and the least controllable. You cannot switch it on in a quiet month.
01
Word of mouth. Same strength, same weakness. It arrives when it arrives.
Someone searches your trade and their town. This is the one almost nobody has set up properly, and it is the one you own.
03
Pay per enquiry. This is the one most tradesmen overpay for, and the one you rent rather than own.
The whole of marketing for tradesmen is moving work from the fourth bucket into the third. A platform lead is rented, a search result is owned. When you stop paying a lead platform the phone stops that afternoon. When you stop investing in your own listing it fades over months, and you can restart it.
Not a strategy, a list. It is free, takes an hour, and beats most of what people pay for.
Not claim it. Finish it. Primary category set to the work you want more of, service areas listed, every service typed in as its own entry. This is the highest return hour in trade marketing and most profiles are half done.
Google has a service-area setting for exactly this. You do not have to publish where you live to rank in the towns you cover.
Yours, not stock. Phone shots are fine. Uploading consistently beats one perfect batch.
Website, Google, Facebook, every directory. Same format, same spacing. Inconsistency quietly holds back local rankings and costs nothing to fix.
Send it the day you finish, from the driveway, while they are pleased. The timing beats the wording.
Paid advertising suits a trades business in three situations: you are new and nobody knows you, you have moved into a new area, or you have a quiet patch to fill and cannot wait four months for search. It does not suit you if your diary is full for eight weeks, and any agency saying otherwise is selling.
Here is what it produced on an account we run. The Timber Design Studio is a timber frame design consultancy selling to self-builders, developers and manufacturers, so the audience is adjacent to yours rather than identical. The mechanics are the same. Between 28 June 2023 and 28 July 2026 the account produced 360 leads at an average of £4.64 each. One creative alone produced 230 of those. The best campaign averaged £2.04 a lead. A traffic campaign we tried averaged £53.13 a lead, which is why it was switched off.
Per lead, on the campaign that worked hardest.
Across 360 leads and three years.
The traffic campaign. Same audience, wrong structure.
To find the one creative that produced 230 leads.
The lesson is not the £4.64. It is that we ran 19 creative variants to find the one that worked. Anyone telling you the first ad will be the good one has not run many ads.
Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Rated People, Bark. Tradesmen tend to have strong feelings either way, so here is the even version.
Enquiries from day one with no build-up. For a new business with no local reputation that is genuinely valuable.
You are quoting against three or four others on price, and the relationship belongs to the platform. Your reviews live there.
Use them while you build the thing you own, and judge them on cost per job won, not cost per lead. A £30 lead you win one in three of is a £90 job cost, which may well be fine. One in twelve is not.
The mistake is not using them. It is using them for six years and never starting on the listing and website that would have made them optional.
It depends on whether you are filling a gap or growing, and on your average job value. A firm doing £3,000 kitchens and one doing £60,000 extensions should not spend the same. What we can tell you is the order: the free hour first, then the website, then ads.
You need to be findable. Social is optional and suits some trades far more than others. Groundworks, plant and roofing do well. Domestic electrical work generally does not.
The principles hold, but search gets more valuable as job value rises. Our guide to SEO for builders covers that, and if you already spend on ads, the figures in construction lead generation are the ones to compare against.
Send us your trade and your area. We will look at your Google listing, your website and the terms people search in your patch, and tell you the one thing holding you back. Half an hour, no charge.
Knox Growth is a construction marketing agency working with building and trade firms across the UK. Everything here is what we would do ourselves, in the order we would do it.
