Free tool · No email required

Contractor Marketing Plan Builder

Seven questions about your trade and your numbers. You get back a real twelve-month plan — what to fix first, which channels in what order, how to split the budget, and your break-even cost per lead measured against your trade's actual 2026 benchmarks. Nothing is gated. Print it, or email it to yourself.

Start building How it works

Runs entirely in your browser · Takes about four minutes · Benchmarks last reviewed August 15, 2026

Questions, most of them a single tap

Months of sequenced actions, phased in order

2026

Lead-cost benchmarks, cited by source and date

Cost, and no email address required to see it

Build your plan

Step 1 of 7 · Your trade

What trade are you in?

This sets which 2026 lead-cost benchmarks we measure you against.

What trade is it? Optional — it goes on your plan

No published cost-per-lead benchmark exists for most specialty trades. Your plan will use blended home-services figures for orientation and will say so plainly rather than presenting them as your trade’s numbers.

Where is the business right now?

Growth stage changes the right answer more than trade does.

How big is your service area?

Radius drives how many pages, profiles and campaigns the plan needs.

What does an average job invoice at?

Your typical completed job, not your biggest one. Ballpark is fine.

What's your gross profit margin?

What's left after materials and labor, before overhead. Most trades run 25–45%.

5%70%

Out of 10 real leads, how many become jobs?

Leads that turn into signed work — not estimates given, jobs booked.

Tap a number. Most contractors land between 2 and 4.

What can you put toward marketing each month?

Be realistic. A plan you can't fund isn't a plan.

$ /mo

Now rank what matters most

Drag to reorder, or use the arrows. Your plan sequences around your top priority.

1 More leads, fastI need the phone ringing sooner rather than later
2 Lower cost per jobI'm getting work but paying too much for it
3 Better quality leadsToo many tire-kickers and price shoppers
4 Stop renting leadsI want channels I own, not marketplace fees

The arithmetic, longhand

What is a break-even cost per lead, worked all the way through?

Your break-even cost per lead is your gross profit per job multiplied by your close rate. It is the most you can pay for one lead before the first job stops making money. Here it is with real numbers, so you can check the tool's arithmetic against your own.

Worked example — a typical remodeling job

AFC · No. 003

Average job value What a typical completed job invoices at $8,500

Gross profit margin After materials and labour, before overhead × 30%

Gross profit per job $8,500 × 0.30 $2,550

Lead-to-job close rate One booked job for every four real leads × 25%

Break-even cost per lead $2,550 × 0.25 — your ceiling $638

Against that ceiling, a $57 plumbing lead on Local Services Ads is not expensive — it is a rounding error. A $183 non-branded Google Ads lead still clears comfortably. The number is also deliberately conservative: it counts only the first job, and ignores repeat work, referrals and maintenance agreements, all of which raise the real ceiling.

The lever most contractors overlook is the close rate. Moving from 25% to 35% on the same job value and margin lifts the ceiling from $638 to $893 — a 40% increase, bought with a better first phone call rather than a bigger budget.

The method

How does the plan builder decide what to recommend?

It runs one calculation and then reads it against published 2026 lead costs for your trade. Your break-even cost per lead is your gross profit per job multiplied by your close rate. That single number determines which channels can work for you at all — everything else in the plan follows from it.

Step one

Your ceiling comes first

If your average job is $8,500 at a 30% margin, each job carries $2,550 in gross profit. At a 25% close rate you need four leads per job, so you can afford up to $638 per lead before the first job loses money. That's your ceiling, and it's the only number that decides whether a channel is viable for you.

Step two

Real benchmarks, not estimates

We compare your ceiling against published 2026 cost-per-lead data for your specific trade — Local Services Ads and Google Ads figures drawn from tracked contractor spend, with the source and date shown. Where no trade-specific benchmark has been published, the plan says so rather than inventing one, and it will not call an unverified estimate a benchmark.

Step three

Sequence beats selection

Knowing which channels work isn't the same as knowing what to do first. The plan orders twelve months around your stage, your budget and your ranked priorities — because a contractor spending $500 a month across five channels does worse than one spending it on the right two.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you choose to email the plan to yourself. There's no account, no unlock step, and no follow-up sequence waiting for you. If you want a person to look at your actual site and market, that's the free audit — also no obligation.

Tape measure, framing square and marking tools laid out beside a written contractor marketing plan

Measure first

Nobody bids a job without measuring it.

You wouldn't quote a roof from the driveway, and you shouldn't buy marketing without knowing what a lead can cost you. That's the entire idea behind this tool: work out the number first, then decide what to spend. It takes four minutes and it will occasionally tell you not to spend anything at all.

Run my numbers

What you get back

What is actually in the twelve-month plan?

Six sections. Your numbers with a verdict, your ceiling measured against real 2026 lead costs, a budget split with dollar amounts, three phases of sequenced actions, five things you can do this week that cost nothing, and a realistic timeline. All of it printable, none of it gated.

Section 1

Your numbers, with a verdict

Break-even cost per lead, gross profit per job, leads needed per booked job, and how many jobs a month it takes to cover your budget. Then a plain verdict: the numbers work, the numbers are tight, or paid advertising will not clear your ceiling yet. That last one appears more often than you might expect, and it is the most useful result the tool produces.

Section 2

Your ceiling vs. real lead costs

Every channel with published 2026 data for your trade, each flagged profitable or above your ceiling, with the source and date attached. Where no trade-specific figure has been published, the row says so and the plan uses labelled blended home-services averages instead of quietly substituting a number.

Section 3

Budget split in dollars

Not percentages you have to do arithmetic on — actual dollar amounts per channel at your stated budget, weighted by your top priority. It also tells you what annual revenue that budget is consistent with at the 6–12% of revenue benchmark, which is often the first time a contractor sees whether they are underspending for the size they want to be.

Section 4

Three phases, in order

Months 1–2 foundation, months 3–6 demand, months 7–12 compound. The contents change based on your trade, stage, service area, budget band and ranked priorities — a seasonal HVAC company with a tight ceiling gets materially different instructions from a multi-city roofer with room to spend.

Section 5

Free wins for this week

Five or six things that cost nothing and can be started today: profile completeness, review requests, replying to existing reviews, a tappable phone number, and response speed. If your close rate is low the plan adds a sixth about tightening the first phone call, because at that point the conversation is worth more than the ad budget.

Section 6

What to expect, and when

Days 1–30, 30–90, months 4–8 and 6–12, with what should be visible at each stage. Paid produces booked work inside the first month and typically pays back in 60–90 days. Search engine optimization generally takes six to twelve months to fully pay back. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is selling you something.

The part most plans miss

Why does the order matter more than the channel list?

Because almost every contractor already knows the channel names. What nobody hands them is the order, and the order is where the money is won or lost. A budget spread thinly across five channels reliably performs worse than the same budget dominating the right two.

There are three reasons sequence beats selection, and they compound.

Foundation first, because everything else leaks through it. Traffic arriving at a page that converts at 1% instead of 4% wastes three quarters of whatever you paid to get it. Fixing the conversion path is cheap, fast, and permanently multiplies every channel you switch on afterwards. Doing it second means paying to learn the same lesson.

Fast channels buy time for slow ones. Paid search produces booked work inside a month. Organic search takes four to eight months to reach competitive terms. Running paid first funds the wait rather than sitting through it — but only if the paid channel clears your ceiling, which is exactly what the plan checks before recommending it.

Compounding needs a head start. Rankings, reviews and brand recognition all get cheaper the longer they run. Month twelve costs less per booked job than month three, but only for work that began in month one. A plan that leaves organic until "later" is a plan that never reaches the cheap part.

Contractor SEO performance dashboard showing ranking and lead growth compounding over twelve months — The compounding half only compounds for work that started in month one.

Reading your result

What do the different verdicts actually mean?

The plan returns one of four, depending on how your break-even ceiling compares against the cheapest channel with published data in your trade. Each one leads somewhere different, and none of them is a dead end.

Verdict 01

Paid will not clear your ceiling

Your break-even sits below the cheapest channel available. Paid acquisition would lose money on the first job. The fix is upstream of advertising — raise average job value, improve margin, or lift close rate. The plan shows exactly how far a ten-point close-rate improvement moves your ceiling, and puts you on free channels meanwhile.

Verdict 02

Workable, but thin

You can afford the cheapest channel, but not by much. This is where focus matters most: one channel done properly, geographic targeting kept tight, and lead disputes filed weekly. Lead quality and close rate become the real levers, because a few points of close rate move the ceiling further than any bidding strategy will.

Verdict 03

The numbers work

Real room between your ceiling and the market rate. You can run paid profitably and still fund organic underneath it, which is the combination that compounds. This is where the phased plan earns its keep, because the temptation at this stage is to switch on everything at once.

Verdict 04

Room to compete aggressively

Your ceiling sits well above every published figure in your trade, which is typical of high-ticket work. The constraint is usually crew capacity rather than lead cost, so the plan is built around what you can actually deliver rather than how much you could theoretically spend.

The bottleneck

Why does the plan always start with your website?

Because every channel eventually sends people there. Search, ads, the map pack, a truck wrap, a referral checking you out — all of it funnels to the same page. If that page doesn't convert, everything upstream of it is paying to lose customers more efficiently.

Here's the arithmetic that makes it the first item in almost every plan we generate. Say you get 500 visitors a month. At a 1% conversion rate that's five leads. At 4% it's twenty. Same traffic, same spend, four times the work. Buying more visitors to fix a conversion problem is the single most expensive mistake in contractor marketing.

There's a second reason it comes first: phone leads convert dramatically better than form submissions. Industry data published in 2026 puts phone leads around a 46% conversion rate against 8–12% for forms, with 37% of phone leads closing on the first call. If your number isn't visible in the header of every page, tappable on mobile, you're routing your best-converting lead type into your worst-converting channel.

Source: Foundry CRO home services benchmarks, April 2026.

Want that measured rather than guessed at? The website scorecard runs 25 checks and gives you a graded fix list.

Contractor lead generation dashboard showing incoming phone calls, new leads and appointments booked — Phone leads convert several times better than forms. Make yours impossible to miss.

Questions

About this tool

Is the marketing plan builder really free?

Yes, and there is no email wall. The plan generates in your browser and you can read it, print it or save it as a PDF without giving us anything. Emailing it to yourself is optional, and if you use that option we see a copy, which is the only benefit we get from offering it.

How is my break-even cost per lead calculated?

Gross profit per job multiplied by your close rate. If your average job is $8,500 at a 30% gross margin, that job carries $2,550 in gross profit. At a 25% close rate you need four leads to book one job, so you can afford up to $638 per lead before the first job stops making money. Repeat work, referrals and maintenance agreements all raise that ceiling in practice, which is why the number is conservative.

Where do the lead cost benchmarks come from?

Published 2026 contractor advertising data, cited by source and date inside your plan. Local Services Ads and Google Ads figures come from SearchLight Digital benchmarks covering tracked spend across hundreds of contractors, with additional trade figures from LocaliQ and Estatehub 2026 data. For trades where no specific benchmark has been published — including anything you select under Another trade — the plan uses blended home-services averages and labels every one of them as blended rather than presenting it as your trade's number. It will never show you an invented figure.

My trade is not on the list. Can I still use it?

Yes. Pick Another trade on the first step and, if you like, type what you actually do — it goes on the plan. Landscaping, concrete, masonry, garage doors, gutters, flooring, septic, tree work and dozens of others have no published cost-per-lead benchmark that we could verify, so the plan uses blended home-services figures and says so on every row rather than dressing an average up as your trade's number. Everything else — the break-even calculation, the budget split, the twelve-month sequence — works exactly the same, because that arithmetic depends on your numbers rather than your trade. Worth knowing: specialty trades are often the best value in local search precisely because nobody publishes benchmarks for them, which usually means fewer competitors have bothered to optimise.

What if my budget is only fifty dollars a month?

Then the plan will tell you to spend it on the things that work at that level rather than pretend a small paid campaign will perform. A complete Google Business Profile, a steady review process and a website that converts are the highest-return work available to a contractor with a small budget, and they cost time rather than money. We would rather give you that plan than sell you a campaign that cannot clear your ceiling.

What happens if the plan tells me paid advertising will not work?

It says so directly, and it explains why. That result means your break-even cost per lead sits below what the cheapest verified channel in your trade actually costs, so the first job would lose money. The plan then points at the three levers that move the ceiling — average job value, gross margin and close rate — and puts you on the free channels in the meantime. A tool that told every contractor to start advertising would be an advert, not a tool.

Does this replace hiring a marketing company?

For some contractors, honestly yes. If your service area is small and your plan comes back as profile work, reviews and response time, you can execute all of that yourself and should. The plan is most useful as a way to know what you are buying before anyone quotes you, so you can tell the difference between a real proposal and a package built for the average client.

Can I use it with a keyboard or a screen reader?

Yes. Every control works from the keyboard, including the priority ranking, which responds to the up and down arrow keys as well as dragging and has explicit move buttons. Each step is a labelled fieldset, errors are announced rather than only shown in colour, and the finished plan is ordinary text you can read, print or have read aloud.

Do you store the numbers I enter?

No. The entire calculation runs in your browser and nothing leaves your device unless you choose to email the plan to yourself. If you do use that option, we receive the plan and the inputs you entered so we can answer questions about it. We do not sell data and we do not add anyone to a mailing list.

Want someone to check the plan?

Free audit of your site, your profile, your reviews and the competitors beating you. You keep the findings either way.

Call 1-800-481-8638 Get a free audit