Agency, freelancer or do it yourself: how a plumber should decide
What plumbing marketing really costs, the red flags in a pitch, which work to keep in house, and why any honest offer starts with proof instead of a contract.
Every plumbing company owner gets the same call. Someone found your listing, noticed you are not ranking for "plumber" in your city, and would like $2,500 a month plus a 12-month agreement to fix it. They have a slide about page one.
You do not need to become a marketer to make this decision well. You need to know what each option costs, what it can and cannot do, and what a bad offer sounds like.
What the three options actually cost
Do it yourself. Free in money, four to six hours a week in time. Realistically an owner can run the Google Business Profile, the review process, and the past-customer texts. Those three are also the highest-return work in the whole list, which is inconvenient news for anyone selling you something else.
Freelancer. $500 to $1,500 a month, or $50 to $110 an hour. Good for one defined job: build the site, run the Google Ads account, edit the video. Weak on coordination. If you hire three freelancers, you are the project manager, and you already have a job.
Agency. $1,000 to $4,000 a month for a small local service business, plus ad spend. Under $800 a month you are buying a checklist and an offshore contractor. Over $5,000 a month you are subsidizing an account manager and a slide deck unless you are doing serious volume across multiple markets.
For most one to five truck plumbing companies the honest answer is a mix: keep reviews and the Google profile in house, pay someone for ads and the website.
Keep these in house, no matter what
- The review ask at the door. No vendor can make your techs ask, and asking is where reviews come from. The reviews guide is the whole system.
- Answering the phone. Nobody sells your work like you do.
- Photos from real jobs. Techs texting a photo to one number costs nothing and feeds every channel.
- Your pricing. Never let a marketing vendor set your prices.
Red flags in the pitch
A 12-month contract before any work is done. In a service that produces leads within 30 days, a year-long lock is protection for the vendor, not for you.
Guaranteed rankings. No one controls Google's results. The only honest guarantee is about work delivered, not position achieved.
A guaranteed number of leads with no definition of a lead. Ask what counts. If a form fill from three states away counts, the number is meaningless.
They own your accounts. If the Google Ads account, the Business Profile, the domain or the website is in the vendor's name, you are renting your own company. Everything must be created in your name with you as owner and them as a user you can remove in one click.
No call recording or lead tracking. If they cannot show you the actual calls, they cannot show you results and neither can you.
Setup fees over $1,500 with no deliverable attached. Ask what the fee builds. If the answer is "onboarding," it is a cancellation penalty collected in advance.
They will not tell you who does the work. Ask for the name of the person in your ad account. If the answer is a department, expect a template.
A monthly report of impressions, reach and rankings. Those are not results. Calls, booked jobs and cost per booked job are results.
The questions to ask on the call
- Who owns the ad account, the website and the domain when I leave, and can you send me that in writing.
- What is the total monthly fee and how much of it is management versus ad spend.
- What will you do in the first 30 days, specifically.
- Can I see two plumbing accounts you run now, with numbers.
- What is the shortest commitment you offer.
- How do you measure a lead, and can I hear the calls.
- Who answers when I text on a Saturday.
Any vendor worth hiring answers all seven without hedging.
Why proof should come before the contract
You would not install a $9,000 repipe and then send the homeowner a bill they had not seen. The same logic applies in reverse to marketing. An owner should see the phone behave differently before money changes hands.
That is why every service on this site is offered as a free 14-day trial with no card and nothing to cancel. It is not a discount and it is not a lead magnet with strings. Two weeks is enough to see whether calls change, and if they do not, you have lost a setup call and nothing else.
Ask any vendor you talk to for the same shape of offer. A short paid pilot, a 30-day out, anything that puts the risk on the side of the person making the claim. The ones who refuse are telling you what they think of their own results.
A sensible first year for a plumbing company
- Months 1 to 2: fix the Google Business Profile, start the review process, turn on missed-call text-back. Mostly free, mostly in house. See the profile guide and the missed calls guide.
- Months 2 to 3: build or rebuild the website with real service pages and price ranges. $2,000 to $6,000 once.
- Months 3 to 6: Local Services Ads and a tight Search campaign, $1,500 to $3,000 a month in spend.
- Months 6 to 12: add Meta for water heaters and repipes, add retargeting, add the past-customer sequence.
Doing it in that order matters. Ads pointed at a shop with 21 reviews, no website and an unanswered phone pay for your competitor's education. 28.7% of plumbing companies still have no site listed, and plumbers with one carry a median of 39 reviews against 6 without.
Frequently asked
Is a plumbing-only agency better than a general one? Sometimes, but ask whether they run accounts in your city already. A vendor with a competitor across town has a conflict they will not mention.
What is a fair management fee on ad spend? Flat $600 to $1,500 a month for a small account, or 12% to 20% of spend on larger ones. Percentage-only fees quietly reward spending more.
How long before I judge results? Thirty days for calls, 90 for booked jobs and cost per acquisition. Anyone asking for six months before you look at numbers is asking for too much.
Every service on this site runs free for 14 days, in your own accounts, no card. Start on the free trial page or text or call (385) 832-6175.