How Much Should a Tradie Actually Spend on Marketing?

Most established tradies should spend 5 to 8% of revenue on marketing, and tradies actively trying to grow should spend 8 to 12%. For a trade business turning over $500,000 a year, that’s roughly $2,000 to $5,000 a month all in. The bigger question isn’t the number, it’s the order you spend it in. Get a fast website and an optimised Google Business Profile working before you spend a dollar on ads, or you’re pouring leads into a bucket with a hole in it. This guide gives you the percentage benchmarks by business stage, the exact priority order for the spend, and what each layer should cost in Australia.

Ask ten tradies what they spend on marketing and you’ll get ten different answers, most of them either “nothing, it’s all word of mouth” or “too much, and I’m not sure it works.” Both are symptoms of the same problem: no framework. Here’s the one we use with trade clients.

What percentage of revenue should a tradie spend on marketing?

The benchmark depends on what stage your business is in. A stable business defending its position spends less than one fighting for growth. The U.S. Small Business Administration has long recommended 7 to 8% of revenue as a general small-business marketing benchmark for firms under $5 million in revenue, and Australian trade businesses sit comfortably in that band, skewing higher when actively growing.

One nuance the percentages hide: in your first year these figures feel impossible because revenue is low and every dollar is spoken for. That’s normal. Early on, weight your spend toward the things that compound (website, Google Business Profile, reviews) rather than the things that stop the moment you stop paying.

Where should the money actually go?

Spend in this order. Each layer makes the next one work harder, and skipping a layer wastes the money you spend on the ones after it.

1. A website that converts (from $100/wk all in, built free on a plan). Not a brochure. A fast, mobile-first site with click-to-call, a quote form that actually reaches you, and real photos. Every other dollar you spend drives traffic here. If the site doesn’t convert, nothing downstream matters. This is why a proper tradie website is the foundation, not an afterthought.

2. Google Business Profile (time, or included in a plan). The single highest-ROI asset for a local tradie. A fully optimised profile with the right category, service areas, weekly posts and a steady review flow shows up in the Map Pack, where most “near me” searches convert. This costs almost nothing but attention.

3. Local SEO ($800 to $2,000/mo). Suburb pages, citations, on-page work, and content that ranks you for “[your trade] + [your suburb]”. Slow to start, but the cost per lead falls every month and the asset is yours. This is the compounding core of a trade marketing budget.

4. Paid ads ($500 to $1,500/mo ad spend, plus management). Last, not first. Ads are the accelerant once the foundation exists. They generate leads from week one while SEO builds, then you taper them down as organic takes over. Running ads into a weak site is how tradies conclude “marketing doesn’t work.”

The most expensive mistake tradies make

The classic error is spending the entire budget on ads while the website does nothing. A plumber we looked at was putting $1,800 a month into Google Ads and sending every click to a one-page site with no reviews, a tiny phone number, and a contact form that emailed an address he checked twice a week. His cost per booked job was over $500. The ad spend wasn’t the problem. The bucket had a hole in it. Fixing that bucket is the first thing our SEO for plumbers work does.

We’ve seen the reverse work cleanly too. A landscaper redirected half his ad budget into a proper site and local SEO for two quarters. By month nine, organic enquiries matched what the ads had been producing, at roughly a third of the cost per job, and the rankings kept working while he was on the tools.

How to know if your marketing spend is working

Track one number above all others: cost per booked job. Not clicks, not impressions, not even leads. Divide total marketing spend in a month by the number of jobs that spend actually produced. If you spent $3,000 and won 10 jobs, your cost per booked job is $300. Whether that’s good depends entirely on your average job value and margin.

If you can’t calculate this number, that’s the real finding. Most tradies can’t, which means they’re flying blind on the single metric that decides whether marketing is making or losing money. Fixing the tracking usually matters more than changing the budget.

A realistic 12-month budget for a growing trade business

For a trade business turning over around $500,000 and actively chasing growth, a sensible all-in plan looks like this: months 1 to 3, weight the spend toward the website rebuild and Google Business Profile while local SEO begins. Months 4 to 9, SEO and content are the core, with a modest ads budget filling the gap. Months 10 to 12, organic is producing the bulk of leads and ad spend tapers to cover only the highest-margin services. Total monthly spend stays in the $3,000 to $4,500 range throughout, but what it buys shifts from setup to compounding returns.

You can run this as separate suppliers or as one plan. We structure it as a single monthly figure so the priority order is enforced automatically rather than being a discipline problem. See our pricing page for how the layers are bundled, and SEO for tradies for how the compounding core works.