Marketing planning decides where the advertising budget of a home services business is deployed, when it’s spent, and which jobs it goes after. The economics behind it (job value, margin, capacity, and season) decide whether that spend actually makes the business money.
Average Ticket & Marketing for Home Services Businesses
Average ticket is the typical revenue a home services business brings in per job. This guide covers how to calculate it, why a company-wide average can mislead, and how ticket relates to acquisition cost, with margin deciding what's affordable.
Read more →Capacity & Marketing for Home Services Businesses
Capacity and marketing is keeping the demand marketing generates in line with the work a home services business can take on. This guide covers how we pace the marketing to the schedule, and the options when it's light or full.
Read more →Channel Mix for Home Services Businesses
How we decide which marketing channels belong in a home services business's mix, the role each one plays, and how demand type and budget change the balance.
Read more →Competitive Market Analysis for Home Services Businesses
Competitive market analysis shows who's competing for a home services business's customers, where they're visible and what they're leading with. This guide covers what can and can't be known about a competitor, and how to find where the business can stand apart.
Read more →Gross Margin & Marketing for Home Services Businesses
Gross margin shows how much room a job leaves for acquisition, overhead and profit. This guide covers how to calculate it, why markup isn't margin, and how to set a ceiling on what each service can afford to spend winning work.
Read more →Market Selection for Home Services Businesses
Market selection decides which parts of a service area a home services business's marketing works hardest in. This guide covers how we weight budget toward the areas that produce the most valuable work, and how we measure what each area returns.
Read more →Marketing Budgeting for Home Services Businesses
How we build a home services marketing budget from the jobs the business wants, what they're worth and what competitors will spend, then plan, pace and review it across the year.
Read more →Residential vs. Commercial Marketing for Home Services Businesses
Residential and commercial buyers buy the same services in very different ways. This guide covers whether to pursue commercial work, how to keep the two apart, and why each needs its own campaigns, landing pages and measurement.
Read more →Seasonality & Marketing Planning for Home Services Businesses
Seasonality and marketing planning shapes a home services business's annual marketing around predictable changes in demand. This guide covers how we allocate the budget by season, ramp spend as the market moves, and measure the plan year over year.
Read more →Service Mix for Home Services Businesses
Service mix is the balance of services a home services business emphasizes in its marketing. This guide covers how we set it around the work worth winning, and how we measure whether it's working.
Read more →How we plan a marketing budget
At Riley Summers, we custom tailor marketing solutions around the needs of each client. That means a fixed annual budget, allocated by season from the business’s booked-job history and paced to the work the team can take on. Where the budget won’t cover every channel, we trim the peripheral channels first and protect the core.
About The Author
Mark Riley is a marketing executive and the founder of Riley Summers Marketing Group, where he leads customer acquisition strategy for home services businesses across paid search, Google Local Services Ads, local SEO and paid social media. He rose to VP of Digital at a national legal-marketing agency, where the digital programs he led generated a significant share of its revenue. Over a 15+ year career, he has managed more than $70 million in digital advertising spend, much of it in one of the most expensive and competitive advertising categories in North America. He measures marketing by what it costs to win a booked job, not by traffic or lead volume.