“Should we be doing TikTok, or is it all Google now.” Some version of that lands here most weeks, and it starts at the wrong end of the problem.
Forty-six percent of small businesses name digital marketing and online advertising among their best sources of customers, and the number splits hard by wallet: 37% among businesses spending under $1,000 a month against 71% among those spending $10,000 or more 1. Advertising is a top source of customers for the people who fund it properly. Below that line, the cheapest customer available to you this month is one who already paid you once.
Owners searching how to get more customers for my business are looking for a channel. What follows is an order instead, and the channel arrives fourth.
That 46% is two different companies wearing one statistic
Thirty-seven against 71 is a gap in budget 1, and budget decides what a month of data is able to tell you. At a thousand dollars a month across every channel you are running, no single campaign gets enough volume in a month to prove or disprove itself, so the owner spends a year unable to say whether the money worked. At ten thousand, the same owner has a clear read within six weeks.
This is why the advice to “start small with ads and scale what works” is close to useless for a business with a thousand-dollar budget. There is no signal to scale. There is a scattering of clicks across four services and six suburbs, and a nagging feeling that somebody is stealing from you.
The order below exists to keep you out of that trap until you can enter the auction at a size where it answers questions.
Start where the phone numbers already are
Open your invoicing software, pull every job from the last twenty-four months, and sort by gross profit rather than revenue. The top forty names on that list are the closest thing to free money in your business.
Price the alternative first so the comparison is real. Our published HVAC band puts a bought inquiry between $45 and $130 with a $75 median, and about 30% of those inquiries become customers, so a booked job costs roughly $250 in media at the median. You can see the same figures for your trade in the lead cost calculator. A call to somebody who already wrote you a check costs you the four minutes it takes to make it.
The call needs a reason that belongs to them specifically: the capacitor you flagged as marginal in April, or the second system in the basement they said they would deal with later. Generic check-in calls get treated as sales calls, because that is what they are, and they go nowhere.
Most of these calls will still go nowhere. Forty calls at a 10% take rate is four jobs, and four jobs is a week of revenue that arrived on a Tuesday afternoon for the cost of a Tuesday afternoon.
Count the ask, because you cannot count the referral
Referrals are the largest source of customers for small businesses and the least managed, and the reason is that owners treat them as weather. We went through the mechanics of building them deliberately in how to grow a plumbing business, and the piece of it worth repeating here is the measurement.
You cannot manage referrals by counting referrals, because they arrive months later and the customer rarely says why they called. You can manage the ask. Put a yes-or-no field on the job ticket for whether the tech asked, then read the ratio at the end of every month. When a shop tells us referrals have dried up, our read is that the asking dried up first, and the job tickets will settle it in an afternoon.
The other lever is who you ask. One satisfied homeowner sends you one neighbor. A business that meets your customer before you do sends you a call a month for years: a home inspector for a plumber, an insurance adjuster for a body shop, a wedding planner for a med spa. Five of those relationships are worth more than five hundred asks, and they cost lunch.
Half of owners name their own website, and most sites have not earned it
More than half of small businesses cite organic and direct website traffic among their top sources of customers 1. Read the word “direct” carefully. Direct traffic is people typing your name into a browser, which means they already heard about you from a neighbor or a truck. Your site is not finding those customers. It is either closing them or losing them.
So the site has one job, and it is answering the two questions a stranger asks before calling: what this costs, and how soon somebody can be standing in their kitchen. A price range on a page loses you the customers who were never going to pay it, which is the point.
Forty-two percent of small business owners have less than an hour a day to give marketing 2, which argues for a site built once to answer those questions rather than a site that needs feeding every week. The blog can wait. The price cannot.
Where advertising becomes the right next dollar
If you are under roughly $300,000 a year in revenue, or you cannot say what a customer is worth to you across two years, hiring anyone to run your ads, this firm included, is early. Two things come first: the forty reactivation calls, and a written price on your own page. Both are free, both work this week, and an agency that takes your money before either one is done is selling you traffic pointed at an unanswered question.
The threshold in dollars is easier than the threshold in revenue. You want enough monthly media to buy about thirty inquiries, because thirty is roughly where a month of data starts meaning something. At our published band for general home services, an inquiry runs $25 to $80 with a $45 median, so thirty inquiries is around $1,350 a month at the median and $2,400 if your market sits at the expensive end. Run your own trade through the lead cost calculator before you accept anyone’s proposal, ours included.
Add management on top of that and you are at the level where our own tiers start, $2,500 a month for Starter with a three-month minimum, all posted on the services page. We put the prices in public so an owner can work out on their own whether they are ready, which for a lot of the people reading this means working out that they are not, and we would rather lose that call than take it. The same math shapes how we open accounts for businesses across metro Atlanta.
Three replies this gets
“We’re brand new. There are no past customers to call.”
Then your first customers cost more than everybody else’s, and you should expect that rather than be surprised by it. New businesses get their first twenty customers from people who already know the owner and from the trades working next to them. Buying those twenty through advertising is the most expensive way to get them, and it teaches you almost nothing, because you are still guessing at your price.
“You sell advertising and you just told me to wait.”
Correct. A client who starts before their offer and their phone can carry the volume quits in month four with a bad taste and tells six people about it. That costs us more than the retainer was worth.
“Doesn’t this take longer than turning on ads?”
It is faster. An ad account produces its first phone call in about a week and a defensible verdict in about ninety days. The reactivation list produces a booked job the same afternoon you start dialing, which is why it goes first no matter how big your budget eventually gets.
Sort the invoices by gross profit tonight and take the top forty names. Everything else in this piece can wait until those calls are made.