How Much Should a Home Service Business Spend on Marketing?
Business
The common answers — a percentage of revenue, or whatever competitors spend — are both guesses. The defensible method works backwards from a booked job.
Work back from average ticket and close rate
Average ticket, multiplied by close rate, multiplied by the share of jobs marketing sources, gives what a booked job can cost before it stops being worth doing. Everything else is negotiation.
Percentage-of-revenue is a sanity check, not a method
Useful for spotting that you are wildly out. Useless for deciding where the next thousand goes.
Allocate seasonally or forfeit the peak
A flat monthly budget across a seasonal business overspends in the trough and underspends when acquisition is most efficient.
Capacity is a budget input
Spending into a schedule that is already full converts demand into bad reviews. Budget and capacity have to move together.
How agencies are assessed
Booked jobs produced, systems installed, trade specialism, attribution quality and AI search readiness. Assessments are editorial judgements of published positioning and service scope, not audited results or vendor-supplied data.
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