Hiring a marketing agency as an electrician, or doing it yourself
What marketing help costs an electrical contractor, the red flags in a pitch, what to keep in-house, and why a provider should prove it before billing.
Electrical contractors get called by marketing companies constantly. The pitch is nearly always the same: a promise about page one, a number of leads per month, and a twelve-month agreement that starts before anything has been proven.
Here is the honest framing. Some of this work you should absolutely do yourself. Some of it is worth paying for. And the pricing is knowable enough that you should never be guessing whether a quote is fair.
What you should keep in-house, permanently
Three things. Nobody outside your company can do them, and any provider who claims otherwise is charging you for something they cannot deliver.
Asking for reviews. An agency can send the text and track the count. It cannot make your electrician say the sentence at the customer's door, and the door is where reviews come from. This is your job forever. The reviews guide has the script.
Answering the phone. You can outsource the after-hours answering and automate the text-back, but the booking conversation belongs to somebody who works for you and cares about the booking rate.
Your prices and your offers. No agency knows what a service change should cost in your county or which jobs you actually want. They can present your pricing well. They cannot invent it.
What is worth paying for
Google Ads management. Genuinely technical, genuinely full of ways to waste money, and it needs weekly attention. Fair price: $500 to $1,500 a month, or 10% to 15% of spend above $10,000 a month. Anyone charging $300 is not looking at the account. Anyone charging 25% of a $3,000 spend is charging enterprise rates for a small account.
Website build. A $2,500 to $7,000 project for a five to eight page electrical site, or $150 to $400 a month bundled with hosting and updates. Two to four weeks.
Local SEO and Google profile management. $400 to $1,200 a month. Worth it for the first six months, then arguably maintenance. Much of the value is front-loaded.
Meta ads including creative. $600 to $1,500 a month plus spend. The creative is the part you are really buying.
Missed-call text-back and follow-up automation. $100 to $400 a month all in. The highest return per dollar on this entire list, because it recovers calls you already paid to generate. Run your numbers in the calculator.
A reasonable total for a three to six truck residential electrical company is $1,500 to $4,000 a month in management fees plus $2,000 to $5,000 in ad spend. Above that, ask hard questions. Below $1,000 a month total, you are usually buying a report rather than work.
Red flags in a pitch
- A guaranteed number of leads. Nobody can guarantee lead volume in a local trade market. What they can guarantee is counting things generously enough to hit the number, at which point "lead" includes wrong numbers and supplier calls.
- A twelve-month contract before any work. Standard in the industry and indefensible. Month to month after a short initial term is entirely normal for a competent provider.
- They own your accounts. The single worst outcome. Your Google Ads account, Google Business Profile, domain and website must be in your name, with you as owner and them as a user. If they leave and take the ad account history, you start from zero.
- No call recording. If nobody can play you the calls their campaign produced, nobody knows whether it worked.
- Reporting that leads with impressions. Impressions, reach and clicks are inputs. The report should open with calls, booked jobs and cost per booked job.
- They cannot name another electrical client. Not fatal, since trades share a lot of structure, but they should at least know what a service change is and why an EV charger lead is worth more than an outlet repair.
- Long-term SEO as the only plan. SEO is real and slow. If somebody proposes twelve months of content before a single lead, ask what happens in month two.
The questions to ask on the call
- Whose name will the ad account, the profile and the domain be in?
- What is the notice period, in writing?
- Will I hear recorded calls, and who reviews them with me?
- What will you report weekly, and does it include cost per booked job?
- What do you need from me each month, in hours?
- Can I try one service before signing anything?
That last question is the one worth watching. The answer tells you whether the provider believes their own pitch.
Doing it yourself: what that actually takes
It is genuinely doable, and here is the honest time cost for a working owner:
- Google Business Profile setup: four hours once, then 20 minutes a week for posts and photos.
- Review system: one hour to set up, then five minutes a day of tallying and reminding techs.
- Website: 20 to 40 hours if you build it yourself on a decent platform, and honestly it will be a 6 out of 10.
- Google Ads: eight hours to set up, then one hour every week on search terms and negatives. This is the piece owners most often start and abandon, and an abandoned ad account is worse than none.
- Meta ads: six hours to set up, four hours a month on creative.
Do the profile and the reviews yourself, always. They are the highest-return work in the trade and they cannot be delegated well. Given that 34.6% of electricians have no website and the median listing sits at 7 reviews, the two free hours you spend on the profile put you ahead of a large share of your competition before anyone is paid anything. The benchmark report shows the field.
Get help with the technical, weekly-attention work: ads and the website. That is a defensible split.
Why the trial-first order matters
Opinion, stated as one: a provider who will not run a service before billing does not have confidence in the service. Fourteen days is enough to install missed-call text-back and see recovered calls, enough to build and run a Google Ads campaign and hear real recorded calls, enough to rebuild a Google profile and watch the map ranking move, and enough to produce a first website draft.
It is not enough for SEO, and anybody claiming otherwise is misleading you. Judge SEO at 90 days.
So ask for a trial. If the answer is no, ask why not, and listen carefully to whether the reason is about their risk or about your results.
Frequently asked
Is a national franchise marketing program worth it? Sometimes for brand assets and rate cards. Rarely for lead generation, because a national program cannot adjust to your county, your ticket size or your crew capacity.
What if I have already signed a twelve-month agreement I regret? Read the termination clause, ask for account ownership transfer in writing regardless of whether you stay, and start collecting reviews yourself immediately. That last one is yours to keep no matter who runs the ads.
How long before I should expect results? Missed-call text-back: days. Google Ads: two to four weeks to stabilize. Meta: two to three weeks. Profile and reviews: one to three months for ranking movement. A website: it converts the traffic you already have, so the effect shows as soon as the traffic does.
Every service on this site is offered as a free 14-day trial, in your own accounts, with no card. Text or call (385) 832-6175.