Contractor Marketing Budget in BC: How Much Should You Spend, and On What?

A contractor marketing budget in BC usually starts from a percentage of revenue: 5 to 10% if you sell mostly to homeowners, and 2 to 5% if you sell mostly to other businesses. That rule of thumb comes from the Business Development Bank of Canada, and it’s a fair place to start. It isn’t where you finish. The right number for a roofer in Abbotsford or an excavation company in Chilliwack depends on how many new jobs you need, what a job is worth, and how much of your work already walks in through referrals.

TL;DR

• BDC’s rule of thumb is 5 to 10% of revenue for companies that sell to consumers and 2 to 5% for companies that sell to businesses.

• A percentage tells you what’s normal. It doesn’t tell you what you need. Build the number from the jobs you want to add.

• Fund the foundation first: a website that converts, a complete Google Business Profile and tracking. Then paid traffic. Then content.

• Follow-up is the cheapest line in the budget and the one most contractors leave out.

• In BC, spend follows the season. A flat amount every month is usually the wrong shape.

What the Canadian benchmarks say about a contractor marketing budget

There isn’t a published benchmark just for BC trades, so the honest starting point is Canadian small business data. BDC’s article on average small business marketing budgets gives two numbers worth knowing:

• The rule of thumb. B2B companies should spend between 2 and 5% of revenue on marketing. For B2C companies the proportion is often higher, between 5 and 10%.

• What businesses actually spend. A 2019 BDC survey of more than 1,400 Canadian businesses found small business marketing costs average just over $30,000 a year. Companies with 20 to 49 employees spend about twice that.

Most residential trades are B2C. If you’re in roofing, HVAC, plumbing, painting, landscaping or residential electrical, homeowners are the customer and the higher range applies. If most of your revenue comes from general contractors, developers or property managers, as it does for a lot of excavation and concrete outfits, you’re closer to the B2B range.

Run the rule against your own revenue and you get a bracket, not an answer. Using BDC’s ranges:

• A residential company doing $500,000 a year lands between $25,000 and $50,000.

• A residential company doing $1 million lands between $50,000 and $100,000.

• A mostly commercial company doing $2 million lands between $40,000 and $100,000.

Two cautions. The survey is from 2019 and covers every industry, not just the trades. And an average tells you what other businesses spend. It says nothing about whether that spending worked.

Build the budget from jobs, not from a percentage

A percentage of last year’s revenue funds last year’s business. If you want to grow, work backwards from the jobs you want to add.

1. Set the new revenue you want from marketing. Leave out referrals and repeat customers. This is the work you need to go out and get.

2. Divide by your average job value. That’s how many jobs you need.

3. Divide by your close rate. That’s how many real quote opportunities you need.

4. Multiply by what a qualified lead costs you. That’s your traffic budget.

5. Add the fixed costs. Website upkeep, software, photos and video, and whoever manages it all.

Here’s the math with made-up numbers, only to show how it works. Say a Chilliwack roofer wants $300,000 in new work next year and the average job is $15,000. That’s 20 jobs. If the company closes one quote in four, it needs 80 real leads. What those 80 leads cost is the number that sets the budget.

That last number is the one you can’t guess, and it’s different for every trade and every town. If you’ve run ads before, your own account will tell you. If you haven’t, our breakdown of what Google Ads cost for contractors in BC explains what drives it.

Then compare the two numbers. If the job-based budget sits inside BDC’s range, you have a plan. If it’s well above, the growth target is too big for one year, or your close rate needs work first.

What a contractor marketing budget in the Fraser Valley has to cover

Most contractors think “marketing budget” means ad spend. Ad spend is one bucket of four.

1. The foundation

A website that makes it easy to call you, a complete Google Business Profile, and tracking that shows where calls and forms came from. These are mostly one-time or occasional costs, and nothing else works without them. Our post on what a contractor website costs in BC covers that line on its own, and our web design for contractors page shows what the site needs to do.

2. Paid traffic

Google Ads and Meta ads. This is the monthly line, and it’s the one you can turn up or down. One thing to know when you set it: Google bills on a daily budget, not a monthly one. According to Google’s help page on average daily budgets, a campaign can spend up to two times its daily budget on a given day, and the monthly limit is 30.4 times the daily budget. So pick the monthly amount you can live with, divide by 30.4, and that’s the daily number to enter.

3. Content

Real photos and video from your jobsites. Your ads, your website and your Google listing all run on it. It doesn’t need to be a big line, but it can’t be zero. Stock photos don’t earn trust with a homeowner in Langley comparing three quotes.

4. Follow-up

A CRM, a missed-call text and a quote follow-up sequence. This is the cheapest bucket and it raises the return on the other three, because every lead you paid for gets chased. If quotes go out and nobody calls back, fix this before you add a dollar to ads.

There’s also a cost that never shows up on an invoice: your time. Google’s page on how local ranking works says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and prominence is built from things like reviews and links. Asking for reviews and keeping your profile current costs hours, not dollars. Count the hours, or pay someone to own them.

What moves the number up or down for BC trades

• How much work is already referrals. A company living on word of mouth can sit at the low end. A company that wants growth beyond its network can’t.

• Stage of business. A newer company with no reviews, no rankings and no name recognition has to buy attention that an established company gets for free. Expect the high end of the range while that reputation is being built.

• How crowded your market is. Surrey and Vancouver have more companies bidding on the same searches than Hope or Agassiz. More competition means a higher cost to be seen.

• Season. Exterior painters, roofers and landscapers in the Lower Mainland sell around the rain. HVAC has a heating season and a cooling season. Put more of the year’s budget into the months before your busy season and less into the months when nobody’s buying.

Two ways contractors waste a marketing budget

Spreading it thin. A small budget split across five channels gives each one too little to work. Pick one traffic source, fund it properly, and add the second when the first is paying for itself.

Stop and start. Cutting to zero every slow season and starting from scratch in the spring means paying to rebuild momentum every year. Turn it down. Don’t turn it off.

Avoiding both is most of what we mean by a system. It’s the idea behind Built Tough’s marketing for BC contractors: one plan where the website, the ads and the follow-up are budgeted together.

Frequently asked questions

How much should a small contractor in BC spend on marketing each month?

Start with BDC’s range of 5 to 10% of annual revenue for a company that sells to homeowners, divide by 12, then shift more of it into the months before your busy season. A flat monthly number is easier to plan but rarely matches when BC homeowners buy.

Is 5% of revenue enough for a contractor in the Fraser Valley?

It can be, if most of your work already comes from referrals and you only need to top up the schedule. If you’re trying to grow, or you’re newer in a crowded market like Abbotsford or Surrey, 5% is usually the floor. Build the number from the jobs you need and see where it lands.

Does a marketing budget include the website?

Yes. A website is a marketing cost, but it’s a one-time or occasional one, so keep it on a separate line from monthly ad spend.

What should I cut first if money gets tight?

Cut the channel you can’t measure. Keep tracking and follow-up, because they cost the least and protect every lead you’ve already paid for. Then lower ad spend before you switch it off.

The bottom line

A contractor marketing budget isn’t a number you copy from another company. It’s a percentage to sanity-check against, a job count to build from, and four buckets to fund in the right order: foundation, traffic, content, follow-up.

If you want help setting that number and building the system behind it, that’s what we do at Built Tough. See how our contractor marketing services in BC fit together. Marketing that works as hard as you do.