Ask "how much should a local home improvement business spend on marketing?" and you will get the same non-answer everywhere: a percentage of revenue, somewhere between vague and useless. We suspect the question behind your question is different anyway. After a bad experience or two, what you really want to know is whether marketing is worth spending anything on at all.
Fair question. Here are real numbers.
What a realistic budget looks like
For a home improvement business selling jobs worth £3,000 to £30,000 or more, a sensible starting point for paid advertising is £1,500 to £2,500 per month in ad spend, plus management.
Businesses in competitive markets or chasing aggressive growth typically run £3,000 or more.
Illustrative figures, and every market differs, but if someone promises meaningful lead flow on £200 a month, be sceptical. That budget buys a handful of clicks in most home improvement categories, not a pipeline.
What it should produce
In most home improvement categories, well-run campaigns generate quality leads at between £15 and £60 each, with prices varying by trade and job value. A £1,500 monthly spend at £30 per lead means roughly 50 enquiries.
Follow the maths through with conservative rates: 50 enquiries, around half becoming quotes with decent follow-up, and a quarter of those quotes won, gives you roughly six jobs. At an average job value of £8,000, that is around £48,000 of revenue from a monthly investment in the low thousands.
Your numbers will differ. And the platform lead won rates differ, too - expect it to be higher on Google, and lower on Meta. One of our Google ad clients has a 90-100% lead conversion rate to appointments - amazing!
The point is that this is the calculation, and any agency you work with should be able to build it with you, with your real figures, before you spend a pound.
What you should see in the first 90 days
Month one: campaigns live, leads arriving, early cost per lead visible. Month two: costs improving as data accumulates, first quotes converting. Month three: a clear picture of cost per lead, cost per appointment, and revenue attributable to the spend.
You should not expect full profitability in week two. You should absolutely expect visible momentum and honest reporting, though!
What a poor return looks like, and what it means
Red flags: no booked appointments, cost per lead climbing month after month with no explanation, reporting built on clicks and impressions rather than jobs and revenue, and no one able to tell you what a lead actually costs you. A poor return is not proof that marketing does not work. It is proof that particular marketing is not working, and the diagnosis is nearly always targeting, offer, or follow-up. All fixable, but only if someone is measuring properly.
The only number that matters
Judge marketing on one metric: revenue back per pound in. Everything above exists to serve that. We build this exact model with businesses before they commit, using their job values and their market. No hedging, just the maths.
Want to see what the numbers would look like for your business? [Get in touch here.]
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