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Marketing Budget Allocation Calculator
How Much Should I Spend on Marketing as a Home Service Company? (Roofing, HVAC, Plumbing & More)
One of the most common questions home service business owners ask is:
💰 How much should I spend on marketing for my roofing, HVAC, or plumbing company?
The answer depends on your revenue, competition, and growth goals—but there’s a proven way to allocate your budget for maximum ROI.
That’s why we built this Home Services Marketing Budget Calculator, which helps businesses determine how to spend smarter, not just spend more.
💰 The Right Marketing Budget for Home Service Businesses
Most experts recommend spending 5-10% of your annual revenue on marketing if you want steady growth. However, if you’re aggressively scaling, a 15-20% allocation is often needed—especially in competitive markets.
Here’s a general rule of thumb:
- Stable growth (5-10% of revenue) → Maintain your current lead flow
- Aggressive growth (15-20% of revenue) → Take more market share & expand
- Hyper-growth (20%+ of revenue) → Dominate your service area
For example, if you run a $3M HVAC company, you’d typically spend $150K–$300K per year on marketing. But if you want rapid expansion, you might need to push closer to $450K–$600K.
But how should you allocate that budget? That’s where our calculator comes in.
🔢 Home Services Marketing Budget Calculator: How It Works
We’ve created a dynamic calculator that adjusts your marketing allocations based on your total budget.
🏗️ Here’s how the budget is distributed for home service businesses:
✅ Google Ads + PPC Management (36.8%) → Paid search ads are a fast way to generate leads, especially for emergency services like HVAC repairs, roof leaks, and plumbing emergencies.
✅ Aggressive SEO (18%) → Organic rankings drive consistent leads without ad spend over time. Investing in SEO ensures you own the top spots in Google for high-intent searches.
✅ Facebook Branding & Lead Gen Ads (10%) → Local homeowners aren’t always searching for services, but well-targeted Facebook & Instagram ads keep your business top-of-mind.
✅ Retargeting & High-Intent Digital Ads (4%) → 97% of website visitors don’t convert on the first visit. Retargeting them with ads ensures they come back and call.
📉 What Happens If Your Budget Is Lower?
If you don’t have a full $1M marketing budget, the calculator automatically removes lower-priority items and redistributes funds to high-impact strategies.
✅ Under $700K? → Cuts social media influencer marketing and multi-city microsites
✅ Under $500K? → Removes video marketing but keeps SEO, PPC, and branding ads
✅ Under $350K? → Eliminates in-house social media specialists but keeps core lead-generation strategies
This ensures every dollar is optimized based on your available marketing budget.
🔎 What’s the Best Marketing Mix for HVAC, Roofing & Plumbing?
Each home service niche has slightly different marketing needs, but these principles apply to all:
🔥 HVAC Marketing Budget Strategy
- Paid Search Ads (Google & Bing Ads) are critical for emergency repairs (A/C out, heater broken).
- SEO & Local Map Rankings generate long-term leads for furnace installations, new HVAC systems, and maintenance plans.
- Facebook & YouTube Ads are great for seasonal tune-ups and awareness campaigns.
🏠 Roofing Marketing Budget Strategy
- Storm season? PPC and Google Local Service Ads (LSAs) should be your top spend.
- Long-term SEO investment ensures you rank for searches like “roof replacement near me”.
- Facebook & Instagram Ads work well for neighborhoods hit by hail damage.
🚰 Plumbing Marketing Budget Strategy
- Google Ads dominate for emergency calls like clogged drains, pipe bursts, and water heater failures.
- SEO ensures consistent leads for high-margin jobs like water softeners & whole-home repiping.
- Retargeting ads help recapture leads who searched but didn’t book a service.
No matter your industry, the key is balancing short-term lead generation with long-term marketing efforts like SEO and branding.
🚀 Get Your Custom Marketing Budget Breakdown
Every business is different—but our Home Services Marketing Budget Calculator gives you a personalized spending breakdown based on your total budget and the best-performing digital strategies.
🔹 Stop guessing where to spend your marketing dollars.
🔹 Optimize every dollar for maximum lead flow and ROI.
🔹 Plan your budget like a pro—whether you’re a $500K or $10M business.
👉 Try the Calculator Now and see where your business should be investing!
📢 Want expert help executing your marketing plan? Hook Agency specializes in SEO, PPC, and lead generation for home service companies. Let’s customize a strategy that drives real revenue. 💰
🔗 Contact Us for a Free Strategy Call
🔑 Final Takeaway
There’s no one-size-fits-all marketing budget, but there are proven formulas that ensure your money works harder for you.
💡 Smart spending > just spending more.
💡 Data-driven decisions > gut-feeling guesses.
💡 Organic + paid marketing > relying on one channel.
Try the Marketing Budget Calculator now and start spending smarter. 🚀
5 Quick Stats About Marketing Budgets
- 48% of companies are spending 4-10% of revenue on marketing according to our poll – Source: Hook Agency
- 50%+ of companies say the largest ROI from marketing comes from search-engine related disciplines – including paid search, SEO and content marketing. Source: Hook Agency
- 44.4% of organizations polled said that their top marketing objective was to increase their amount of leads. Source: Hook Agency
- 69.7% of people said they were spending >HALF(!) of their budgets regarding marketing on digital/online marketing for 2021. Source: Hook Agency
- According to Brafton – companies spend 11.2% on average on marketing. Source: Brafton/Gardner CMO
This digital marketing budget calculator gives high’s and lows
We made this tool for people to give them greater clarity and confidence in what they are spending online. If you’re a director of marketing, business owner, or just someone who wants to get more clarity about how the different pieces of digital marketing might fit together for your particular situation – Schedule a consultation now, and we can walk you through some suggestions based on your unique business model.
Commonly Asked Questions About the Marketing Budget Calculator
Why is it important to have a digital marketing budget?
There are a number of reasons its critical to have a digital marketing budget: one being that every aspect of your business should be budgeted. But also, a marketing budget allows you to set your strategy and then make sure those things you planned actually happen. Also, it ensures you stay on target for both estimated and actual marketing costs. And lastly, it makes allocating funds and resources to the appropriate areas better and more refined with every budget (monthly, annually, etc.)
How much should I budget for marketing?
For every 100 dollars, you make in your business – you might spend 10 on marketing, except for in ‘high cost of goods sold’ companies – who may spend 3-5 dollars out of every 100 instead. This according to a cross-section of many surveys of benchmarks for marketing spend in businesses.
How do you calculate marketing costs?
Your marketing costs should correlate with your company’s desire to grow and if you have some attrition in current customers – it should also correlate with maintaining your existing trajectory. Find the benchmarks in your industry – and balance those with your intentions for growth, and test the waters with those numbers, and tweak the budget each year based on your previous year’s budget’s ability to get the results intended. If your previous marketing costs didn’t give a significant R.O.I., try new methods regularly. SEO, E-mail marketing, Video marketing, and Event marketing all seem to have higher than average perceived R.O.I. if done right and regularly.
How do you plan a marketing budget?
Find what companies in your industry are spending, and balance that with your company’s desire for growth, and then start with the highest perceived R.O.I. methods like SEO, event marketing, and video – or whatever those are in your industry. Consult with experts in your industry as much as possible, and then experiment vigorously the first year – pushing further on the methods that start to show a return. Use a template like these to present your plan to other leaders at the organization: hookagency.com/marketing-plan-templates – then hire any appropriate specialists if needed. Send us a message now if getting higher on Google is important in your industry.
Other amazing resources for planning your marketing budget
Ready to take the leap?
“We know what it takes to help get home service businesses more leads with Google. Even if we’re not the right fit, we’ll get you where you need to go.”
- Sydnee Olsen, Sales Lead
