Australian tradesperson using power tools representing web design and marketing for builders and spa

Marketing for builders, plumbers, sparkies and local trades

Your work is good. Your last three customers said so. The problem is that nobody searching right now can tell the difference between you and the bloke charging half your rate with a Facebook page from 2019. I build the website, brand and content that shows the difference before you've even quoted.

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How people actually choose a tradie?

Trades have one of the longest, most cautious buying decisions of any industry I work in — and almost none of it happens where most tradies are spending their marketing money.

Nobody hires a builder off an Instagram Reel. They hire after a sequence of small trust checks, and every one of them is a place you can win or lose the job..

It starts with a recommendation or a search.

Either a mate says "call this bloke," or they type "electrician [suburb]." Both end the same way — they Google your name or your trade, and what comes up decides whether you get a call.

They check whether you look legitimate.

Licence number, ABN, insurance, real photos of real jobs. This takes about twenty seconds and it's a hard filter. No website, or a website that looks abandoned, and you're out before you knew you were in.

They read reviews looking for horror stories.

Didn't turn up. Left a mess. Quoted one price, charged another. Went quiet halfway through. They're scanning for the thing they're most afraid of, and they'll take one detailed bad review over ten generic good ones.

They ask for a quote — from three of you.

This is where most jobs are actually lost. Not on price. On the quote turning up four days late, or being a text message with a number in it, while someone else sent a proper document the same afternoon.

Then they go quiet.

Sometimes for a fortnight. They're waiting on the other quotes, talking to their partner, checking the budget. The tradie who follows up once, politely, wins a surprising number of these. Most never follow up at all.

Closing line

Everything I build for a trade business is aimed at those five moments. Not at follower counts.

What's usually going wrong?

Quotes go out and never come back.

You quote the job, you send it, you hear nothing. You assume you were too expensive. Usually you weren't — the quote took four days, it arrived as a text, and someone else's landed the same day looking like it came from a real business. Price loses fewer jobs than speed and presentation do.

Your website looks like it's from 2014, or you haven't got one.

Worse it's the template job. Built off a stock theme, so it looks identical to every other builder in the state. Same hero image of a hard hat on a blueprint. Same three icons: Quality, Reliability, Experience. Same "we pride ourselves on customer satisfaction."

All your work is on your phone.

Eight years of good jobs sitting in a camera roll. Nobody sees them. Meanwhile the bloke with worse work but a decent gallery is getting the calls, because he's the only one who can actually show what he does.

You're getting the wrong jobs.

Tyre-kickers, tiny jobs miles away, people who want three quotes and were always going with their cousin anyway. That's a positioning problem. If nothing says who you're for and what you do best, you get everyone — and everyone is mostly the wrong ones.

Word of mouth has hit its ceiling.

It got you here and it's not getting you further. Referrals are fantastic and they're finite. When the phone goes quiet for a fortnight there's no second channel to fall back on.

You've been sold marketing before and got nothing.

Someone charged you a monthly fee for boosted Facebook posts and a directory listing. You got a few dud leads and cancelled. Reasonable conclusion: marketing doesn't work for trades. The actual conclusion: that wasn't marketing.

What I'd do about it !

Brand and positioning

Most trade businesses are named after the owner and the trade, with a logo someone's nephew made. That's fine. What's missing is a reason to pick you over the other four quotes.

I work out what you're actually best at and who you're actually for. Heritage renovations, not all renos. Commercial fitouts, not domestic. Emergency callouts within twenty minutes. The high-end kitchen work other builders subcontract to you.

Getting specific feels like it narrows the market. In trades it does the opposite — it's what lets you charge properly and stop competing on price with someone who shouldn't be quoting the same job.