Hiring a marketing agency for a concrete company, or doing it yourself
What a fair price is, the red flags in the first sales call, what a concrete contractor can do alone, and why a two-week trial beats a twelve month contract.
Concrete contractors get called by marketing companies constantly. The pitch is always the same shape: page one, exclusive leads in your area, a spot opening up for one contractor per city, and a twelve month agreement to be signed before anyone has produced anything.
Some of those companies do good work. Most sell the same package to every trade and swap the word "plumber" for "concrete" in the templates. This guide is how to tell the difference, what things actually cost, and what you can do yourself.
What you can genuinely do alone
More than you think, and it is the highest-return work.
- Your Google Business Profile. Categories, services, hours including Saturday, 60 captioned photos, weekly posts, seeded Q and A. An afternoon plus 20 minutes a week. Nobody will do this better than you because nobody else knows the difference between exposed aggregate and a salt finish. The profile guide is the checklist.
- Reviews. Ask on strip day, every job. No agency can make your foreman say the sentence. This is the single biggest lever in a trade where the median company has 7 reviews.
- Photos and video. Before and after pairs from the same spot, a pour time lapse, a stamp release reveal. Your phone is fine. This is the raw material every paid channel needs.
- Answering the phone faster. Missed-call text-back costs under $100 a month and does not need an agency.
Do those four and you will beat most of the 80,873 concrete companies on Google without spending a marketing dollar.
What is genuinely worth paying for
- Google Ads management. The negative keyword work, conversion tracking, call recording and weekly search term pruning are tedious and technical, and the cost of doing it badly is measured in thousands of wasted clicks.
- A real website. Not because you cannot use a template builder, but because speed, service pages, structured data and a working quote form take skill you do not need to acquire.
- Meta ads. Mostly for the editing and testing discipline. The raw footage should still be yours.
- Bookkeeping. Unrelated to marketing until the day you try to work out which channel actually paid, at which point it is the whole thing.
What a fair price is
Ranges for a residential concrete company doing $500,000 to $3 million a year:
- Google Ads management: $500 to $1,500 a month, or 10% to 20% of ad spend, whichever is higher. Ad spend is separate and should be billed to your own card in your own account.
- Meta ads management: $400 to $1,200 a month including creative.
- Local SEO and Google profile management: $300 to $900 a month.
- Website build: $1,500 to $6,000 one time, or $150 to $400 a month for build, hosting and updates.
- Missed-call text-back and follow-up automation: $50 to $200 a month.
- Full service, several channels together: $1,500 to $4,000 a month.
Above $5,000 a month, the work should include a dedicated person you can name, weekly calls and reporting on booked jobs, not leads. Below $500 a month for anything described as "full service SEO," expect a template site and a monthly report generated by software.
Red flags in the first call
"We guarantee page one." Nobody controls Google's results. What can be guaranteed is work performed, not position.
"We have exclusive leads in your area." This is usually a lead broker selling the same lead to three contractors, or it is an ad account you will never own. Ask who owns the phone number and what happens to the leads when you stop paying.
A twelve month contract with a setup fee. In a trade with a season, a twelve month agreement signed in March means you pay through a winter you got nothing from. Month to month after any genuine setup period is reasonable; a year with a cancellation penalty is not.
They will not build in your accounts. Your Google Ads account, your Business Profile, your Meta account, your domain. If a company builds a site on a domain registered to them, you are renting your own business name. Ask before you sign: "Whose name is on the domain and the ad account?"
They cannot tell you what a concrete lead should cost. Anyone who has run this trade knows residential flatwork leads land roughly $45 to $150 in most metros. Vagueness here means they have never done it.
Reporting in impressions and clicks. You do not sell impressions. Ask for calls, cost per lead, and booked jobs. If they cannot produce booked jobs, ask for calls over 60 seconds.
No mention of your phone answering. Any competent partner asks how calls get answered before they spend a dollar of your money, because paid traffic into a voicemail is the fastest way to waste it. See the speed to lead guide.
The questions to ask them
- Show me a concrete contractor you work with now and what their cost per booked job is.
- Whose name is on the ad account, the domain, and the tracking number?
- What is the first thing you would change on my Google profile, right now, on this call?
- What negative keywords do you use for concrete? A real answer includes countertops, jobs, and ready mix.
- What happens if I stop in month three? What do I keep?
- Who actually does the work, and are they in the country I am being billed from?
Question three is the fastest filter. Anyone who has looked at your listing for 60 seconds can name something. Anyone who has not will change the subject.
Why a trial beats a contract
You would not hire a finisher without watching him pull a screed. The same logic applies here, and it is the reason every service on this site is offered as a free 14-day trial with no card.
Two weeks is enough to see calls from ads, enough to see reviews move if the crew is asking, and enough to know whether the person you are talking to returns messages. It is not enough for local SEO or AI search to fully mature, and anyone honest will tell you that before you start rather than after.
What you should expect from any trial, ours or someone else's: work built in your own accounts, a written price quoted before it starts, nothing charged during it, and everything built stays yours if you walk. If a company will not do a trial in a trade this seasonal, ask yourself what they think you would learn in two weeks.
Frequently asked
Should I hire a local agency or a remote one? It does not matter much for ads. It matters for photo and video, where somebody has to physically stand on your job site, and that person can be a local freelancer at $300 a day rather than an agency.
Can my nephew do this? For the profile, the photos and the reviews, yes, and he should. For ad accounts with real spend, an untrained person will cost you more in wasted clicks than a manager charges.
How long before I judge it? Ads: 45 days. Reviews: 30 days. Website: judge the draft, then 90 days for traffic. Local SEO and AI search: a quarter. Anyone promising faster on the last two is guessing.
Every service on this site runs as a free 14-day trial, in your accounts, with no card. Start by reading the benchmark report so you know what you are being compared against. Text or call (385) 832-6175.