What doing your own marketing really costs a Coquitlam owner

The short answer

Add up three things: the hours you spend on marketing each month multiplied by your billable rate, the value of enquiries you lose because the work is rushed or skipped, and any money you waste on unwatched ads. Compare that total with a done-for-you fee. If your total is close to or above the fee, outsourcing likely pays. If it is far below, keep the work and schedule it properly.

The rest of this guide shows how to estimate each piece without guessing.

Step 1: Track one month of marketing time

You cannot price what you have not measured. For one month, write down every block of time you spend on marketing, even the 10-minute ones.

Use a simple tally like this:

Owners are often surprised by the last line. The calls from directory sellers, the "quick question" from a web person and the time spent reading ad invoices all add up.

Be honest about tasks you meant to do but did not. Write those down too, with the time they would have taken. They come back in step 3.

Step 2: Put a price on the hours

Multiply your monthly marketing hours by the value of an hour of your time. Which rate you use depends on where the hours come from.

• If they come from the workday, use your billable rate. Those hours displaced paid work.
• If you are fully booked anyway, use your profit per hour, because the real loss is capacity you could have sold.
• If they come from evenings and weekends, use a lower figure, but not zero. Tired owners make worse decisions, and family time has value.

Worked example for a Coquitlam electrician:

• 7.5 hours a month on marketing
• Billable rate $110 an hour
• About two-thirds of the hours come from the workday: 5 hours × $110 = $550
• The rest come from evenings, valued at $40 an hour: 2.5 hours × $40 = $100
• Time cost: $650 a month

That is before counting anything lost to the quality of the work.

Step 3: Estimate the enquiries you lose

Rushed or skipped marketing loses business quietly. You never see the customer who chose a rival because your profile showed old hours or because nobody answered their review question.

Look for these signals and estimate conservatively:

1. Stale profile. Outdated hours, few recent photos, no reply to recent reviews. Google's own help pages note that replying to reviews and collecting more positive reviews can help local ranking.
2. Thin website. One "Services" page for everything, or pages that mention jobs you no longer do.
3. Missed contacts. Calls you never returned, emails answered days late.
4. Unwatched ads. Clicks from searches unrelated to your work, or ads running to areas you do not serve.

Then put a number on it. Suppose you think you lose four enquiries a month to these gaps, you close one in three enquiries, and an average job earns you $500 in gross margin:

• 4 lost enquiries ÷ 3 = about 1.3 lost jobs
• 1.3 × $500 = about $650 a month in lost margin

You can test the estimate later by fixing the gaps for a few months and comparing enquiry counts.

Step 4: Count wasted ad spend

If you run Google Ads yourself, open the search-terms report for the last 30 days. Add up the cost of clicks from searches that could never become your work: job-seekers, do-it-yourself questions, other cities, unrelated services.

Many self-managed accounts show a meaningful share of spend on such searches, because nobody adds negative keywords week by week. Whatever you find, that is money a managed account should recover. In our example, say $200 of a $1,000 monthly budget went to useless searches.

Step 5: Compare the totals

Now put it together:

Compare that with a done-for-you plan. Our Growth plan is $1,999 a month month-to-month, or $1,499 a month on annual billing, plus 5% GST; details are on the pricing page.

In this example, the cost of doing it yourself is roughly equal to the annual-billing price, before counting the extra enquiries a properly run plan should produce. That is a reasonable case for outsourcing. If your total came to $400, the case is much weaker, and the honest answer is to keep the work and do it on a schedule.

Common mistakes in this calculation

• Valuing your time at zero. It is the most common error and makes every option look expensive.
• Counting the ad budget as part of the fee. Ad spend is the same either way; what changes is waste.
• Ignoring the tasks you skipped. The lost enquiries from undone work are often the biggest number.
• Assuming outsourcing removes all your time. Plan on a monthly review and quick replies for photos and approvals.
• Comparing against the cheapest quote you have seen. A plan that does not include weekly work will not recover the lost enquiries.

If you decide to keep doing it yourself

Doing your own marketing can work well if you treat it like a job. Put two fixed blocks in your calendar each week, 45 minutes each, and work through a list:

1. Post one update and two photos to your Google profile.
2. Reply to every new review.
3. Read your ads' search-terms report and add negative keywords.
4. Add or improve one website page every two weeks.
5. Check that hours, phone number and service area are correct everywhere.

If you find you cannot keep the blocks for more than a month, that is useful information too.

If you decide to hand it over

Read the handoff guide first, so you know which accounts to keep in your name and what a fair weekly task list looks like. Then compare our services against your list from step 1.

When you contact us, bring your tally sheet. It makes the first conversation much more useful, because we can see exactly which hours you want gone. Call, text or email us with it, or keep it for yourself as a baseline. Either way, you now know what your marketing really costs.