Most marketing advice is written as though every business were the same shape. It is not. A plumber and an orthodontist are both local service businesses, and almost nothing about how they should spend a marketing budget is alike. The difference is not a matter of taste — it follows from a few structural facts about how their customers decide, and once you can name those facts the right priorities become fairly obvious.
What actually makes industries different
Four variables explain most of the variation. Work out where your business sits on each and the correct emphasis usually falls out of the answer.
- Urgency. How long between recognising the need and choosing somebody. A burst pipe is minutes; a kitchen remodel is months. Short urgency rewards being findable at the instant of need; long urgency rewards staying visible across a research period.
- Value per customer. What one job is worth, and whether they come back. This sets what you can afford to pay to acquire someone, and it varies by orders of magnitude between trades.
- Frequency. Once in a lifetime, annually, or monthly. Low frequency means you cannot rely on repeat business and must keep filling the top; high frequency means retention is worth more than acquisition.
- Trust required. How much is at risk if the choice is wrong. Handing over a house key, a legal matter or a child's health demands far more proof than choosing somewhere to eat.
Urgent, high-value, low-frequency: the trades
Emergency plumbing, heating and cooling, roofing, garage doors. The customer has a problem now, will choose within the hour, and may never need you again for years.
Everything here is about being present at the moment of need and answering the phone. A missed call is a lost job, permanently, because the next result down the page picked up. Priorities in order: the profile that puts you in the nearby results, paid search for the emergency terms, and a response process that never drops a call. Refinement of your messaging matters far less than availability.
Considered, high-value: medical, dental, legal, remodeling
The customer will research for weeks, compare several providers, read everything written about you, and make a decision loaded with anxiety. Speed helps but does not decide it.
Here the work is proof. Credentials, results, named practitioners with real biographies, thorough answers to the questions people are too embarrassed or too uninformed to ask, and a volume of recent feedback substantial enough to look like consensus rather than anecdote. Paid search is expensive in these categories — legal in particular has some of the costliest keywords in existence — which means intake quality decides profitability long before creative does. A practice that converts half its enquiries can outbid one that converts a fifth and still earn more.
Frequent, lower-value: restaurants, salons, retail, fitness
Individual transactions are small, decisions are fast and often impulsive, and the entire economics depend on people coming back. Acquiring a customer once and losing them is a loss.
The emphasis shifts almost entirely to retention and presence: an accurate profile with current hours and good photographs, strong recent ratings, a reason to return, and a way to reach past customers directly that does not depend on an algorithm. Spending heavily to acquire a one-time visitor rarely pays here.
The most expensive mistake in industry marketing is importing a playbook from a differently shaped business. Emergency-trade tactics applied to a dental practice produce enquiries that never book; considered-purchase tactics applied to a plumber lose to whoever answered the phone.
What does not change
A short list of things every local business needs regardless of trade, and it is worth getting these right — along with the fundamentals common to all marketing — before worrying about industry nuance.
- A complete, accurate and actively maintained profile in the local results — see Google Business Profile 101.
- A site that loads quickly on a phone and says what you cost.
- A steady flow of recent feedback, and replies to it.
- Somebody answering enquiries fast. This beats almost every clever tactic in every industry we have worked in.
- Consistent business details everywhere you appear online.
Working out your own order
Place yourself on the four variables, then let the extremes decide your first move. High urgency means fix findability and response time before anything else. High trust requirement means build proof before buying traffic. High frequency means fix retention before acquisition. High value per customer means you can afford to pay properly for each one, so cheap channels may be a false economy.
We publish per-trade breakdowns under industry guides, and if you would rather have the order worked out against your own numbers, that is what a proposal does.
Memberships are a useful worked example of the frequency variable, since the whole model depends on retention rather than acquisition — see boost your gym's membership.
Frequently asked questions
- Is industry-specific marketing advice actually necessary?
- The fundamentals are shared, but the order of operations is not, and order is what determines whether a budget works. Generic advice tends to describe the fundamentals and stop, which leaves the most consequential decision — what to fix first — unanswered.
- My business spans two of these categories. What then?
- Split it. A practice offering both routine and high-value elective work is running two different marketing problems, and averaging them serves neither. Separate pages, separate messaging, and separate measurement, even if the budget is shared.
- Which industries are hardest to market?
- Those combining high cost per click with low conversion — legal and some medical specialisms are the classic examples. The difficulty is rarely getting traffic; it is that the traffic is expensive enough that ordinary intake sloppiness turns a viable channel into a loss-making one.
- Does my industry change which platforms I should use?
- Considerably. Visual trades benefit from image-led platforms, business-to-business work belongs on professional networks, and home services do unusually well on neighbourhood platforms. The mistake is choosing by what is fashionable rather than by where your particular customers already are.