Hiring marketing help for a drywall company: agency, freelancer or yourself, and the red flags
What a fair monthly price looks like for a drywall company's marketing, the questions that expose a bad agency, when doing it yourself is right, and why a trial beats a contract.
The drywall owner's inbox fills with the same pitch every week: "We help contractors get 30 to 50 leads a month, guaranteed." The sender has never finished a ceiling, does not know what a level 5 is, and will put you on a twelve-month contract before a single call comes in. Some of those companies are fine. Most are selling the same template to roofers, plumbers and you. This guide is about telling the difference, deciding whether to hire anyone at all, and what a fair price is.
Do it yourself first, for three things
Three parts of drywall marketing are cheap, fast and better done by the owner:
- The Google Business Profile. Category, services, hours, twenty photos, a post a week. An afternoon to set up, ten minutes a month to keep. The profile guide walks through it.
- The review ask at the walkthrough. Nobody can do this for you; it has to be the person who did the work, at the wall. The reviews guide has the script.
- Missed-call text-back. A $25 to $100 a month service and a text in your own words.
Do those three and you are ahead of most of the 9,203 drywall companies in the dataset, 75% of which have fewer than 10 reviews. Then decide what to hire out.
What to hire out, and what it should cost
A website. Five pages, your photos, price ranges, tap-to-call. A fair freelance price is $800 to $2,500 one time. An agency, $2,500 to $6,000. Monthly "website rental" at $150 to $300 with no ownership is a bad deal for a drywall company that will have the same five pages for years. You must own the domain and the files.
Google Ads management. For a $1,000 to $3,000 a month ad budget, management runs $300 to $800 a month from a freelancer or small agency, or 15 to 20% of spend. Anyone charging $1,500 a month to manage $1,000 of spend is charging you for the privilege. The ad spend itself should be on your own card in your own account, always.
Meta ads. Similar, $300 to $600 a month management on $500 to $1,500 of spend, including creative built from your job photos.
Local SEO and the profile. $200 to $500 a month for ongoing posts, photo uploads, citation cleanup and reporting. More than that for a one-town drywall company is hard to justify.
Everything bundled. A fair all-in for a one or two crew shop, management only, is $800 to $2,000 a month plus ad spend. Pitches at $3,000 to $5,000 a month for a company doing $400,000 a year are out of proportion.
The questions that expose a bad fit
Ask these on the first call and write down the answers:
- "Who owns the Google Ads account, the website domain and the files when I leave?" The only acceptable answer is you.
- "Show me a search terms report from a contractor account you manage." If they cannot explain negative keywords or do not know "drywall jobs" is a problem, they will burn your first $900.
- "What does a drywall repair call cost in a market like mine?" They do not need to be exact; they need a range and a reason. The Google Ads guide has ours.
- "Will I get call recordings?" Yes or walk away.
- "What is the contract length and what happens if I stop after month two?" Anything over month to month after a setup period needs a very good reason.
- "What exactly happens in the first 14 days?" A real answer lists specific things: campaigns built, tracking installed, pages written. A vague answer means a template.
Red flags
- Guaranteed lead counts or guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google.
- A twelve-month contract with an early termination fee.
- They run the ads from their own account, so your history vanishes when you leave.
- They sell the same leads to other drywall companies. That is a lead marketplace, not an agency, and should be priced per lead.
- They cannot name one thing specific to drywall in the first ten minutes: popcorn ceilings, texture matching, the builder-versus-homeowner split, net 30 pay.
- Their own website loads slowly on a phone.
- The reports are about impressions and clicks instead of calls and booked jobs.
When a freelancer is the right call
For a one-crew shop that needs a site and a simple Google Ads account, a competent freelancer is usually the better value: lower price, direct access, no account manager. The risk is availability; if they get a full-time job, your ads sit untouched. Mitigate it by owning every account and keeping a written note of what was built.
An agency makes more sense when you want three or four things run together, when you have two crews and a $3,000 a month ad budget, or when you simply do not want to manage a person. Pay for the coordination, not for the logo.
Why trial-first
The usual order is a sales call, a contract, a setup fee, and then you find out. The better order is a short, free trial where the agency builds the thing, you watch the calls or the pages arrive, and you decide with evidence. Two weeks is enough to see whether Google Ads produce real drywall calls or job seekers, whether a website gets built properly, whether text-back actually fires. If it does not work in two weeks, you have lost nothing but a setup conversation.
Any agency confident in its work for drywall companies should be willing to run a service free for two weeks with no card. If the one you are talking to will not, ask why.
How to judge the first month, whoever does it
Three numbers, written down weekly: tracked calls and form fills, booked jobs from those, and cost per booked job including the management fee. Not clicks, not impressions, not "visibility". If after 30 days you cannot name the jobs that came from the marketing, either the tracking is missing or the marketing is. Check your review count against the benchmark report at the same time; a good partner moves that number too.
Frequently asked
Should I just buy leads from a marketplace instead? Marketplace leads for drywall run $30 to $80 each and go to three to five contractors at once. If you win a third of them at a $400 average repair, it can pencil out for a shop with nothing else. But you build no asset; the day you stop paying, the phone stops. Your own profile, site and ads compound.
My nephew does social media. Is that enough? Social posts alone do not make a drywall phone ring. If he will also handle the Google profile, upload job photos weekly and shoot the popcorn video, that is real help. Give him the profile guide and a $200 a month budget to learn Meta ads.
How long before I know if it is working? Google Ads and text-back, two to four weeks. A website, the day it goes live for ads, and two to three months for organic. Reviews, immediately per job and about six months to reach the 75th percentile of 10 if you ask at every walkthrough.
Every service on this site is offered as a free 14-day trial, no card, no contract, so you can judge it the way this guide says to: on calls and booked jobs. Details on the free trial page.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, drywall companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor