How to advertise a trade business in New Zealand

The best place to advertise a trade business in New Zealand is wherever your next customer is standing when they decide they need you: the plumbing merchant, the hardware store, the kitchen showroom, the paint shop, the real estate office. Get your name in front of that person at that moment, keep your Google Business Profile complete, and put your number on the van. Most tradies who do those three things well rarely need much else.

The rest of this guide is the detail, written for electricians, plumbers, builders, painters, roofers, landscapers, fencers, glaziers, arborists, heat pump installers and the rest of the trades.

Start with the job you want more of

Before spending a dollar, decide which job you are advertising for. Not "electrical work". A specific job: heat pump installs, switchboard upgrades, bathroom renovations, exterior repaints, retaining walls.

An advertisement that says "all electrical work, no job too small" is an advertisement for nobody in particular, and it gets remembered by nobody. An advertisement that says "Switchboard upgrades from $X, done in a day" is remembered by the one person in the room who has a 1970s fuse box and has been meaning to do something about it.

Pick the job that pays best for the hours, or the one you want to be known for. Advertise that. The rest of the work comes in behind it, because once someone has your number they ring you for everything.

The free things: the van and the job site

Your van drives past thousands of people a week. Most trade vans have a phone number in a size you cannot read from the next lane. Fix that. Trade name, the one job you want, the town, a phone number in letters you can read at thirty metres. If the van is white and has nothing on it, a signwriter can change that for a few hundred dollars, and it will outlast any other advertising you buy this year. The signwriter directory lists people who do it, with prices shown.

The job site is the second free advertisement. A corflute sign on the fence of a house you are working on says "we are trusted on this street" to every neighbour who walks past, and neighbours are the most likely people to hire you next. Ask the homeowner, most say yes. Take it down the day you finish.

Google Business Profile and reviews

When someone types "electrician near me" or "plumber Pukekohe" into their phone, the three businesses in the map box get almost all the calls. Which three appear depends mostly on how complete the Google Business Profile is, how close you are, and how many recent reviews you have. It has very little to do with how good your website is.

So: claim the profile, fill in every field, add photos of real work from your phone, list the services you actually do, and keep the hours right. Then ask every happy customer for a review before you leave the site. Not by email a week later. Standing in their kitchen, phone out, "would you mind leaving us a quick review, it makes a big difference." Most people say yes when you ask in person and almost none do when you email.

Twenty recent reviews will usually beat a competitor with a fancy website and four reviews from 2021. It is the highest return work a tradie can do and it costs nothing.

Google Ads: only for the emergency trades

Google Ads puts you at the top of the search results and charges you each time someone clicks. For a trade whose customers search at the moment of need, it can work: a burst pipe, a blocked drain, no hot water, a locked door, a dead switchboard. Someone standing in a flooding laundry will click the first plumber they see and ring it.

For everything else, it mostly does not. Nobody searches "painter" at 11pm in a panic. They think about painting for months, mention it to friends, and hire the one whose name they have heard. Paying several dollars a click to reach someone who is six months from deciding is a slow way to spend a budget.

If you run an emergency trade, set a small daily budget, aim it at your own district only, and track which calls came from it. If you do not, put the money into the next two sections.

The merchant counter and the showroom window

Think about where a homeowner is when they realise they need a tradie. They are in the plumbing merchant looking at a tapware display. They are in the paint shop with a colour chart, doing the sums on how long the job will take. They are in the kitchen showroom, being told the cabinets are the easy part. They are in the real estate office, three weeks from moving into a house that needs a fence, a heat pump and a repaint.

Every one of those businesses has a counter, a window or a screen its customers stare at while they wait, and most are empty. We run a marketplace for local advertising space, Pritty Ghood, where those businesses list that space and a tradie can book it for a few weeks or a season. A counter card or a window poster starts at about $55 a week, the price on the listing is the price you pay, and the host approves every booking so you are never put up somewhere that does not want a tradie on the wall.

The match is the point. A builder's card on a kitchen showroom counter is in front of exactly the person about to need a builder. We have written a short page for each trade on where its customers are and what to put in front of them: electrician, plumber, builder, painter, roofer, landscaper, and the rest under advertising by industry.

Where it does not work: if no merchant or showroom in your area is listed yet. Check the listings for your district before deciding. We are adding hosts, and the browse page says so rather than pretending.

Referral deals with other trades

The electrician knows the builder needs a plumber. The painter knows the plasterer. The landscaper meets every fencer in town. A quiet agreement between two or three trades who do not compete, to pass each other's names on and mean it, brings in more work than most paid advertising, and it costs a coffee.

Make it specific: "when you finish a kitchen, tell them we do the splashback tiling and give them this card." Keep a stack of each other's cards in the van. Return the favour every time, or it stops within a month.

Sponsor the local club

Trade businesses have sponsored rugby, football, netball and cricket clubs in New Zealand for a hundred years, and it keeps working because the same few hundred families see your name on the fence or the jersey every Saturday for a season, and those families own houses in your district. A junior team costs a few hundred dollars for the year. A senior team or a fence sign at the home ground is more, and it is priced by the club.

Pick the club where your customers are, not the one you played for. A fencer wants the club in the new subdivision. A roofer wants the one in the older suburb. We wrote a separate guide on how to sponsor a local sports club, including what a package should contain and how to tell whether it worked.

What to put on the advertisement

Whatever you put up, it needs five things and no more:

1. The trade and the one job. "Heat pump installs" not "HVAC solutions."
2. The town or district. People hire local. Say you are.
3. One reason to ring you. Done in a day. Fixed price quote. Master electrician. Ten years in Franklin. Pick one.
4. A phone number big enough to read from where they are standing.
5. A way to measure it. A QR code that counts scans, or a "mention this card" line. If you cannot tell whether an advertisement brought anybody in, you cannot decide whether to keep paying for it.

Leave off the full list of services, the licence numbers, the association logos, and any sentence longer than eight words. Nobody reads a poster. They glance at it.

A monthly plan for a two-person outfit

For one van, two people and around $400 a month:

Once, this month: get the van signwritten properly. Claim and complete the Google Business Profile. Order twenty corflute job-site signs. Print a stack of cards for the referral trades.

Every job: ask for the review in person. Put the sign on the fence. Leave a card with the customer and one with each neighbour who asks what you are doing.

Ongoing, about $250 a month: one counter card or window poster in the merchant or showroom your customers visit, booked for at least eight weeks so it has time to work. Rotate to a second location if the first one is not producing calls.

Once a year, about $500 to $1,000: a junior team at the local club, with a fence sign if the package includes one.

Not this year: radio, the community paper, a billboard, and Google Ads unless you are an emergency trade.

Give the plan eight weeks before judging it, then move the money toward whatever is bringing the calls in.