Marketing notes · For local service businesses
The Year-End Marketing Review
Five questions to answer in December before setting next year’s number, and the one hour it takes.
Why December
By December the year’s numbers exist and nobody has looked at them together. Sales are in QuickBooks, the marketing invoices are scattered across the same file, the jobs are in the scheduling software, and the story the owner tells about the year is whichever month he remembers most. One hour with the five questions below replaces the story with a number, and the number is what next year gets planned against.
The five questions
- What did marketing cost this year, all of it, and what share of sales was that? Add every invoice, subscription, sign, and sponsorship, divide by the year’s sales. Write the percentage down next to last year’s.
- Where did the jobs come from? Sort the year’s jobs by source as best the records allow. If the honest answer for most of them is “don’t know,” that is finding number one and the first fix for January.
- Which source cost the most per booked job, and which the least? Divide each source’s spend by the jobs it produced. The most expensive source is usually the one that felt busiest.
- What is owned now that was not owned in January? Reviews gained, town pages added, listing corrected, customer list built, tracking numbers in place. Rented channels stop the day the payments stop; this list is what carries into next year.
- What was paid for and never used? The software nobody opened, the listing service that sent no calls, the report nobody read. Cancel it before the January renewal.
The one-page record
The five answers go on one page that gets filled in every December and kept. A table like this is enough.
| Year | Sales | Marketing spend | Cost of marketing | Jobs with a known source | Most expensive source | Least expensive source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | ||||||
| 2026 | ||||||
| 2027 |
Setting next year’s number
With the five answers on one page, next year’s marketing budget is a decision instead of a guess: the percentage of sales the owner chooses to spend, split across the sources that earned it, with a date in March to check whether it is on track. A service business that is holding steady typically lands between 5 and 10 percent of sales, an operating standard from the author’s years running marketing for a Northwest Ohio home services company rather than a published survey, and a shop planning to grow will choose a number above it on purpose.
What the review is not
It is not a vendor review, although the answers will make one obvious. It is not a plan; the plan is the slow-season sheet. It is one hour, five answers, and a percentage written in the same place every year so that in five years there is a line and not a set of stories.
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