Marketing for electricians, where three different businesses share one van

A service call, a panel upgrade and an EV charger install are three businesses sharing one van, and most electricians advertise them as one.

What the search behaviour actually looks like

Electrical search splits harder than almost any trade. "Electrician near me" is often somebody with a dead outlet and a fifteen-minute job. "Panel upgrade cost" is a person planning four thousand dollars of work over a month. "EV charger installation" is a homeowner who has already bought the car and has a deadline. Same trade, same van, three completely different conversations — and one keyword bucket for all of them is how an electrician ends up with a phone full of dead outlets and no panel work.

The gap between the smallest and largest job in this trade is wider than in most. A troubleshooting callout and a service upgrade can be twenty times apart, and the customers are not the same people. Averaging them into one number makes every decision downstream wrong: it makes the cheap leads look affordable and the expensive ones look ruinous, when the truth is usually the reverse.

The arithmetic, with your numbers

Say a customer is worth $1,900 over twelve months — a working middle for a mixed residential book — small callouts, some panel and circuit work, and the repeat calls that follow a first good visit — and you close 40% of the leads you get. Then:

That last figure is the one that settles every argument about whether advertising is expensive. If leads cost you a fraction of it, the correct response is to buy more of them, not to negotiate the price down. If they cost more than it, no amount of bidding strategy fixes that — the close rate or the customer value has to move first.

Run it with your own numbers: how to work out what a lead should cost you, and what that means for a monthly budget.

Which channel does the work here

Search first, and it is not close for the service half — somebody with no power is typing, not browsing. The planned work is the opposite: nobody wakes up wanting a panel upgrade, so that side is built on the map listing, on reviews, and on answering the cost question in public before anyone calls.

The general version of this question, and how to tell which one you need: Google Ads or Facebook Ads for a service business.

Timing

Storms and heat both move this trade — outages after wind, panel load after a hot week, generator interest for a month after any regional blackout. The planned work follows a different clock entirely: it lands when people are already spending on the house, which is spring and early summer, and again in the weeks before winter. An electrician who advertises the same message all year is competing hardest in the months when the expensive work is not being decided.

What we hear from electrical contractors

"We are already booked out six weeks."

Then this is about which six weeks, not more of them. A book filled by whoever called first is not the same as a book filled by the work you want, and the difference shows up in your margin rather than your calendar.

"Most of our work is word of mouth."

It usually is, and that is worth protecting rather than replacing. The question is what happens on the weeks referrals go quiet — every trade has them, and they are not predictable. This is what fills those weeks.

"The good jobs come from builders, not homeowners."

Often true, and the two need different work. Commercial and builder relationships are sold, not advertised. What advertising can do is take the residential side off your hands so you have the time to sell the other.

"People only call us when something breaks."

That is the service side, and it is the half that is easy to buy. The half worth building is the planned work — panels, rewires, chargers — where somebody is deciding over weeks and picks whoever answered their question first.

What we would build

Separate the two before spending anything. One route for the emergency work, priced against a callout, judged on answered calls. A second for planned work, priced against a four-figure job, judged on booked estimates. They share a van and nothing else, and running them as one campaign is the single most common thing we fix in this trade.

Around it, the rest of the same build: the offer, the page it lands on, the filter that stops you quoting people who will never buy, the follow-up that reaches them in minutes rather than hours, the tracking that tells you which ad produced which job — and then the campaigns. All of it in month one, and we do not charge for that month.

After that it is $1,000 a month while we run and grow it. Four months for the price of three, $3,000 at signing. We take three new clients a week and hold one business per category per market, so the honest first question is whether yours is still open.

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