Hiring a marketing agency for a gutter company, or doing it yourself

By Steve Meitler · 2026-09-01 · 5 min read

What each channel really costs to run in house, the red flags in contractor marketing pitches, fair prices, and why any deal should start with a trial.

Gutter companies get pitched constantly, mostly in August and September when everyone knows the season is coming. The pitches sound identical: page one rankings, a set number of leads, a twelve-month agreement, and a setup fee due before anything happens. Some of those companies are good. Many are reselling the same template to four gutter companies in your metro, which mathematically cannot work for all four.

This guide is about telling the difference, and about deciding honestly whether you should hire anybody at all.

What each channel costs you to run yourself

Time is the real price. Rough weekly hours after the initial build, for a two-crew company:

The profile and review work is genuinely doable in house and you should do it in house, because your crews take the photos and your customers know your name. Missed-call text-back is a one-afternoon setup that never needs touching. Those two are the highest return per hour in the entire list, and the reviews guide and the missed calls guide contain the whole method.

Google Ads is where owners lose money doing it themselves, not because it is hard, but because it needs a weekly hour that never happens in October. An account left unattended during peak season quietly drifts into broad match and irrelevant search terms.

Fair prices

For a residential gutter company in a normal metro:

• Google Business Profile and local SEO management: $400 to $900 a month
• Google Ads management: $500 to $1,200 a month, or 12% to 18% of ad spend, plus the spend itself
• Meta ads management: $500 to $1,000 a month plus spend
• A ten-page website, built once: $1,500 to $6,000
• Review generation and text-back systems: $150 to $400 a month
• Everything bundled: $1,500 to $3,500 a month plus ad spend

Above that range you are paying for someone's office. Below $400 a month, nobody is doing meaningful work; you are buying an automated report.

The number that matters is not the fee, it is the fee plus spend divided by booked jobs. If a $900 management fee plus $1,500 in spend produces 40 booked cleanings and four installation jobs, that is $60 per booked job against an average ticket well above it. Do that arithmetic every month and the pricing debate answers itself. The pricing guide covers working out what a customer is actually worth to you.

Red flags

A twelve-month contract with a setup fee due before any work. The season is eight weeks long in this trade. A twelve-month lock means you cannot leave until after the only period that mattered.

Guaranteed lead counts. Nobody controls demand. Somebody promising 50 leads a month either counts form spam and wrong numbers as leads, or is about to buy shared leads from a lead broker and mark them up.

"We already work with a gutter company in your area." Then they are choosing between you every day, and one of you loses.

Owning your accounts. If the agency builds the Google Ads account, the Google profile, or the website on their own asset and you cannot take it with you, you are renting your own business. Every account should be in your name with them granted access.

No call recording, no call tracking. Without recordings, nobody can tell whether a bad month was bad marketing or a phone nobody answered.

Reports full of impressions and reach. The only three numbers are cost, leads, and booked jobs.

Pressure timed to the season. A pitch in early September that expires Friday is exploiting the fact that you are about to be busy.

Questions to ask that get honest answers

• Which of my accounts will be in my name, and can I export everything if we stop?
• Can I hear three recorded calls from another contractor client, with names removed?
• What is your plan for July, when nobody is searching for gutter cleaning?
• How will you handle the national guard brands bidding against me on Google?
• Who writes the ad copy and who edits the video, and can I see their last five pieces of work?
• What happens in the first 14 days, specifically, day by day?

The answer to the last one is the tell. Anybody with a real process can describe two weeks in detail. Anybody who cannot describe two weeks is going to spend the first month building a strategy document.

The hybrid that works for most gutter companies

Keep in house what only you can do:

• Photos and video from the ladder, every week
• The at-the-door and photo-text review ask
• Answering the phone

Hire out what needs a specialist and a weekly hour you do not have:

• Google Ads, especially the negative keyword and search term work described in the Google Ads guide
• The website build
• AI search and content pages

That split costs less than full service, and it keeps the parts that depend on your crews where your crews are.

Why any arrangement should start with a trial

There is no way to evaluate marketing from a pitch deck. Two weeks of live work tells you more than any case study: whether they answer, whether the ads are built sensibly, whether the copy sounds like a gutter company or a template, and whether anything actually rings.

That is why everything on this site is offered as a free 14-day trial with no card and no contract. Pick one service, watch it run inside your own accounts, and decide with evidence. If it does nothing, you have lost a setup call. The free trial page has the details, and the FAQ answers what happens on day 15.

You should demand this from anybody you talk to, not only from us. An agency confident in its work can afford two weeks.

Frequently asked

Freelancer or agency? A good freelancer at $600 to $1,200 a month often beats a mid-size agency, because you get the person doing the work instead of an account manager. The risk is availability, so ask what happens when they take a vacation in October.

Should I hire someone local? It does not matter for ads or website work. It matters slightly for content, because someone who knows your tree cover and your rain season writes better pages. Judge on the work, not the zip code.

What if I have almost no budget? Then do the free things in this order: fix the Google profile, ask every customer for a review, turn on missed-call text-back, and put real prices on a simple site. That sequence alone moves most companies past the trade median of 6 reviews and out of the 37.9% with no website. See the benchmark report for where that puts you.

Text or call (385) 832-6175 if you want to talk it through, whether or not you end up trying anything.