The nation’s biggest full-service remodeling firms spend roughly 3% of their revenues on marketing, data from the 2018 Remodeling 550 suggests.
That mean is based on responses from the 288 of the top 300 full-service firms that responded to the annual survey. Sixty-three percent of that group, or 183 of the 288, were clustered in the 0.1% to 3% range, with 30% of the total spending 1% to 2%.
The No. 1 marketing practice cited by the firms involved little to no expense: repeat customers and word-of-mouth advertising. A total of 87% cited word-of-mouth as one of their top three marketing activities. Website activities and search engine optimization (SEO) came in second, cited by 70% of all firms as a top-three source.
For remodelers spending less than 3% of their revenue on marketing, the numbers are even bigger: 92% of those firms rely on word-of-mouth marketing, and 70% rely on SEO optimization.
Remodelers looking to spend a little more on marketing also use word-of-mouth and SEO optimization, but utilize other methods as well. For the 100 companies spending more than 3% of revenue on marketing, practices such as internet pay-per-click (21%), hosting events/homeshows (30%), TV ads (11%), and showrooms (16%) were among the top three techniques used to expand marketing efforts. Below is a table of the breakdown of all methods used with the 288 firms.
Wallisch, Sean