How to choose a marketing agency for builders: work out what limits your firm first

When work feels thin, it is easy to assume a building firm needs more enquiries. It is a fair starting point. For the second half of 2025, workloads held up while enquiries softened, on 493 responses from small and medium-sized UK construction firms to the State of Trade survey run by the Federation of Master Builders (FMB) and the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB). The same survey cuts against the belief, though. Nearly half of firms reported jobs delayed by a shortage of skilled tradespeople. The FMB says skills shortages are now materially constraining growth and delivery, making it harder for small builders to keep projects on schedule and take on new work. A firm in that position gains little from a fresh batch of enquiries. The belief holds for some builders and fails for others, so the first job is to find out which you are.

Start with one question

Ask what stops you taking one more good job next month. Your own records answer it better than a guess: count the quotes you declined, the start dates that slipped and the enquiries that went nowhere over the last six months. There are three possible answers. You have too few crews to build it. You have too few enquiries to fill the diary. Or the enquiries you get are the wrong jobs, smaller or thinner in margin than the work you want. Each answer points to a different kind of agency, and the first sometimes points to none. How you sell, whether you build to someone else's drawings or design and build yourself, shapes the questions inside each branch rather than adding a fourth. The three branches below each end in questions to put to any agency you speak to. Contract terms and proof of past work come up across the branches, because the right answer shifts with the situation, and the general checklist sits in what should be in a marketing agency contract.

If crews are the limit: pay for sorting, not volume

Pick this branch if jobs are starting late or you already turn work away. Extra enquiries lengthen a queue your crews cannot clear. The agency to look for works on which jobs reach you and how well you price and quote them, not on how many arrive. Our view: that narrow scope may suit a one-off project on your website and enquiry form better than a monthly retainer. Ask these three questions.

1. How will paid spend stop when your next free start date moves beyond a set number of weeks, and who can press stop?
2. Which questions would the enquiry form add so that jobs outside your range are filtered before a site visit? Ask about who owns the property, the budget band and approvals already in place. Building regulations approval and planning permission are separate approvals, and a project may need both, so a form that only asks "extension: yes or no" tells you little. That page points to separate rules in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so tell the agency which nation you build in.
3. What notice period will the contract carry? One month or less lets you cut spend when a large job fills the diary.

If your crews have room: pay for a tracked path to signed contracts

Pick this branch if you could build more tomorrow and enquiries are the gap. This is where an enquiry-focused agency fits: local search, reviews, quick quote follow-up, then reporting on signed work. Several facts shape what to ask.

The first is time. Houzz's study of 2025 US renovation projects, drawn from registered Houzz users, found kitchen projects took an average of 9.5 months to plan and 5.8 months to build. Planning time is not the same as the wait between an enquiry and a signed contract, so measure that wait in your own records rather than borrow the Houzz figure. Buyers are also urged to shop around, and a step in TrustMark's advice to homeowners in the UK is to obtain three quotes before starting any work. Badges are rule-bound too: CAP rule 3.52 needs an advertiser to hold the authorisation for any trade badge it shows, and the FMB warns that some businesses claim FMB membership when they are not members. In California, the contractors board wants a licensed contractor's number in every form of advertising, websites and online posts included, and other states set their own rules.

If the plan buys leads from a marketplace, ask what evidence backs its claims about lead quality. HomeAdvisor sells home improvement leads to service providers in the US, and in March 2022 the Federal Trade Commission alleged it had misrepresented the quality, source of leads, and likelihood they would result in actual jobs. Under the final order the FTC approved in April 2023, the company is prohibited from making any false or misleading claims regarding its leads. For a fuller map of the stages between an enquiry and a paid job, see marketing for builders. Then ask these three questions.

1. Can the report follow each month's enquiries through to signed contract value, and split them by source: your website, a marketplace or referrals?
2. Which badges, memberships and licence numbers will go into ads, and will the agency check each against your certificates before it publishes?
3. Can you speak to a builder with similar job sizes in your region who has used the agency for a year or more?

If the enquiries are the wrong jobs: pay for patience and proof

Pick this branch if enquiries arrive but for smaller or thinner jobs than you want, usually because you want more design-and-build work or larger projects. A design-and-build firm can sit in either of the other branches too; it belongs here when the gap is the kind of job, not crews or volume. In the Houzz study of 2025 US projects cited above, 29% of renovating homeowners hired general contractors and 5% hired design-build firms, which made general contractors, the US label for the firms this article calls builders, the construction professionals they sought most often. Houzz's separate survey of US professionals found that design-build firms and specialty contractors were the only two groups that listed managing client concerns about costs among their top three challenges. Put with the planning figure above, that hints at a smaller pool of buyers, long planning periods and cost worries to manage. Both sources cover the US, not the UK, so test the pattern against your own enquiry log.

Our view: look for an agency that builds a portfolio, writes about how costs are set and follows up over months, because, on that evidence, sales are few and slow. An agency built around enquiry volume suits that less. Ask these three questions.

1. Will the agency record the approval stage each lead has reached, from early drawings to a submitted planning application to a building regulations application, so you can see which enquiries are real projects?
2. Does the plan count a paid design stage or pre-construction agreement as the first conversion, and does the minimum term cover at least one run from first contact to that signature, with exit rights if it runs longer?
3. Can the agency show a past client's project pages that state which approvals each finished job needed and was signed off for, rather than photographs alone?

Who should not hire an agency yet

Four situations call for something else first.

Your diary is full and the work is the work you want. An agency has little to improve. TrustMark tells homeowners that good people are in demand, so they may need to wait for the right tradesperson. That means a diary with a wait on it is not proof that buyers are walking away. If the constraint is crews, hiring or training addresses it directly and an agency does not.

You cannot say what happened to last year's enquiries. An agency cannot improve a number nobody holds. Log each enquiry with its date, source, job type, the earliest start date your crews could have offered, the quote and the result, then review the log after a quarter.

You have no finished jobs you can prove. In England and Wales, under a full plans application, a completion certificate usually follows within 8 weeks of the work finishing, as long as it complies. Photograph each finished job and keep its sign-off with the photographs, so a project page shows only work you can evidence. Do this yourself or with a freelancer on a one-off job before you consider a retainer.

Your plan is a marketplace listing and nothing else. Treat it as a test with its own evidence, as above: check that the listing shows only the badges you hold and, in the US, your licence number, and decide on an agency once the log shows what the listing produced.

If none of these four fits, one of the three branches above does, and its questions are the place to start.

To talk through which branch sounds like your firm, tell us about your business. The reply will cover whether an agency would help at all, or whether crews, paperwork or a simpler fix should come first.