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The 90-Day Appliance Repair Marketing Plan (With Budget)
I own Appliance Marketing Pros. We run marketing for appliance repair, HVAC, and dryer vent cleaning companies, and the question owners actually ask me is not “what marketing works.”
You already know what works. Google Business Profile. Local Services Ads. Google Ads. Reviews. A website that does not look like it was built in 2014. None of that is a secret, and there are a hundred articles listing it, including one of ours.
The question I get on the phone is different: “What do I do first, and what is it going to cost me?”
A list of strategies cannot answer that. A list tells you what exists. A plan tells you the order, the money, and the date you check whether it worked.
So this is the plan. Ninety days, in three 30-day blocks, with a budget worksheet you fill in using your own numbers before you spend a dollar. It works for a one-truck shop and it scales to fifteen. Where the math changes for HVAC or dryer vent cleaning, I say so.
One note on wording first, because people mix these up.
Marketing Plan or Appliance Repair Business Plan? What Belongs in Each
An appliance repair business plan is the whole company on paper. Ownership and legal structure. Service mix and the brands you work on. Pricing and your diagnostic fee. Staffing, trucks, parts inventory, insurance, licensing. Three years of financial projections.
Marketing is one section inside that document. It is usually the thinnest section, and it is usually the one a lender reads hardest, because it is the only part that explains where the revenue in your projections is going to come from.
Here is how to use this article either way:
- If you are writing an appliance repair business plan for a bank, an SBA loan, or a partner, the 90-day sequence below is what goes in your marketing section, and the worksheet in Step 2 is what feeds your customer acquisition line in the projections. Lenders do not want to read “we will do SEO and social media.” They want to see cost per lead, booked-job rate, and marketing as a percentage of revenue. That is what the worksheet produces.
- If you already have a running shop and the phone is just too quiet, skip the rest of the business plan. Start at Step 1 and work forward.
Either way, the numbers below are the part that matters. Everything else is formatting.
Step 1: The Four Numbers That Set Your Marketing Budget
Do not pick a budget by copying what another shop spends. Pick it by working backward from the revenue you want. You need four numbers, and you already have all four sitting in your invoicing system and your phone log.
1. Your average completed ticket
What it is. Total invoiced revenue divided by completed jobs over the last 90 days.
The benchmark. The national average completed appliance repair runs roughly $275, including the diagnostic fee. Refrigerator and freezer work averages $200 to $350 and up. Microwaves and disposals land lower at $75 to $150. HVAC service and repair typically runs $350 to $600, with system replacements in the $6,000 to $14,000 range. Residential dryer vent cleaning runs $110 to $200, and $250 to $400 for a roof vent or a long finished-basement run.
Why it decides your budget. A $275 ticket and a $600 ticket can not carry the same cost per lead. This is the single number that separates an affordable campaign from an expensive one.
2. Your booked-job rate
What it is. The percentage of inbound leads that turn into a job on the schedule.
The benchmark. Strong appliance repair shops convert 50% to 70% of inbound calls into booked appointments. Shops with a live human answering during business hours reach 85%. Below 40%, you do not have a marketing problem. You have a phone problem, and buying more leads will make it more expensive, not better.
Why it decides your budget. Moving from 65% to 85% cuts your cost per booked job by nearly a quarter without touching your ad spend. That is the cheapest improvement available to you and it is why it sits in the first 30 days of this plan instead of the last.
3. Your share of repeat and referral work
What it is. The percentage of your jobs that came from a past customer or a person a past customer sent you.
The benchmark. A healthy shop sees 20% to 30% of new customers arrive by referral, plus repeat work on top of that. The average American household has 8 to 10 major appliances and every one of them eventually fails, so a customer you fixed a dryer for in March is a refrigerator call two years from now if your follow-up is any good.
Why it decides your budget. Every job that comes from repeat or referral is a job you do not have to buy. If this number is under 15%, paid advertising has to fund your entire schedule, and that is the most expensive way to run a shop.
4. Your cost per lead by source
What it is. What you actually pay for one contact from a real person, broken out by channel.
The benchmark. In the accounts we manage, Local Services Ads run $20 to $45 per lead for appliance repair in a rural county or small metro, and $45 to $70 in a major metro like Chicago, Dallas, or Los Angeles. HVAC runs roughly double that. Google Ads search produces exclusive leads at $25 to $75 for appliance repair and $60 to $150 for HVAC, depending on how competitive your auction is and how tight the campaign is built.
Why it decides your budget. Cost per lead is the input. Cost per booked job is the output, and it is the number that actually matters. We broke that math down in detail in our guide to exclusive appliance repair leads.
Step 2: The Appliance Repair Marketing Budget Worksheet
This is the part most marketing plans skip. Ten lines. Fill them in before you turn anything on.
| # | Line | Where it comes from | Your number |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Monthly revenue target | What you want the shop to invoice | |
| 2 | Average completed ticket | Line 1 of Step 1 | |
| 3 | Jobs needed per month | Line 1 divided by Line 2 | |
| 4 | Jobs from repeat and referral | Line 3 times your repeat/referral share | |
| 5 | Jobs marketing must produce | Line 3 minus Line 4 | |
| 6 | Your booked-job rate | Line 2 of Step 1 | |
| 7 | Leads needed per month | Line 5 divided by Line 6 | |
| 8 | Blended cost per lead | Line 4 of Step 1 | |
| 9 | Required monthly ad spend | Line 7 times Line 8 | |
| 10 | Ad spend as a percentage of revenue | Line 9 divided by Line 1 |
The check on line 10. Home services companies that hold healthy margins keep total marketing at 8% to 12% of revenue. Under 8% and you are usually coasting on past reputation. Over 15% and you are buying revenue at a price that does not leave a profit.
The worksheet filled in
Here is a real-shaped example. Two-truck appliance repair shop that wants to invoice $45,000 a month.
| # | Line | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Monthly revenue target | $45,000 |
| 2 | Average completed ticket | $275 |
| 3 | Jobs needed per month | 164 |
| 4 | Jobs from repeat and referral at 25% | 41 |
| 5 | Jobs marketing must produce | 123 |
| 6 | Booked-job rate | 65% |
| 7 | Leads needed per month | 190 |
| 8 | Blended cost per lead | $40 |
| 9 | Required monthly ad spend | $7,600 |
| 10 | Ad spend as a percentage of revenue | 16.9% |
That does not close. At 16.9%, this shop is spending well past the 8% to 12% band before it has paid for a single part, a single hour of tech time, or a gallon of fuel.
Most owners look at line 9 and conclude they cannot afford to advertise. That is the wrong conclusion. Look at lines 4 and 6 instead.
Fix the phone first. Take the booked-job rate from 65% to 85%, which is a training and answering problem, not a budget problem. Leads needed drops from 190 to 145. Required spend drops to $5,800, or 12.9% of revenue.
Then fix the follow-up. Take repeat and referral from 25% to 35% with a review request on every job and a simple past-customer touch. Jobs marketing must produce drops to 107. Leads needed drops to 126. Required spend drops to $5,040, or 11.2% of revenue. Now it closes.
Same revenue target. Same ad rates. $2,560 less per month, or $30,720 a year, without changing one thing inside the ad account.
That is the entire argument for the sequence in this plan. Days 1 to 30 are not a warm-up. They are the cheapest money you will ever make.
What that budget looks like by shop size
| Annual revenue | Trucks | Hold at 8% | Grow at 12% |
|---|---|---|---|
| $250,000 | 1 | $1,667 per month | $2,500 per month |
| $500,000 | 2 | $3,333 per month | $5,000 per month |
| $1,000,000 | 4 to 5 | $6,667 per month | $10,000 per month |
| $2,000,000 | 8 to 10 | $13,333 per month | $20,000 per month |
How to split a monthly budget
Using the $5,000 figure from the example above:
| Line item | Share | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Local Services Ads | 30% | $1,500 |
| Google Ads search | 25% | $1,250 |
| Local SEO, website care, and content | 25% | $1,250 |
| Call tracking and review software | 8% | $400 |
| Google Business Profile management and posts | 7% | $350 |
| Test budget for one new thing | 5% | $250 |
Those percentages shift. A shop with no website worth sending traffic to spends more on the site in month one and less on ads. A shop in a market with three aggressive competitors on Local Services Ads spends more there. Start here and adjust with data, not with feelings.
The capacity check nobody runs
Before you spend anything, confirm you can actually run the work.
A productive appliance repair technician completes 4 to 6 jobs per day. Two techs at 5 jobs a day across 22 working days is 220 jobs a month. The example shop above needs 164, so it fits with room to spare.
If your worksheet says you need 300 jobs and you have two trucks, no marketing plan fixes that. You have a hiring plan to write, not a marketing plan. Buying leads you cannot service produces missed calls, blown appointment windows, and one-star reviews, which is a fast way to spend money making your business worse.
Days 1 to 30: Fix What You Are Already Paying For
Nothing in this block costs real ad dollars. Almost all of it is time. It is also where the biggest return in the whole 90 days lives, because you are recovering leads you already generated and already lost.
Each item below follows the same three lines: the move, the benchmark, and what done looks like.
Week 1: Put a number on the phone
The move. Install call tracking. One number on your Google Business Profile, one on your website, one on each paid channel. Then pull two weeks of call data and count three things: total calls, calls answered, and calls that became a booked job.
The benchmark. Target a 90% or better answer rate during business hours. In the accounts we audit, missed and abandoned calls commonly run 15% to 30% of inbound volume, and almost no owner knows it until the recording exists.
Done when. You can state your answer rate and your booked-job rate as numbers, not as a feeling. Our guide to appliance repair call tracking walks through the setup.
Week 2: Rebuild the Google Business Profile
The move. Primary category set to Appliance Repair Service, with secondary categories for the appliances you actually service. Real hours including holiday hours. Service area matched to where you will actually drive. At least a dozen real photos of your trucks, techs, and finished work. Full services menu with a written description on every service.
The benchmark. Your profile is the first thing most local searchers see, and profile completeness plus review activity are what put you in the map pack. Post to it weekly, not monthly.
Done when. Every field is filled, your name, address, and phone match your website and directories exactly, and you have a recurring weekly post scheduled. Full walkthrough in our Google Business Profile guide for appliance repair.
Week 3: Website triage
The move. Five checks, in this order. Click-to-call button visible without scrolling on a phone. Service area named in text on the homepage, not just on a map image. A separate page for each major service instead of one page listing everything. A form that works on a small screen. Page load you would tolerate yourself on a bad cell connection.
The benchmark. More than half your visitors are on a phone. If a homeowner has to pinch and zoom to find your number, they are already dialing the next shop.
Done when. You have called your own number from your own site on your own phone, and it took two taps. More on this in our guide to optimizing an appliance repair website for conversions.
Week 4: Turn on the review engine
The move. Automate a review request by text within one hour of job completion, while the customer is still standing in front of a working appliance. Train the tech to say a sentence about it before he leaves.
The benchmark. Aim for 8 to 12 new reviews a month and an average at 4.7 or better. Review velocity, meaning a steady flow of recent reviews, matters more than a big pile of old ones.
Done when. The request fires automatically on every completed job without anyone remembering to send it. See our guide to getting reviews for your appliance repair business.
Month 1 budget. Call tracking runs $45 to $150 a month. Review request software runs $50 to $200 a month. Field service software, if you do not have it, runs from free for two users up to about $150 a month for a mid-size shop. Everything else in this block is your time.
Days 31 to 60: Turn On Demand Capture
Now you buy leads, because now you can hold onto them. This block is about the two channels that reach a homeowner at the exact moment their refrigerator stopped cooling.
Week 5: Local Services Ads
The move. Complete verification, including license, insurance, and background screening. Set your job types and service areas tightly. Set a weekly budget, not a daily one.
The benchmark. You pay per lead, not per click, and leads run $20 to $70 for appliance repair depending on your metro. Google issues automated credits for certain lead types on its own schedule. There is no manual dispute button anymore, so budget as though you keep every dollar you spend and treat any credit as a bonus. The badge on your profile is now the unified Google Verified badge.
Done when. You are verified, live, and your job types exclude work you do not do. The two most common ways owners waste money here are leaving every job type switched on and drawing a service area larger than they will actually drive. Full detail in our guide to Local Services Ads.
Week 6: Google Ads search
The move. One campaign, tight geography, exact and phrase match on high-intent terms. “Refrigerator repair near me,” “washer repair [your city],” “same day appliance repair.” Call extensions on. Ad schedule matched to when a human answers.
The benchmark. Expect $25 to $75 per lead for appliance repair and $60 to $150 for HVAC. A campaign with no negative keyword list will burn 20% to 40% of its budget on parts lookups, DIY videos, and manual downloads.
Done when. Conversion tracking is verified working, your negative keyword list is built, and you have checked the search terms report at least once. Start from our appliance repair negative keyword list.
Week 7: Landing pages that match the ads
The move. Stop sending paid traffic to your homepage. Build one page per service and per city you bid on, with the headline matching the ad, the phone number at the top, three reviews, and one clear next step.
The benchmark. A matched landing page lowers cost per lead because more of the same clicks turn into calls. You are not paying less per click, you are wasting fewer of them.
Done when. Every ad group points at a page that names the service and the city in the first headline. Our guide to appliance repair landing pages covers the build.
Week 8: Guardrails
The move. Cap the weekly budget. Exclude zip codes you will not drive to. Set up a weekly 20-minute review of the search terms report. Confirm every lead source is tagged in your CRM so you can tell what produced each booked job.
The benchmark. Aim for a cost per booked job under $130 for appliance repair and under $315 for HVAC on paid channels. On a $275 ticket, $130 is already 47 cents of every revenue dollar going to acquisition before parts and labor.
Done when. You can pull a report that shows spend, leads, booked jobs, and revenue by source.
Month 2 budget. This is where the ad dollars from your worksheet start flowing. If line 9 said $5,000, do not start at $5,000. Start at half and build up as your booked-job rate holds.
Days 61 to 90: Build the Part That Compounds
Paid ads stop the day you stop paying. This block builds the assets that keep producing after the invoice is paid, and it is the block most owners never get to because they never made it through the first two.
Week 9: Service and city pages
The move. One real page per service, one real page per city or neighborhood you serve. Not a template with the city name swapped. Local landmarks, the brands you see most in that area, drive time, actual review text from customers there.
The benchmark. Organic search and your Google Business Profile deliver the lowest cost per booked job of any channel once they mature, commonly under $135 for appliance repair. They also take months, not weeks, which is exactly why they belong at day 61 and not day 1.
Done when. Every service you sell and every city you serve has one indexed page with unique text on it. Our guides to local SEO for appliance repair and service area pages cover the build order.
Week 10: Mine the customers you already have
The move. Export your customer list. Sort by last service date. Send a simple message to anyone you have not seen in 12 months. No discount required, just a reminder that you exist and a click-to-call.
The benchmark. Repeat customers cost under $25 per booked job, cheaper than any paid channel by a factor of five. With 8 to 10 major appliances per household, your customer list is a lead source you already paid for once.
Done when. The list is in a CRM you own, and a 12-month follow-up runs automatically. See appliance repair customer retention.
Week 11: Build the referral system
The move. Ask on every completed job. Give the customer something specific to hand over, whether that is a card, a text they can forward, or a link. Track where each new customer came from at intake.
The benchmark. 20% to 30% of new customers from referral is the target. Referral customers convert faster and carry higher lifetime value than paid traffic because the trust work is already done.
Done when. “How did you hear about us?” is a required field at intake and somebody reads the answers monthly.
Week 12: Cut, keep, and reallocate
The move. Sit down with 90 days of data. Rank every source by cost per booked job, not by lead volume. Cut the worst one. Move that money to the best one. Then set next quarter’s targets.
The benchmark. A source with the same cost per booked job but a $70 lower average ticket is still losing. Compare both.
Done when. You have made at least one budget change based on a number instead of a hunch.
The 90-Day Scorecard
Print this. Fill it in on day 30, day 60, and day 90.
| Metric | Where it comes from | Day 30 | Day 60 | Day 90 target |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answer rate | Call tracking | Baseline measured | Improving | 90% or better |
| Booked-job rate | Calls compared to scheduled jobs | Baseline measured | Improving | 65% or better |
| New reviews per month | Google Business Profile | 4 or more | 8 or more | 8 to 12 |
| Cost per lead by source | Ad platforms | Not yet | Measured | Within your market range |
| Cost per booked job, paid | Spend divided by completed jobs, per source | Not yet | Measured | Under $130 appliance, under $315 HVAC |
| Repeat and referral share | Intake source field | Baseline measured | Improving | 25% or better |
| Marketing as a percentage of revenue | Your profit and loss statement | Measured | Measured | 8% to 12% |
| Booked jobs and revenue by source | CRM | Baseline measured | Measured | Trending against your own day 1 |
These are targets to aim at, not promises. Nobody can guarantee you a ranking, a lead count, or a date, and any agency that does is telling you what you want to hear instead of what is true. What you can control is whether these numbers get measured at all, and most shops never measure a single one.
For the full set of numbers to run a shop by, including the operational and financial metrics this plan does not cover, see our guide to appliance repair KPIs.
What Changes if You Run HVAC or Dryer Vent Cleaning
The sequence is identical. Three numbers move.
HVAC. Your leads cost roughly double, but your average ticket is $350 to $600 on repair and $6,000 to $14,000 on a replacement. A $90 lead looks expensive against a service call and nearly free against one system swap, so track your leads all the way through to replacement close rate before you decide a channel is too expensive. Your demand is also seasonal, which means the budget should not be flat across twelve months. Front-load ahead of the first heat wave and the first hard freeze.
Dryer vent cleaning. Your ticket is $110 to $200 residential and $250 to $400 for a roof vent or a long run. That is a small enough number that you cannot afford to buy a lead twice. Your booked-job rate and your route density matter more than your ad budget. Bundle it with an appliance call when you can, because the second service on the same driveway costs you nothing in windshield time.
Multi-trade shops. Run the worksheet once per service line. A blended average ticket across appliance repair and HVAC hides which line is funding the other one.
Five Ways Owners Blow Up a 90-Day Marketing Plan
- Starting at week 5. Turning on ads before the phone is fixed means paying full price for leads you will lose. Every week you skip in the first block makes the second block more expensive.
- Changing everything at once. New website, new ads, new CRM, new phone system in the same month means you learn nothing when results move. Change one thing at a time and give it 30 days.
- Judging on leads instead of booked jobs. Lead count is a vanity metric. A channel that produces 40 leads and 6 booked jobs is worse than one that produces 15 leads and 10 booked jobs, every time.
- Quitting SEO in week 10. Organic and Google Business Profile work is the cheapest cost per booked job you will ever have and the slowest to arrive. Cutting it at day 75 because it has not paid yet is the most expensive mistake on this list.
- Letting the plan live in your head. Write it down with a name and a date next to every line. A plan with no owner and no due date is a wish.
What to Do on Day 91
Run the worksheet again with your new numbers, not your old ones.
Your booked-job rate moved. Your repeat and referral share moved. Your cost per lead is now a real figure from your own account instead of a range from an article. Plug those in and the plan for the next 90 days writes itself, usually with a bigger budget and a better return, because you fixed the leaks before you turned up the pressure.
Then pick one thing to add. Not five. Email to your past customer list, or short video for your Google Business Profile, or one more city page cluster. One.
And if you are building or updating an appliance repair business plan for a lender, this is where the marketing section comes from: a documented sequence, a budget tied to a percentage of revenue, and 90 days of real numbers instead of projections. That is a far stronger case than any three-year forecast built on hope.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much should an appliance repair company spend on marketing?
Eight to twelve percent of revenue is the working band for home services companies that hold healthy margins. Established shops with strong repeat and referral volume can hold at the low end. Shops opening a new service area or trying to grow need the high end. Under 8% usually means you are living off past reputation, and over 15% means you are buying revenue at a price that does not leave a profit.
What should be in the marketing section of an appliance repair business plan?
Five things, and none of them are the word “social media.” Your target service area with population and competitor count. Your channel mix with a budget by channel. Your assumed cost per lead and booked-job rate. Your projected cost per booked job. And a review and referral system, because a lender wants to see that your customer acquisition cost drops over time instead of staying flat forever. The worksheet in Step 2 produces all five.
How long before a new marketing plan produces booked jobs?
Local Services Ads and Google Ads can produce calls within days of going live. Google Business Profile improvements typically show up in weeks. Organic search and content take months. That is exactly why this plan is sequenced the way it is: the fast channels fund the slow ones while the slow ones mature. I am not going to give you a date, because nobody honestly can, and the ones who do are selling you something.
Should I hire an agency or run this myself?
If you have five hours a week and you like systems, run it yourself. Everything in this article is doable by an owner. The honest test is whether you will still be doing it in week 9, because most owners get through the first block, get busy, and stop. If the choice is between running it inconsistently yourself and paying somebody to run it every week, pay somebody. Consistency is what produces results here, not brilliance.
Does AI change any of this?
It changes the speed, not the judgment. We use AI to pull search term reports faster, draft page copy, and flag anomalies in ad accounts within hours instead of at the end of the month. It does not know that a Sub-Zero call is worth four times a microwave call in your market, or that the zip code across the river takes 50 minutes in traffic. AI makes us faster. Experience makes us right. Anyone selling you a fully automated marketing plan for a service business has not ridden along on a service call.
Can I run this plan on $1,500 a month?
Yes, and plenty of one-truck shops do. At that budget, put nearly all of it into Local Services Ads and your Google Business Profile, keep call tracking, and do the website and content work yourself. Skip Google Ads search until you have the booked-job rate to justify it. A small budget spent on two channels beats the same budget spread across six.
Let’s AMP Up Your Growth
At Appliance Marketing Pros we build and run marketing for appliance repair, HVAC, and dryer vent cleaning companies. Websites, local SEO, Google Ads, Local Services Ads, and Google Business Profile management, all of it measured on booked jobs and revenue rather than on traffic charts.
Most of the owners we work with came to us with the same problem this article solves. They knew what marketing existed. They did not know what to do first, what it should cost, or how to tell whether it worked.
We will not promise you a ranking, a lead count, or a timeline. What we will do is run the worksheet above with your actual numbers, show you where your current setup is leaking, and tell you honestly whether you need an agency or just a better phone process.
Bring your last 90 days of call data and invoices. Book a strategy call with our team and we will do the math on the call.
If you want the full menu of tactics behind this plan, start with our guide to appliance repair marketing strategies.
