Hiring a marketing agency or freelancer for a septic company versus doing it yourself: red flags, fair prices, and why trial first
What a septic company should do itself, what to pay someone for, the pitches to hang up on, what fair monthly prices look like, and why you should see the work before paying.
A septic owner gets three to five marketing calls a week. "We noticed you are not on page one." "We have a program for septic companies." "Fifty exclusive leads a month, guaranteed." Most of those calls come from people who have never seen a pump truck and could not tell a distribution box from a riser. Some are fine. The trouble is telling which, before signing a 12-month agreement.
This guide lays out what you can do yourself in an evening, what is worth paying for, what a fair price is, and the pitches that should end the call.
What you should do yourself
Three things take an evening each and no outside help:
- Fill in your Google Business Profile completely: category, services with price ranges, hours, 20 photos, the service area by town. The profile guide walks through it. Nobody knows your services and counties better than you.
- Ask for reviews at the tailgate, every job, with the link texted on the spot. The reviews guide has the script. An agency cannot stand in the driveway for you.
- Set the pump-out price range and put it on the site, the profile and the truck. The pricing guide covers how.
Those three move a company from the median of 13 reviews toward the top quarter faster than any paid service, and they cost nothing.
What is worth paying for
Things that need daily attention or a skill you do not have:
- Google Ads management, because search terms drift weekly and a neglected account wastes half its budget
- A website built properly, once, with a page per service and the counties named
- Missed-call text-back and follow-up, set up and monitored
- Meta ads with video edited from your phone footage
- Texting your customer list by last service date, every month
- Bookkeeping, so you know what a pump-out actually earns after disposal, fuel and the truck note
The test for each: does it need doing every week, and would you actually do it? If you are on a lid six days a week, the honest answer for most of the list is no.
Fair prices for a one to three truck septic company
- Google Ads management: $300 to $800 a month, plus ad spend paid to Google on your own card. Anyone charging a percentage of spend has a reason to spend more.
- Website: $1,500 to $4,000 to build, $20 to $100 a month to host and maintain. The $12,000 proposal is for a brand site you do not need.
- Google Business Profile management and posting: $150 to $400 a month.
- Review request system: $30 to $100 a month for the tool, or included with a profile package.
- Missed-call text-back and follow-up: $50 to $200 a month.
- Meta ads management: $300 to $700 a month plus spend.
- Full package, everything above: $1,000 to $2,500 a month plus ad spend. Over $3,000 a month for a two-truck company is hard to justify unless installs are the main business.
A freelancer is usually cheaper than an agency and often better, because you talk to the person doing the work. The risk is that they disappear in inspection season. Ask who covers when they are out.
Red flags that should end the call
- "Guaranteed page one" or "guaranteed leads." Nobody controls Google's ranking, and lead guarantees are met with junk leads.
- A 12-month contract before any work is shown. The work either produces calls in the first month or it does not.
- They own the ad account, the website domain or the phone number. When you leave, they keep your history, your site and your tracking number. Everything must be in your name.
- Shared leads, where the same homeowner is sold to three septic companies. You are paying to race.
- A percentage of ad spend as the fee.
- Reports that show impressions and clicks but not calls and booked jobs.
- They cannot name the difference between a pump-out customer and an install customer, or they talk about "brand awareness" for a company with one truck.
- "We work with hundreds of septic companies." Ask for three in a different state you can call.
Questions to ask before signing anything
- Who owns the ad account, the domain and the tracking numbers? (You.)
- What does the first two weeks produce that I can see? (Live ads, calls recorded, review requests sent.)
- How do I cancel? (Month to month, 30 days.)
- What do you count as a lead? (A call over 45 seconds or a form from inside my service area, not a click.)
- Have you run ads for a trade where the busy season is spring thaw and Thanksgiving? (The answer tells you if they have done septic.)
Why trial first
The pattern in this trade is pay first, hope, then argue about the contract. A better order is to see the work, then decide. Any service worth paying for can show something in two weeks: a Google Ads campaign produces tracked calls, a text-back produces replies from missed callers, a review system produces reviews, a customer-list text produces bookings. If a company will not run anything until a contract is signed, that tells you how confident they are in the work.
That is the reason the free 14-day trial on this site exists. Pick one service, it runs for two weeks on your number and your account, no card, and at the end you look at the schedule. If it filled the route, continue month to month. If it did not, stop, and keep everything that was built.
Doing it yourself all the way
Some owners do, and do well. If that is you, the order is: profile, reviews, price on the site, missed-call text-back, then a small exact-match Google campaign at $400 a month, then the customer-list texts every month. Budget four hours a week, every week, and check the search terms report on Sunday night. The guides on this site cover each step, and the benchmark report tells you how far you have to go in your state.
The point where most owners hand it off is the second truck. At that point the four hours a week become eight and the cost of a wasted ad budget is bigger than the fee.
Frequently asked
Is a franchise marketing program worth it? Sometimes for the buying power on ads, rarely for the creative, which is generic by design. Ask whether you can run your own local ads alongside it.
What about the lead-selling sites? Shared leads at $30 to $80 each, sold to several companies. They can fill a slow week, but you are racing to the phone, and the customers are price shoppers. Not a foundation.
How long before I should see results from an agency? Ads and text-back inside two weeks. Profile and reviews in 30 to 60 days. A new website ranking in 90 days. Anyone asking for six months before judging is asking for six months of fees.
If you want to see what two weeks of any one service looks like before deciding, start the free 14-day trial, no card required.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, septic companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor