Buyer’s guide
How to choose a marketing agency for your trade business
Nine things you can check about any agency before you sign, ten questions to ask them, and our own scorecard filled in honestly — including the three rows where we do not come out well.
Read this first: we publish this page
Groundbreaker Marketing wrote this, and we sell the thing it is about. That is a conflict of interest and you should read it accordingly.
What we have done about it: every criterion below is something you can verify yourself about any agency, without taking our word for it — is the price published, whose name is on the account, are the reviews readable. And we have filled in our own column honestly, including the rows where the answer is "no". An agency scorecard where the author wins every line is marketing, not a guide.
We have not scored anyone else. Ranking named competitors is a page we could write and have chosen not to publish without their agreement and ours — see the note at the bottom.
Nine things you can check before you sign
All nine are verifiable from an agency’s own website and Google profile, in about fifteen minutes, before you ever get on a call.
| What to check | Why it matters | Us | Our detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Publishes its prices | If you cannot find out what an agency charges without a sales call, you cannot compare it to anything. It is also the clearest signal of whether the price is the same for everyone. | Yes | $1,495/month published with all eleven inclusions and the ad-spend minimum. |
| You own the ad accounts | The account history is what makes campaigns cheap over time. If the agency owns it, leaving means starting from zero — which is why some of them insist on it. | Yes | Accounts are created in your name and stay there. |
| Call and form tracking included | Without it nobody can tell you which marketing produced the phone call, so budget decisions get made on gut feeling. | Yes | Included in the fee, with recordings, durations and a dashboard you can open yourself. |
| Reviews visible on their own site, in full | A widget or a hand-picked pull-quote tells you nothing. All of the reviews, with names and dates, tells you a lot. | Yes | All 8, at 5.0, reproduced in full with names and dates. |
| Named people with published backgrounds | You should know who is doing the work and whether they have any business doing it. | Partly | Both owners are named with real bios. Certifications and credentials are not yet published — that gap is on our own team pages. |
| Third-party awards or accreditation | Genuine recognition from a body that has standards is worth something. Paid directory badges are not. | No | We hold none we can name and link. We say so on our awards page rather than putting up a badge wall. |
| Long review track record | A handful of five-star reviews is a weaker signal than fifty reviews averaging 4.7 over five years. | No | 8 reviews is a small sample, however good the average. Worth weighing honestly. |
| Specialises in your trade | An agency that has run septic or excavation accounts already knows what a good cost per lead looks like in your market. A generalist is learning on your budget. | Yes | Septic and wastewater first, plus excavation, foundation, drilling, HVAC and plumbing. |
| Will say when more budget will not help | Channels get demand-capped: there are only so many searches to buy. An agency taking a percentage of spend has an obvious reason not to mention it. | Yes | Our fee is flat, not a percentage of spend, so we have no incentive to inflate your budget. |
Our column is filled from what is published on this site: the pricing page, the reviews page, the team pages and the awards page. Three rows are a "partly" or a "no", and those are the ones worth pressing us on.
Ten questions to ask any agency
Take these to us and to everyone else you are considering. The useful signal is not the answer — it is whether they answer directly or manage the question.
- What exactly do I get for the monthly fee, itemised?
- Is the ad spend included in that number, or on top of it?
- Whose name will the Google Ads and Google Business Profile accounts be in?
- If I leave, what do I keep — the website, the domain, the ad history, the lead data?
- How will you tell me which channel produced each phone call?
- Can I see the reporting myself, whenever I want, or do I wait for a monthly PDF?
- What is the minimum term, and what happens at the end of it?
- Who specifically will be working on my account, and what have they run before?
- Can I speak to a current client in my trade?
- What would make you tell me to stop spending money?
Three answers that should end the conversation
- “We’ll set the accounts up on our side.” Your ad account and Google Business Profile should be in your name. This one is not negotiable, and it is the most expensive mistake in this whole list.
- “We guarantee first page in 30 days.” Nobody controls Google’s auction or your competitors’ budgets. A guarantee here means either a meaningless definition of "first page" or a claim that cannot be kept.
- “Here’s a report of your impressions and reach.” If nobody can tell you how many phone calls the work produced, the reporting is measuring the wrong thing.
The version of this page we have not published
The obvious page here is "Top 10 Septic Marketing Agencies in 2026", with us in it. We have not published one, for two reasons: we would need to agree which agencies are genuine peers rather than picking convenient ones, and naming and scoring other companies carries real legal exposure that ought to be signed off rather than assumed.
Blocked on a decision, not on effort
To publish the named comparison we need:
- Which agencies Ashley considers legitimate peers to be compared against.
- Sign-off on naming them in a published, ranked comparison.
- A rule that every scored cell links to a public source, and reads "not publicly stated" where there is none.
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Run these questions past us
Book a call and ask all ten. If we cannot answer one, you will get “let me find out” rather than a runaround — that is the thing our clients keep writing reviews about.