Ask the expert: honest answers to your trades marketing questions

Who answers the questions here?

Short answer: I do. I'm Ali Sedighi, I hold an MBA in Technology Management, and I have worked in digital marketing since 2007, when I founded the full-service agency ONE.ir.

Since then I have built 150+ live HVAC websites and run marketing for heating and cooling companies across Canada. Trades.Expert is part of the Sedighi.ca and SAZ.ca group of companies, a Canadian group headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. You can read the longer version on the about page.

One thing to be clear about. We are a marketing and consulting service. Nobody here holds a wrench for a living: we aren't a contractor, and installs, repairs and service calls are never part of what we sell. When I answer a question about furnaces or roofs, I'm answering how to market that work, never how to do it.

What questions do trades owners ask most?

Short answer: almost every question comes back to one of five worries. Where should my money go, what should a lead cost, why isn't Google showing me, is my website losing calls, and can I trust an agency?

Here is how the library is organized around those worries:

If your question isn't on that list, the FAQ covers price, contracts, timelines and ownership.

Why should I trust an answer from a marketing person?

Short answer: you shouldn't, unless the answer shows its working. Every answer on this site tries to give you something you can check yourself: a calculation, a test you can run this week, or a public source.

Take the most common question I get: "Is $80 a lead too much?" On its own, nobody can answer it. Add three facts and the answer falls out. If your average job is worth $1,200 in gross margin, you book one job for every three leads, and you'd like marketing to cost no more than a quarter of the margin it produces, then each job can carry $300 of marketing cost. Divided across three leads, that's $100 a lead. So $80 is fine. If you only book one in six, the same $80 is too much, and the fix is in your phone handling, not your ads.

That is the style throughout: numbers you can replace with your own, and a clear statement of what would change my answer.

What can the HVAC results tell a plumber or a roofer?

Short answer: they show the method works when it's done properly, not that your trade will get the same numbers. All of our published case studies are results from our HVAC work, and we present them that way.

A few of them, so you can see the scale:

• CombiBoiler.ca reached 300% ROI and 300+ monthly leads.
• BCWide.ca reached 3× leads in 90 days.
• HVACDeal.ca produced 500+ leads at a 12:1 ROI.

Heating is a demanding trade to market: emergency calls in a cold snap, large replacement decisions, and long quiet stretches. The parts that transfer to other trades are the structure: a page for every service you want to sell, a Google Business Profile that is complete and active, ads cut down to the searches that book, and tracking that counts jobs rather than clicks. The results page goes through each case and what it does and doesn't prove.

Does the answer change by province?

Short answer: often, yes. The marketing principles are the same everywhere, but the regulators you should mention, the programs your customers ask about and the length of your busy season differ a lot.

A heat pump installer in Manitoba fields questions about provincial rebates that a Calgary installer doesn't. A Quebec business has French-language obligations for its advertising. A roofer in St. John's plans around a different season from a roofer in Kelowna. The areas page links to an answer page for each province and for the three territories, each with official sources and dates.

What happens if I call?

Short answer: you'll talk to a senior strategist about your question, not a salesperson about a package.

Bring one thing: the question that's costing you sleep or money. It helps if you also know your average job value, roughly how many enquiries you get a month, and where they come from. We will tell you what we think, what we would check first, and whether we are a good fit. Plans are month-to-month with 30 days' notice, and the full prices are on the pricing page. If you'd rather keep reading first, start with the guides.