Most marketing advice is written for online shops and software start-ups. This playbook isn’t. It’s for businesses that rent, lease, sell, haul or build: where one customer can be worth thousands of dollars, the sale happens on the phone or over a quote, and the busy season decides the year.

It’s the approach we follow when we set up marketing for equipment and trades businesses, written down so you can run it yourself, hand it to your team, or hold an agency to it. Nine chapters, each ending in something you can act on this week.

A word on numbers. Everything here is our approach and our rules of thumb, not a promise. Where we use figures, they’re illustrative, picked to make the maths easy to follow. Your costs, close rates and seasons will differ, and finding out by how much is the whole point of measuring properly.

Where your customers actually come from

Every customer you’ll ever win falls into one of two groups: people who are already looking for what you sell, and people who aren’t looking yet.

The first group is searching right now. A contractor won a job and needs a skid steer on Monday. A fleet manager’s reefer trailer failed an inspection. A homeowner’s furnace quit at 10pm. They pick up a phone, type what they need and where they are into Google, and call one of the first few businesses that look credible.

The second group will need you eventually but isn’t thinking about it today. They scroll Facebook and Instagram, drive past your yard, read an industry newsletter. Marketing to them is about being remembered when the need arrives.

For equipment and trades businesses, a large share of revenue usually comes from the first group, because the need is urgent and specific. That shapes everything else in this playbook.

The funnel, in plain English

Every channel feeds the same five stages. Each stage has its own lever, and a weak stage drags down everything after it.

Most businesses obsess over the top two rows and ignore the bottom two. A cheaper click means little if nobody answers the phone.

Where each kind of business tends to find customers

Don’t forget the cheapest channel of all: customers you already have. Repeat business and referrals don’t show up in an ad dashboard, but a good review process (chapter 5), fast follow-up (chapter 6) and a simple email to past customers before each busy season (chapter 7) all feed them.

The website that sells

Your website has one job: turn a visitor into a phone call or an enquiry, quickly. Not to win design awards, not to tell your company history. Ads and SEO send people there; the website decides whether that money was wasted.

Speed, on a phone

Most of your visitors arrive on a phone, often on a job site or in a truck cab, on a patchy connection. Google tests your site the same way, on a simulated mid-range phone, and slow pages lose people before they see your offer.

• Test your homepage and your main landing pages with Google PageSpeed Insights, or our free website audit, which runs it for you and explains the results.
• The usual culprits: huge uncompressed photos, auto-playing video, chat widgets and tracking scripts loading before the page, and bloated page-builder themes.
• Fix the pages your ads point to first. They’re the ones you’re paying to send people to.

Above the fold: what, where, how to get a price

Someone landing on your page should know within a few seconds:

1. What you do, in their words. “Excavator & skid steer rentals” beats “Solutions for every project”.
2. Where you do it. City, region or service area, stated plainly.
3. How to get a price or availability, with a big button and a tappable phone number.

Answer the questions people are too busy to ask

The best equipment and trades websites answer the question in the buyer’s head before they have to call:

• What will it cost? Rates, “from” prices, or a quote calculator. For anything bought on finance, a payment calculator showing the monthly number. We’ve written about why a calculator is often your best salesperson.
• Is it available? For dealers, inventory that stays in sync, so nobody calls about a truck you sold last week. For rental companies, live or near-live availability, or at least a “check availability” form that asks for dates.
• Can I trust you? That’s the next section.

Trust signals that matter in these industries

• Real photos of your yard, your fleet, your crew and finished jobs. Stock photos of smiling people in hard hats fool nobody.
• Reviews, pulled from Google or quoted with the customer’s permission.
• Credentials: licences, insurance, safety certifications, manufacturer authorisations, trade association memberships. Only the ones you genuinely hold.
• Specifics: service area, response times you can actually keep, warranty terms, financing partners.
• A human: a named person, a direct line, an address customers can visit if you have one.

Short forms win

Ask for what you need to call someone back: name, phone or email, what they need, and when. Everything else can wait for the conversation. A long form feels like paperwork; a short one feels like a request.

The Google Ads playbook

Google Search is where people who need you right now go first. Done well, it’s the most predictable lead source most equipment and trades businesses have. Done badly, it’s a fast way to pay for clicks from people looking for jobs, manuals and toy excavators.

Structure campaigns by service and by area

Organise your account the way your customers search, and the way your business makes money.

• One campaign per service line with its own budget, so your best-margin services never run out of money because a cheaper one ate it.
• Tightly themed ad groups inside each campaign, so the ad and the landing page match the search.
• Location targeting by service area. Target the cities and regions you actually serve, set to people in those places rather than merely interested in them.
• A separate brand campaign for searches of your own name, so you can see brand and non-brand performance separately.

An illustrative structure for a rental company serving the Fraser Valley:

Keywords that convert

The searches that turn into customers usually combine a specific thing, an intent word and a place:

• Thing: “mini excavator”, “53 ft reefer”, “Peterbilt 579”, “furnace repair”
• Intent: rental, for sale, lease, quote, price, near me, financing, emergency
• Place: city, region, “near me”

Start with phrase and exact match on those combinations. Broad match can work well later, once your conversion tracking is solid and the bidding has real data to steer by; before that, it tends to spend money on loosely related searches.

Negative keywords: the money you don’t spend

Every week, read the search terms report: the actual searches that triggered your ads. Add anything irrelevant as a negative keyword. Here’s the starter list we begin most accounts with. Adjust it to your business; “used” is a negative for a rental company and a money keyword for a dealer.

Track calls, not just forms

In these industries a lot of leads arrive by phone. If you only count form fills, you’ll undervalue the campaigns that make the phone ring and cut the wrong ones.

• Add call assets to your ads so people can call straight from the search results.
• Use Google’s website call tracking (a forwarding number swapped onto your site for ad visitors) so calls from your site are credited to the right ad.
• Count a call as a lead only if it lasts long enough to be a real conversation. We usually start at around a minute and adjust once we’ve listened to some calls.
• If you can, record calls (with the disclosure your province requires) and spot-check them. It’s the fastest way to learn which keywords bring buyers and which bring tyre-kickers.

One landing page per campaign

Send each campaign to a page about that thing, in that area, not your homepage. Someone who searched “dump trailer rental Abbotsford” should land on a page that says dump trailer rental, mentions Abbotsford, shows the trailer and a rate, and has a form asking for dates. The checklist in chapter 2 applies to every one of them.

Let smart bidding learn

Google’s automated bidding (Maximize conversions, then a target cost per acquisition) can do a better job than manual bids, but only if it’s fed accurate conversion data and given time.

Our approach:

1. Get tracking right first. Forms and qualified calls recorded as conversions, and nothing else counted as one: no page views, no “time on site”.
2. Give it a few weeks before judging. New campaigns spend the first stretch learning; costs per lead are usually higher at the start.
3. Make changes in batches, not daily. Big budget swings and constant edits reset the learning. We make structural changes about once a week and leave the rest alone.
4. Move to a cost-per-lead target only once the campaign produces a steady flow of conversions each week, and set the target near what it’s actually achieving, not where you wish it was.

Sizing a budget: work backwards from customers

The most common budget question is “how much should we spend?” The honest answer starts from the other end: how many new customers do you want, and what’s one worth?

The chain is simple. It’s the same model behind our ROI calculator:

An illustrative example. You want 6 new customers a month, each worth about $3,500.

Two things this exercise tells you straight away. First, what you can afford to pay for a lead: if a customer is worth $3,500 and you close 15%, a lead is worth roughly $525 in revenue, so a $75 lead is a bargain and a $400 lead probably isn’t. Second, where to push: improving the landing page from 6% to 7%, or the close rate from 15% to 18%, buys you more customers for the same spend.

The Meta ads playbook

Facebook and Instagram are where you reach people before they search, bring back people who visited and didn’t enquire, and, for trucking fleets and trades, recruit the drivers and technicians you need to grow.

Lead forms or landing pages?

Meta offers instant forms that open inside the app, pre-filled with the person’s details. They’re convenient, which is both their strength and their weakness.

Our approach: start with instant forms that use the higher-intent setting (a review step before submitting) and include one or two qualifying questions, such as “What do you need, and when?” Then call within minutes (chapter 6). If quality is poor even with fast follow-up, move that campaign to a landing page.

Creative that works, by niche

Across all of these, the creative that tends to win is real: your equipment, your yard, your people, filmed on a phone in good light. Polished stock imagery usually looks like an ad, and gets scrolled past like one.

• Rental & leasing: the actual machine on a real job. A clear “from” rate if you publish one. Seasonal hooks: “Book your spring compaction equipment now.”
• Equipment & truck dealers: new arrivals as they land, short walkaround videos, a catalogue ad fed from your inventory. If you show a monthly payment, make sure it’s accurate and carries the terms your lender and your province require.
• Trucking fleets (customers): reliability and proof. Lanes you run, equipment you run them with, how you communicate on a load.
• Contractors & trades: before-and-after photos, the crew’s faces, a short clip of a job being done properly, and a reason to book now.

Retargeting: the cheapest second chance

Most people who visit your website leave without enquiring. Retargeting shows them your ads again for a few weeks. Set up these audiences from day one, even if you don’t spend on them yet:

• Website visitors in the last 30 days, excluding people who already enquired
• Visitors to high-intent pages (pricing, inventory, quote pages) in the last 14 days
• People who opened your instant form but didn’t submit
• People who watched most of a video

Keep retargeting creative different from the first ad: a review, an offer, an answer to a common objection. And cap how often people see it. Being remembered is good; being followed around is not.

Driver and technician recruiting

Recruiting ads follow different rules, and they’re where Meta often earns its keep for fleets and trades.

• Say the things drivers actually decide on, up front: pay and how it’s calculated, home time, routes or lanes, equipment, and requirements (for example a Class 1 or AZ licence and a clean abstract).
• Show real drivers and real trucks, not stock photos.
• Use instant forms with screening questions: licence class, years of experience, location. That saves your dispatcher from calling everyone.
• Follow up the same day. Good drivers are talking to several fleets at once.

Local SEO

When someone searches for a service near them, Google usually shows a map with three businesses before the regular results. Getting into that map pack, and ranking well below it, is the most valuable free marketing most local businesses can do. It takes longer than ads, but it compounds.

Your Google Business Profile

This is the single most important local SEO asset you have, and it’s free.

• Primary category: pick the most specific one that describes your main business (“Equipment rental agency”, “Truck dealer”, “Roofing contractor”). Add secondary categories for other genuine services.
• Business name: your real name, exactly as it appears on your signage. Adding keywords and cities to the name breaks Google’s guidelines and can get the profile suspended.
• Service areas: if customers don’t come to you, set service areas and hide the address.
• Services and products: list them with short descriptions. Dealers and rental companies can feature specific units.
• Photos: a steady flow of real ones: the yard, the fleet, the crew, finished jobs.
• Hours: accurate, including holiday hours. Nothing loses a customer faster than a closed gate during “open” hours.
• Posts: seasonal offers, new arrivals, completed projects. They keep the profile looking alive.

Service-area pages, done right

If you serve several cities, it’s tempting to create a page for each one by copying the same text and swapping the city name. Google treats near-identical pages like that as doorway pages, which its spam policies specifically target, and they rarely rank.

A service-area page earns its place when it’s genuinely about that area:

• Jobs you’ve done there, with photos (with the customer’s permission)
• Delivery or travel times and any delivery fees for that area
• Local specifics: permits, bylaws, road bans, soil or weather conditions, as relevant
• Reviews from customers in that area
• The services you actually offer there, with links to the full service pages

Fewer, better pages beat a page for every postal code.

Reviews

Reviews influence both your map ranking and whether someone calls you once they see you.

• Ask at the right moment: when the equipment comes back in good shape, the job is signed off, or the truck is delivered. A happy customer today is a busy customer next week.
• Make it one tap: send the direct review link from your Business Profile by text or email.
• Reply to every review, good and bad, politely and specifically. Future customers read the replies.
• Never buy reviews, offer incentives for them, or only ask the customers you expect to be happy. All three break Google’s policies.

Schema: telling Google what’s on the page

Schema markup is structured data in your page’s code that tells search engines exactly what they’re looking at. It doesn’t guarantee anything, but it removes guesswork.

• LocalBusiness (or a more specific type) on your homepage and contact page: name, address or service area, phone, hours, website.
• Service on service pages.
• Product with Offer on inventory pages for dealers: make, model, year, price, availability.
• BreadcrumbList on deeper pages.

Make sure what’s in the schema matches what’s visible on the page, and test it with Google’s Rich Results Test.

Speed to lead & follow-up

This is the chapter that most often decides whether marketing “works”. You can do everything else in this playbook perfectly and still lose the customer to whoever called back first.

In equipment and trades, buyers often contact several businesses at once, especially when the need is urgent. In our experience, the first business to reply with a useful answer, not just “we got your message”, wins a disproportionate share of those jobs.

Set a response-time standard

Our targets for the businesses we work with:

• Instantly: an automatic acknowledgement by email or text, saying who will be in touch and when.
• Within five minutes during business hours: a phone call from a real person.
• Same business day for anything that arrives after hours, first thing in the morning at the latest.

Write your standard down, make someone responsible for it, and measure it. If you can’t measure it today, start by writing the time each lead arrived and the time someone called back on a whiteboard for a week. The result is usually eye-opening.

Automate the parts that don’t need a person

• Instant acknowledgements for every form, lead ad and after-hours call.
• Missed-call text-back: if nobody picks up, an automatic text saying you’ll call back shortly. A lot of callers won’t leave a voicemail but will reply to a text.
• Lead routing: each lead goes straight to the right person (rentals, sales, service, recruiting) with a notification on their phone.
• Reminders: if a lead hasn’t been contacted within your standard, someone gets nudged.

Put every lead in one place

A CRM doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to answer four questions for every lead: who they are, where they came from, who owns them, and what happens next and when. Phone, web form, Facebook lead and walk-in all go in the same place, tagged with their source. That source tag is what makes chapter 8 possible.

A follow-up sequence that doesn’t give up too early

Most leads that go quiet aren’t lost; they’re busy. An illustrative sequence for a quote request:

Seasonality by industry

Most equipment and trades businesses live and die by the season. The mistake we see most often is spending hardest during the busy season, when you’re already turning work away, and going dark the rest of the year, which means starting cold every spring.

The patterns below are typical for much of Canada. Yours will differ by region and by what you sell. Your own invoices from the last two or three years are the best seasonality report you have: total them by month before you plan a budget.

How we handle a season

1. Ramp up before demand peaks, not during it. Search volume rises ahead of the season, and campaigns need a few weeks to learn. Starting early means you’re efficient by the time demand arrives.
2. During the peak, protect your margins. If you’re booked solid, shift budget to your highest-value services, raise prices or minimum rentals, and keep collecting reviews.
3. In the slow season, cut to maintenance, don’t switch off. Keep brand search and retargeting running, so campaigns keep their history and you stay visible to the people who plan ahead.
4. Use quiet months to build the things that compound: fix the website, write service-area pages, publish useful content, clean up the CRM, collect reviews from the season just finished.
5. Email past customers before every season. It’s the cheapest campaign you’ll run all year.

Measuring what matters

If you can’t tell which marketing produced which customers, every decision is a guess, and the loudest opinion in the room wins. Measuring properly isn’t about dashboards. It’s about being able to answer one question every month: for every dollar we spent, what came back?

The chain that matters

Follow the money all the way through, not just to the lead.

A channel with a higher cost per lead can be the better channel if its leads close more often or buy more. That’s the most common mistake we see: cutting the “expensive” campaign that was producing the best customers.

What has to be set up

1. Conversions defined and tracked: form submissions, qualified calls, lead-form submissions, chats. Recorded in Google Analytics 4 and sent to Google Ads and Meta.
2. Every lead tagged with its source: UTM parameters on every ad link, and the ad click ID captured with each form, so a lead in your inbox or CRM says which campaign produced it.
3. Outcomes recorded: when a lead becomes a customer, mark it in your CRM with the revenue. That’s what turns cost per lead into cost per customer.
4. Outcomes fed back to the ad platforms once you have volume. Importing “won” deals into Google Ads teaches its bidding to find more people like your customers, not just more people who fill in forms.
5. Consent handled properly. Tracking runs behind a cookie banner with Google’s Consent Mode, and no names, emails or phone numbers are sent to ad platforms from your website tracking. We’ve written about doing conversion tracking without creeping on customers.

The monthly scorecard

Fill this in on the first working day of every month. It takes half an hour once your tracking and CRM are set up, and it’s the most useful half hour of the month.

Questions to ask every month

• Which channel produced customers at the lowest cost, and can it take more budget?
• Which campaign produced leads but no customers? Is that a targeting problem or a follow-up problem?
• Did response times slip? Did the close rate move with them?
• What’s the one change we’ll make this month, and how will we know if it worked?

A 90-day launch plan

Here’s how we’d sequence everything above for a business starting from scratch, or starting over. It assumes someone can spend a few hours a week on it, or that you have help. Tick the boxes as you go.

That’s the playbook. None of it is complicated, but all of it has to be done, and kept up. The businesses that win with marketing are rarely the ones with the cleverest ads. They’re the ones that answer the phone, measure what happens and improve one thing every month.