What you are actually buying
Search only works on people who are already looking. Someone types in what they need, and if you are visible you get the job. That is a good channel and most of what we do, but it has one hard limit: it cannot reach anybody who is not yet in the market.
On the Peninsula that limit costs more than it does in suburban Melbourne, because a large share of the money arrives in a wave. The family who will need six trades for their Blairgowrie place in December are sitting in a Melbourne living room in July, not searching for anything. By the time they search, in the same week everybody else does, you are competing with everyone at once and you are probably already booked.
Social is the only channel that reaches them in July. It is not better than search, it does a different job. Search harvests demand at the moment it appears. Social builds recognition in the months beforehand, so that when the search does happen, yours is the name they already half know.
Which is why the calendar matters so much here, and why most Peninsula businesses have it backwards. They post constantly through summer, when they are flat out and the work is already won, then go quiet all winter, which is exactly when the posting would have been worth something.
The work
Most of this is designed to be sustainable rather than impressive. A social presence that collapses in March because it was too much work was never going to pay off anyway.
Not a studio shoot. A handful of photos from a job you were on anyway, which is the only approach that survives contact with a working week. Our guide to getting a month of posts from one job is the method we hand clients.
The audience you want in January has to be built in July. That means a modest, steady cadence in the quiet months rather than a burst of activity when you are already flat out and have no time for it.
Paid reach can be pointed at Melbourne postcodes with holiday-home ownership, or at people physically in Rye this weekend. Both are useful and they are completely different campaigns.
A good share of Peninsula enquiries now arrive as a message rather than a call. Slow replies cost jobs, so we set up who answers what and how fast, and it is usually you rather than us.
Boosting a post because the button is there is how most small budgets get spent. We would rather run two or three deliberate campaigns a year around your season than trickle money out every month.
Enquiries and messages against the accounts you own, not follower counts. If a month did not produce work we would rather show you that than dress it up in reach figures.
Timing
Autumn and winter, roughly April to August. This is the season that matters and the one everyone skips. You have time, the audience is at home in Melbourne thinking about next summer, and reach is cheaper because fewer local businesses are competing for it. Post the work you did over summer, the maintenance jobs people should book now, and the things that make you look like a real operator.
Spring, September to November. Booking season. This is when holiday-home owners start organising the trades they need before Christmas, and it is the single best window for paid campaigns pointed at Melbourne.
Summer, December to February. You are busy. Post less, and post about availability and turnaround rather than trying to build an audience. This is also the best time to collect photos and ask for reviews, because the work is happening and people are pleased.
If capturing the content is the part that worries you, getting a month of posts from a single job is the method we give clients, and social media ideas when you have no time covers the rest.
Being straight about it
Social media is easy to sell and hard to hold to account, so it gets sold to plenty of businesses it will not help. Three cases where we would tell you to spend elsewhere.
Your work is urgent and unplanned. Emergency plumbing, locksmiths, breakdowns, anything where somebody needs you in the next hour. Nobody scrolls their way to that decision. That money belongs in local search and Google Ads.
Your Google Business Profile is a mess. If your listing is half-finished or your most recent review is from 2022, fixing that is free and will do more than a year of posting. Our profile checklist is an afternoon's work.
You genuinely cannot sustain it. Social only compounds if it keeps going. If the honest answer is that nobody will take photos and nobody will answer messages, a smaller commitment done properly, or nothing at all, beats a service that quietly dies in month four.
If you are weighing this against paid search, SEO or social ads for a local business works through the comparison properly.
FAQ
For anything with a season, or anything people choose rather than urgently need, usually yes. It is the one channel that reaches a Melbourne family in July, months before they would ever search for a Peninsula trade. If your work is urgent and unplanned, an emergency plumber or a locksmith, it is worth much less and the money belongs in search instead.
Ongoing management for a small local business generally sits in the hundreds per month rather than the thousands, and it depends mostly on how much of the content you can capture yourself. Businesses that send us photos from their own jobs pay considerably less than ones where we have to produce everything, and they usually get better results because the content is real.
Usually Facebook and Instagram, and usually just those two. Facebook is where the local community groups and the older holiday-home owners are. Instagram is where the work photographs well. Adding a third platform you post to occasionally is worse than doing two properly, and almost nobody down here needs TikTok or LinkedIn as well.
Two or three times a week through the quiet months is plenty, and consistency matters far more than volume. A business posting twice a week all year beats one that posts daily for a fortnight in January and then goes silent, because the audience you are building takes months to be worth anything.
It is much better if you do, and it is easier than it sounds. Five minutes on a job you were doing anyway produces a month of material, and phone photos of real work outperform anything staged. We can shoot properly when a business genuinely needs it, but for most trades and home services that is not where the money should go.
Yes, and on the Peninsula the timing matters more than the budget. A campaign pointed at Melbourne in October, before people have booked their summer trades, does more than the same money spent in January when they have already chosen someone. We would rather run a few deliberate campaigns around your season than a permanent monthly spend.
No, but it is often the better first spend, and it is free. If your profile is incomplete or your reviews are years old, fixing that will do more for enquiries than any amount of posting. Our Google Business Profile checklist covers it, and we would tell you to do that before signing up for social media management.
Yes, always. The pages, the ad account and the business manager should be in your name with us added as a user. If an agency creates them under its own account you lose your audience and your ad history the day you leave, which is a bad position to be in and an easy one to avoid.
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