Hiring a marketing agency for a moving company, or doing it yourself
What to do in house, what to pay for, the red flags in a mover's pitch, why lead sellers are not marketing, fair prices, and why a deal starts with a trial.
Moving companies get pitched more than almost any other local trade, and the pitches are unusually bad. The reason is that this industry has a large, established layer of businesses whose product is your lead rather than your growth. Aggregators, brokers, directory upsells and pay-per-lead networks all sell you the same customer they are selling to four competitors. When an agency calls, most owners cannot tell which category the caller is in.
Here is how to tell, what a fair price looks like, and what is genuinely worth doing yourself.
What you should keep in house
Three things should never leave your building.
Answering the phone and calling leads back. No vendor can fix this, and it is the single largest determinant of your close rate. If a lead sits for an hour, nothing upstream matters. The speed to lead guide has the process.
Asking for reviews. An agency can build the automation, write the templates and handle the replies. It cannot make a foreman say the closing line at the end of a job. The ask belongs to your crews.
Photos and video from real jobs. Four minutes of a crew wrapping a dresser outperforms anything a production company will sell you, and only your people can shoot it.
Everything else is a legitimate candidate for hiring out, because it takes ongoing attention you do not have in July.
What is worth paying for
Google Ads management, if you are spending more than about $1,500 a month. Below that the management fee eats the benefit. Above it, the difference between a maintained account and a set-and-forget one is large, because moving keywords waste money in creative ways every single week.
Website build and speed work. A one-time project with a clear deliverable, which is the easiest thing in this list to buy well.
Local SEO and Google profile management, especially the parts that are tedious and continuous: photos, posts, Q and A, service listings, category work, citation consistency.
Missed-call text-back and lead follow-up automation. High return, low ongoing cost, and technical enough that most owners never get to it.
Meta ads, but only when someone is answering the leads in minutes. Otherwise you are buying leads to ignore.
Lead sellers are not marketing
This distinction is worth being blunt about.
An aggregator sells you a shared lead for $15 to $60. That lead goes to four or five moving companies. You are buying a race, not a customer. It can work if your follow-up is instant and disciplined, and it will never build anything. Stop paying and the flow stops the same day.
Marketing builds an asset you own: a profile with 300 reviews, a site that ranks, an ad account with conversion history, a list of past customers and referral partners. Stop paying and it decays slowly rather than vanishing.
Both can have a place. The mistake is believing you are doing the second while paying for the first for six years. If your entire lead flow is purchased and shared, you have no marketing, you have a subscription.
Red flags
Guaranteed rankings or guaranteed lead counts. Nobody controls Google's results, and lead volume in a seasonal business is not something an honest vendor promises in March for January.
A 12 month contract with a 90 day "ramp up." You are being asked to pay through your peak season before anyone shows you a result. In a business this seasonal, that structure exists to survive the client's first three months of doubt.
They will not give you admin access to your own accounts. Your Google Ads account, your Google Business Profile, your Meta business manager and your domain must be in your name with you as owner. Agencies that hold accounts hostage are common in this trade and the loss when you leave is total.
A lead-gen site that ranks in your city and rents you the calls. They own the asset, you rent the customers, and they can sell to your competitor next quarter.
No call recording and no source tracking. If a vendor cannot tell you which channel produced a booked move, they are reporting on clicks and you are paying for a dashboard.
Reporting that leads with impressions. Impressions are not the product. Booked moves are. Any report that opens with reach is hiding the second page.
They do not ask about your capacity. A vendor who never asks how many trucks and crews you have, or how far out you are booked, is going to sell you leads for dates you cannot service. That produces refund requests and bad reviews, and 18.6% of moving companies are already under 4.0 stars.
What a fair price looks like
Rough US ranges for a small to mid-size moving company:
- Google Ads management: $500 to $1,500 a month, or 10% to 20% of ad spend, on top of the spend itself.
- Meta ads management: $400 to $1,200 a month plus spend.
- Local SEO and Google profile management: $300 to $900 a month.
- Website build: $2,500 to $9,000 one time for a real custom site. Under $1,000 usually means a template with your logo dropped in.
- Missed-call text-back and follow-up automation: $100 to $300 a month plus a setup fee.
- Review generation program: $150 to $400 a month.
Two rules regardless of the number. The management fee should be separate from ad spend on the invoice, so you can see both. And nobody should hold your accounts.
Doing it yourself, realistically
A working owner can genuinely run the Google profile, the review process and missed-call text-back. That is most of the available upside in this trade, and it costs mainly discipline. Budget two hours a week.
Google Ads is where do-it-yourself usually goes wrong, because moving keywords punish inattention faster than any other home service category. If you run it yourself, commit to checking the search terms report weekly and building negatives, or you will fund a lot of truck rental searches.
Websites are worth buying. Not because you cannot build one, but because you will start it in February and still not have finished it in June.
Why any deal should start with a trial
You are being asked to pay before seeing anything work, in an industry where you have already been burned by people selling shared leads. The reasonable response is to reverse the order.
Ask any vendor for a short paid or unpaid trial with a defined deliverable and access to your own accounts. If they refuse, the refusal is the information. That is also why every service on this site is offered as a free 14-day trial with no card: an owner should watch it work before writing a check, and nothing here should require a signature to test.
Frequently asked
Should I hire a moving-specific agency or a general local one? Industry knowledge helps, mostly around seasonality, negative keywords and the trust problem. Competence matters more. Ask any candidate to describe how they would handle end-of-month bid adjustments and the video survey offer. The answer tells you which one you are talking to in about a minute.
How long before I can judge results? Ninety days for ads and follow-up. Six to twelve months for reviews and organic ranking. Anyone promising faster is describing bought leads.
What if I already signed a long contract? Read the termination clause, get admin access to every account today, and document what has been delivered. Even inside a contract, owning your own accounts limits the damage.
Before you hire anyone, look at the benchmark report so you know your own numbers, and read the FAQ for how the trial works. Text or call (385) 832-6175.