Wait. What is the Marketing Benchmark Report?

Coalmarch is the leading provider of digital marketing solutions for the field service industry. With a potent combination of industry knowledge, data-driven strategy and cutting-edge creativity, we have been helping businesses generate qualified leads and grow their market share for more than 10 years.

Our reporting system not only allows our clients to monitor real-time performance data across all channels but has enabled us to gather and analyze that data across dozens of companies. Using that data, we create the Marketing Benchmark Report every year so that pest and lawn companies can see how their performance measures up to their peers and competition – and make informed decisions for the year ahead.

OK…so what’s in the report?

A look at digital marketing trends over the past year and an overview of digital marketing metrics from more than 75 pest and lawn companies.

To understand the full picture, it’s important to understand current digital marketing trends and updates – so that’s where we start. Here’s what made waves in 2022:

• Mobile continues to reign. About 60-70% of our clients’ traffic comes from mobile; this has nearly doubled over the past five years.
• Google’s Helpful Content Update. Google continues to place a bigger emphasis on website content that gives visitors the information they need, demonstrates expertise or depth of knowledge and provides a satisfying user experience, or what they call “people-first” content.
• The ever-changing Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Google continues to tweak the SERP and what shows up there, prioritizing local and “near me” content and enabling “zero-click booking” where people can contact businesses straight from the SERP without ever clicking to a company’s website. The most effective digital marketing will help a company show up in as many areas of the SERP as possible.

What about the metrics?

We’ve crunched numbers from more than 75 pest and lawn companies with revenue ranging from $250,000 to $25 million, with a total of $175 million in combined annual revenue. Altogether, the companies in this report spent a total of $9.5 million in overall marketing and $7.2 million in advertising. We looked at companies with a full 12 months of performance data, from October 2021 through September 2022.

Here’s what we look at:

Organic Performance: That’s any search activity that is earned, rather than paid for – digital marketing that’s not ad-oriented (like your content, your website, your non-paid social media, etc.). That doesn’t mean it’s free, though – there’s almost always a fixed cost for your marketing efforts including content creation, website maintenance and optimization, and more. While organic typically drives fewer leads than paid marketing, it's definitely a good investment: Leads should increase each year, while your costs will remain fairly static.

Paid Ads Performance: Paid digital marketing channels allow your business to target, reach, engage and convert audiences by paying to show ads as a response to certain searches. In recent years paid ads have dominated more and more of the top-of-page real estate for local searches.

• Google Ads: More than 90% of web searches take place on Google, so the Google Ads Platform gets the vast majority of paid search traffic. Typically these are pay-per-click (PPC) ads, meaning you only pay when someone clicks on the ad and goes to your website.
• Microsoft Ads: One of Google’s only challengers. These are also usually PPC ads.
• Local Service Ads by Google: Display ads that appear above the PPC ads on the SERP page, local services are strictly pay-per-lead, where you are only charged when a qualified lead contacts you directly from the ad.
• Branding: Facebook, Instagram, NextDoor, YouTube, display ads, etc. This is all about familiarizing potential customers with your brand before they need you so that when they do need your services, they’re already thinking about your company.

For each channel, we break down average monthly performance, average spend, average leads generated per month, average conversion rate by month and, finally, we compare the cost per lead across all channels. This gives you a broad picture of what other companies are spending – and should give you an idea of how to spend your marketing dollars for maximum effectiveness.

Interested in seeing more and taking an even deeper dive into the 2022 Marketing Benchmark Report? Download your FREE copy here!