What Moving Company Marketing Actually Costs
We are not going to put a fake number on this page to get you to fill out a form. Here is exactly how pricing works, what moves it, and how to figure out what you should be spending before you talk to anybody.
Three Components, No Games
1. A one-time build. Website, tracking installation, Google Business Profile rebuild, campaign construction. This is real work with a real cost and it happens once. Skipping it is why so many movers churn through agencies without ever getting traction.
2. A flat monthly management fee. Same fee whether your ad budget is $4,000 or $40,000. We do not take a percentage of ad spend, because that model pays an agency to talk you into spending more. Our fee is tied to scope, not to your credit card statement.
3. Your ad budget, paid directly to the platforms. Google, Meta, and Local Services Ads bill you on your card, not ours. You see the real numbers. There is no markup buried between what you pay and what actually reaches the auction.
Why Two Moving Companies Get Different Quotes
How many cities you want
Winning one suburb is a fundamentally different job than winning a metro of thirty municipalities. Every city you want to rank in adds pages, citations, reviews, and content.
Local versus long distance
Local is a map pack and speed-to-lead game. Long distance is a content, trust, and nurture game against national van lines and lead brokers with real budgets. Chasing both costs more than chasing one.
What you are starting with
A five-year-old site with real authority and 400 reviews needs less build work than a company on a template site with 11 reviews and no tracking installed.
Which services you need
Local SEO plus reviews plus texting is a lighter engagement than the full eleven-service stack with content publishing and multi-platform paid media.
Your capacity and your season
There is no point buying leads for July if your trucks are already booked. Budget should be seasonally weighted toward the shoulder months, and we will build the plan that way.
Your average revenue per move
A company averaging $4,800 per long distance move can profitably spend far more per lead than one averaging $650 on apartment jobs. Budget follows the math, not the other way around.
How to Figure Out Your Own Number Before Anyone Quotes You
Do this on a napkin before you take a single sales call, ours included.
- Gross profit per move. Average revenue per move times your gross margin. If a local job averages $1,200 at 45 percent, that is $540 of gross profit before overhead.
- Target acquisition cost. Decide what share of gross profit you are willing to spend to acquire a job, allowing more if repeat and referral business reliably follows. Pick your number and write it down.
- Booking rate. What percentage of leads that reach your sales desk become booked moves? If you do not know this, it is the single most important number to start tracking this week. At a 15 percent booking rate, a $90 allowable cost per booked move means roughly $13.50 allowable per lead.
- Work backwards to budget. Booked moves needed per month, divided by booking rate, times allowable cost per lead, equals your media budget. Add management. That is your real number.
Now compare that against what you currently pay per broker lead and what percentage of those close. For a lot of companies, that comparison is the moment the whole strategy becomes obvious.
If the math says your budget is small, the honest answer is to start with the free and cheap channels: Google Business Profile, review generation, speed to lead, and reactivating your past customer and past-estimate lists. We will tell you that instead of selling you a campaign you cannot sustain.
If You Cannot Track It, You Cannot Price It
The most common reason a moving company cannot answer "what should I spend" is that nobody has ever measured cost per booked move by channel. That is fixable in about two weeks, and it is the first thing we do in any engagement, before we recommend a single dollar of media spend.
Pricing Questions
Why is there no price list on this page?
Is there a minimum engagement?
Do you mark up ad spend?
Should I keep buying broker leads while you build?
What happens if I want to leave?
Get an Honest Number for Your Market
Book a free 30-minute call. We will look at your market and your current setup and give you a real scope and a real price. If the honest answer is that you should not hire an agency yet, we will tell you that too.
Book a Free Strategy Call