Questions Business Owners Ask Before Hiring a Marketing Agency
Straight answers on cost, timelines, ownership, and what actually happens month to month. No runaround.
The Short Version
AM Creative is a marketing agency based in Amesbury, Massachusetts. We work with home service contractors and local business owners, and we take clients anywhere in the country. Roofers, remodelers, HVAC, plumbers, electricians, cabinet shops, sign shops, real estate, and other businesses that sell to people in their own backyard.
We build one connected system: a website that converts, local SEO so you show up when someone searches nearby, content, ads when the budget calls for it, and automated follow-up that catches every call and form. One team, one login, one bill.
You own everything we build. Your domain, your website, your content, your Google Ads account, all of it, from day one. There is no long term contract. Setup runs on a short initial commitment, then month to month after that.
Timelines vary. Paid ads generally move first, while SEO builds over several months. How fast either one moves depends on your trade, how competitive your area is, and how much groundwork has to happen before you are at a normal baseline. We give you a realistic range for your situation once we have looked at it, and we report on calls booked and jobs sold, not impressions.
Is AM Creative a fit for my business?
The honest answer is that we are a good fit for some shops and a bad fit for others. Here is how to tell which one you are.
What kind of businesses do you work with?
Home service contractors and local business owners. Roofing, remodeling, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and cabinetry make up most of our roster, alongside sign shops, real estate, and other local businesses that sell to people in their own backyard.
The common thread is not the trade. It is the stage. Our clients are usually three or more years in, past the survival stretch, doing somewhere between $200K and $5MM, and they have hit the ceiling on what word of mouth alone can carry. You can see the industries we cover on our industries page, and how we approach local business marketing more broadly.
Do you only work with contractors?
No, but the trades are what we know best, and that shapes how we work with everyone else too.
We already know that emergency calls and planned remodels behave nothing alike, that roofing spikes after a storm, that HVAC runs a two peak year, and that your slow February is not a marketing failure. A generalist agency spends your first three months learning that on your dime. That same thinking carries over to any local business with a service area, a busy season, and customers who search before they call. What we do not take on is national ecommerce or anything without a local footprint.
Do you only work with businesses in Massachusetts and New Hampshire?
No. We work with local businesses anywhere in the country. Our shop is in Amesbury, Massachusetts, and that is where we started, but the work does not depend on us being down the road from you.
What we specialize in is not a region. It is a type of business. If your customers come from within an hour of your door, you have the same problem a roofer in Amesbury has and a roofer in Tulsa has. You need to show up in the map pack for your own towns, rank for the searches people in your area actually type, and answer the phone before your competitor does. Local search works the same way everywhere. The town names change.
Working with us from out of state means video calls instead of a meeting at your shop, and you send us photos instead of us shooting them. Everything else runs identically, and most of our communication would happen by phone and text regardless.
What if I already have a website I like?
Then we keep it and work on making it convert better. Replacing a site you are happy with is a waste of your money.
Plenty of sites look fine and still fail at the one job that matters, which is turning a visitor into a phone call. Usually the fix is smaller than a rebuild: clearer offers, faster load times, better calls to action, real project photos, and pages built around what people actually search. If the site is on a platform we cannot work with, or it is slow enough to be costing you rankings, we will tell you and explain why. More on our approach to contractor web design.
Who is not a good fit for AM Creative?
Brand new businesses with no revenue yet, shops shopping purely on price, and owners who want to approve every headline before it goes live.
None of that makes anyone a bad business owner. It just means the arrangement will frustrate both of us. Marketing takes a runway and a budget that can survive the first sixty days, and it works best when you trust the people doing it to do it. If you want a vendor who executes your instructions exactly, there are shops built for that and we are not one.
What does it cost and what do I actually get?
Vague pricing usually means somebody is hiding something. Here is how ours works.
How much does marketing cost with AM Creative?
We run tiered monthly plans, and the tier you need depends on how much of the system you want running. Current numbers are on our pricing page.
The bottom tier gets you the system that catches leads: CRM, AI concierge, web chat, missed call text back, review requests, and scheduling. Higher tiers layer on local SEO, then managed ads, then video and social. Most owners find the math simple enough to check themselves. If your average job runs $4,000 and you close half of what you quote, two booked jobs a month covers a mid tier plan.
Is ad spend included in the monthly fee?
No. Your ad budget goes to Google or Meta directly and stays separate from what you pay us. We never mark it up.
For most trades, a workable starting ad budget lands somewhere between $1,000 and $3,000 a month depending on how competitive your service and your territory are. A dense metro costs more per click than a rural county. We will tell you before you start whether your budget is enough to compete in your market, because underfunded ads are a slow way to waste money.
Are there setup fees or charges I will not see coming?
There is a setup fee in month one, quoted before you sign. After that your invoice is the same number every month unless you ask us to add something.
The setup fee covers real work: configuring your CRM, building out pipeline stages, training the AI concierge on your services and pricing, installing tracking, and getting your Google Business Profile in shape. If a project needs unusual setup work, the fee goes up and you hear about it during the quote, not on an invoice.
Can I get just SEO, or just a website?
Yes. We build custom packages when the tiers do not line up with what you need.
We will be straight about the tradeoff though. SEO without a system to catch the calls means you pay to make the phone ring and then lose the ones you miss. A website without traffic is a business card nobody sees. The pieces work better connected, so when you take one on its own, we will tell you what gap it leaves open. Individual services are broken out under SEO, web design, paid advertising, and social media.
How long before my phone starts ringing?
Different channels move at different speeds. Anyone who gives you one number for all of it is guessing.
How long until I see results?
It depends, and any firm number you get before someone has looked at your account is a guess. What we can give you is the usual shape.
Paid ads tend to move first, generally within the first several weeks of going live. SEO is slower, usually a matter of months before it carries real weight and longer still before it compounds. Those ranges assume a reasonably healthy starting point.
Three things push it either way: your trade and how competitive your area is, where you are starting from, and how much has to be fixed before you are even at a normal baseline. A shop with a working site, a claimed Google profile, and steady reviews moves faster than one where all three need rebuilding first. We give you a realistic range for your situation once we have looked, and we would rather set expectations low and beat them.
The gap between spending and seeing is real either way, and it is the point where most owners quit on something that was about to work.
Why does SEO take so long?
Because Google has to see enough signals over enough time to decide you deserve the spot, and there is no way to rush that.
Rankings come from four things stacked together: content that actually answers what people search, other sites linking to you, a technically clean site, and real people clicking through and staying. Content and technical work move in weeks. Authority takes months, because it depends on other people and other sites, which we do not control. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either buying links that will burn you later or ranking you for phrases nobody types.
What happens if the phone still is not ringing after 90 days?
We show you the data, tell you what we think is wrong, and you decide whether to keep going. If we cannot show real progress, you should leave.
Sometimes the diagnosis is uncomfortable. The calls are coming in and nobody is answering them. The ad budget is too small for the territory. The quotes are going out and not closing. We would rather name that than blame the algorithm and keep billing you. There is no penalty for walking away and we will hand over everything.
Do you adjust for my busy and slow seasons?
Yes. Running the same campaign in February that you ran in July is a good way to burn budget.
Roofing spikes after storms. HVAC runs two peaks and two valleys. Remodeling quotes slow around the holidays and land in January. We shift ad spend, content topics, and offers to match, and we plan the slow stretch as the time to build the SEO and content that pays off in your next busy season.
Your calendar will not look like a New England calendar if you are in Phoenix or Tampa, and we build around yours rather than ours. The first thing we ask is when your phone goes quiet and when you cannot keep up.
Do I own my website, and what happens if I leave?
This is the question most contractors do not think to ask until they are already stuck. Ask it of every agency you talk to.
Do I own my website and my accounts?
Yes. All of it, from day one. Your domain, your website and its content, your Google Ads account, your Google Business Profile, your analytics, your social accounts.
We build on WordPress and standard platforms, never a proprietary system that only we can log into. This matters more than it sounds like it should. Some agencies build your site on software they control, and when the relationship ends you lose the site, the content, and every bit of ranking history you paid for. We do not do that, and we put it in writing.
Am I locked into a long contract?
No. There is a short initial commitment while the system gets built, then month to month after that.
The initial period exists because month one is heavy setup work and judging results at day thirty is not fair to either of us. After that you stay because the work is producing, or you go. We are not interested in holding anybody hostage. If we needed a two year contract to keep clients, that would tell you something about the work.
What happens if I want to cancel?
You give us notice, we hand over every login and file, and we tell you what we would do next if we were you.
That includes domain access, WordPress admin, the Google Ads account, Search Console, analytics, your CRM data exported, and any content or creative we produced. No ransom, no stalling, no last minute discovery that something was in our name. We would rather part on good terms and have you tell the next contractor at the supply house that we were straight with you.
What is AM Connect and do I have to use it?
AM Connect is the CRM and follow up system underneath everything else. It catches the calls, texts, form fills, and chats so nothing gets lost. Every plan includes it.
It handles missed call text back, an AI concierge trained on your services, review requests after a job wraps, scheduling, and invoicing. The reason it is in every plan is simple. Most contractors do not have a lead problem so much as a follow up problem. Getting more calls into a system that drops them just means losing more work, faster.
How will I know whether this is working?
If you cannot tell whether your marketing is working, that is a reporting failure, and it is on the agency.
What do you actually report on?
Calls, form fills, booked appointments, and jobs sold. Traffic and rankings show up too, but underneath the numbers that pay you.
You get a monthly report with a written summary in plain English, not a stack of charts. When we mention a ranking, we tie it to what it produced: this page moved from position eleven to four, and it brought in nine calls last month. You also get standing access to the dashboard so you can check any day you want without waiting on us.
Can I see where each call came from?
Yes. Call tracking ties each call back to the source, whether that was an ad, an organic search, your Google Business Profile, or a form on the site.
Calls are recorded, so you can hear how they were handled. That turns out to be one of the more useful things owners get from the system, and not always for marketing reasons. Owners regularly find out that the marketing is fine and the phone handling is what is costing them jobs.
How often will I hear from you?
A monthly report and a strategy call whenever you want one. Beyond that, you can text or call us directly.
You are not getting handed to an account manager juggling forty other clients after the first month. It is the same small team the whole way through. If you are nearby we will sit down at your shop when something needs a real conversation, and if you are not, we get on a call the same day.
Have you gotten results for contractors like me?
Yes, and we publish the numbers rather than describing them. You can read through the case work on our results pages.
Look at construction and remodeling results and the Signs East results for a sign shop in Kingston, New Hampshire. The town names will not match yours. What to look at instead is the shape of it: where the business started, what we changed, how long each piece took to move, and what it produced. That pattern repeats regardless of the map.
How do I get started?
Three steps, and the first one costs you fifteen minutes.
What happens on the first call?
Fifteen minutes. We ask where your work comes from now, what you have already tried, and what is actually broken. No pitch deck.
Most of that call is us asking questions. By the end you will have a straight answer on whether we can help, and if we cannot, we will say so and point you somewhere better. Book it on the contact page.
What do you need from me to get going?
Access to your accounts, a bit of time in month one, and photos of your work.
Access means your website, Google Business Profile, and any ad accounts you already have. The time is a training session on the CRM and a conversation about your services and pricing so the AI concierge answers correctly. The photos matter more than people expect. Real pictures of your jobs beat stock every time. If you are close enough for us to drive to, we come shoot them ourselves. If you are not, we will tell you exactly what to shoot on your phone and how, and that works fine.
What happens in the first 90 days?
Broadly: build, then launch, then adjust based on what the early data shows. How much fits into each stage depends on what already exists and what has to be built from scratch.
- Build: CRM configured, tracking installed, Google Business Profile optimized, site audit and priority fixes, keyword research, first content piece.
- Launch: ads live if they are part of your plan, citations submitted, content publishing on a regular cadence.
- Adjust: campaign changes based on real data, conversion fixes on the pages people actually land on, link building.
That sequence stretches or compresses depending on where you are starting. A site that needs rebuilding pushes everything back. A shop with solid foundations moves through it quicker. You get the plan in writing with realistic dates for your situation before any work starts, so you know what you are paying for while it is happening.
I have been burned by an agency before. Why would this be different?
Fair question, and the only honest answer is that you should judge us on what we do rather than what we say here.
What we can point to: you own everything, so leaving costs you nothing but time. There is no long contract, so we have to earn the next month. You get dashboard access, so you can check the work without asking. The reports talk about jobs, not impressions. And if it is not working at ninety days, we will be the ones to say so. None of that is a guarantee. It just means the usual traps are not there.
Still have a question we did not answer?
Fifteen minutes on the phone will tell you more than another hour of reading. We will give you a straight answer either way.
Or call us directly at (978) 464-8895