Concreter Marketing Cost Calculator

Understanding concreter marketing costs in Australia

What concreting businesses spend on marketing in 2026

A single crew residential concreter in an Australian capital typically spends $1,200 to $3,000 a month to stay booked, almost entirely on Google Search and local presence. A larger residential operation running two or three crews commonly spends $4,000 to $9,000 a month. Commercial and civil concreters spend very differently, often less on advertising and considerably more on relationship development, tender preparation and a website that stands up to a builder's scrutiny.

The starting point should be job flow rather than a round number. A single crew pouring driveways needs roughly four to eight jobs a month. With paid search clicks at $6 to $16 and a conversion of around 25 to 35 percent on quoted leads, that lands the media requirement somewhere between $1,500 and $3,000 a month depending on how competitive your metro area is.

The job value spread and why it dominates the budget

Concreting has one of the widest job value spreads in the trades. A standard 40 square metre plain grey driveway at $65 to $95 per square metre is a $2,600 to $3,800 job. The same driveway in exposed aggregate at $100 to $150 per square metre is $4,000 to $6,000. A house slab package including excavation, formwork, steel and pour runs $18,000 to $40,000 plus, and a commercial pour can be multiples of that.

Because of that spread, a single blended cost per lead figure is meaningless. Paying $80 for an enquiry is expensive if it turns out to be a $1,200 path and cheap if it is a $30,000 slab. The practical response is to run separate campaigns for separate job types, with landing pages that pre-qualify by scope, and to track cost per job independently for each. Concreters who run one campaign for everything end up optimising toward the highest volume and lowest value work by default.

Radius targeting and the concrete truck problem

Radius is a harder constraint in concreting than in almost any other trade, because ready mix concrete has a limited window between batching and placement. Long hauls raise the risk of a load stiffening, add truck hire time and blow out travel for the crew. That is before considering that a two hour round trip removes most of a pour day.

Despite this, concreters routinely advertise across an entire metropolitan area, paying $6 to $16 per click for enquiries in suburbs they will not service profitably. Tightening the radius to a genuine working zone, commonly 25 to 40 kilometres from the yard for residential work, is the single cheapest budget improvement available. It reduces wasted clicks, improves the quality of the enquiries you do get, and stops you quoting defensively high on far jobs to protect yourself.

Seasonality and weather

Residential concreting is weather bound in a way that most trades are not. A wet fortnight stops pours entirely, and in the southern capitals winter slows homeowner projects sharply while summer and early autumn carry the bulk of demand. Spending the same amount every month means paying peak prices for enquiries during periods when you cannot schedule the work, which produces both wasted money and irritated prospects who go elsewhere.

A weather aware budget front loads media into the drier, warmer months, holds a lower baseline through winter, and includes the ability to pause quickly during sustained wet periods. Winter is a sensible time to invest in SEO, photography and website work, all of which take months to pay off and will be in place when demand returns.

Photography and the decorative premium

Decorative concreting sells on appearance. Exposed aggregate, honed finishes, coloured and stencilled concrete and polished interior floors are chosen by homeowners comparing looks, not prices, and they carry materially better margin than plain grey. That customer will not be convinced by a phone photo taken at 4pm in the rain.

A half day photography session at $350 to $700 covering three completed decorative driveways in good light gives you a gallery, Google Business Profile content and quote attachments for a year or more. For a business trying to move up from plain grey into decorative work, it is close to a prerequisite, because the entire pitch depends on showing finishes the customer has not seen in person.

Commercial work needs a different budget entirely

If your focus is structural slabs, footings or commercial and civil work, consumer advertising is largely wasted. Builders and project managers source concreters through other builders, through concrete suppliers and formwork hire relationships, and through direct approach. What they do is check your website, your licences, your insurance certificates and whether you have poured anything comparable.

For that audience the budget belongs in a credible website with a project sheet, current certificates of currency, safe work documentation and a handful of reference projects, plus the time cost of maintaining three or four builder relationships. Use the estimator above to set a monthly figure, then check the split matches which of these two businesses you are actually running.