How to Build a Q4 Marketing Plan From Your Own Numbers

It’s July. Business is good. The phones are ringing and you’re turning away work.

Then October rolls around.

Techs are sitting in the shop. There are holes in the board. And you’re asking a question you didn’t have to ask three months ago.

Are we going to make payroll?

That’s what I hear from contractors every fall. And most of the time it traces back to one decision: running the same marketing budget all year.

On September 30 I ran a live workshop called Finish 2026 Strong. We built a one-page Q4 marketing plan from the real numbers of a client: a plumber in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Every figure in this post is theirs.

Watch the 18-minute replay above, or copy the worksheet and follow along with your own numbers. Here’s how it works.

Why a Flat Budget Fails in Q4

Say you spend $20,000 a month on ads. Every single month. January through December.

It doesn’t work.

In peak season, demand finds you. In the slower months, it doesn’t. A flat budget overspends when the phones are already ringing and underspends exactly when you need the calls.

The fix is simple to say. Increase your spend in the slower times. Keep it consistent through the peak months. And adjust based on results, not on the calendar.

But you can’t adjust based on results until you know what your results are. That’s where the plan starts.

What You Need Before You Start

Pull these five numbers:

• Your Q3 revenue by lead source
• Your Q3 marketing spend by channel
• Your average ticket
• Your close rate
• Your call tracking report

Don’t have one of them? Estimate it. You can still build a healthy plan. But the more accurate your numbers, the more accurate your marketing plan and your budget.

Step 1: Score Q3 by What It Closed

Most contractors judge a channel by how much traffic it got. The rankings. The impressions. The clicks.

None of that builds a budget.

If you’re going to use real data to plan Q4, you judge every channel by three things: closed revenue, sold jobs and cost per sold job.

Here’s what the Tulsa plumber’s Q3 looked like for their two paid channels:

Channel	Spend	Leads	Sold jobs	Closed revenue
Local Services Ads	$91,945	953	484	$547,230
Google Ads	about $30,000	229	158	about $220,000

From those four columns you get everything else. Cost per lead ($96 on Local Services Ads). Close rate. Cost per sold job. Average ticket. Revenue for every dollar invested.

Look at Google Ads. A 69% close rate and $192 per sold job. Remember that. It decides where the money goes in Step 4.

Your Google Business Profile, website and SEO, referrals and repeat customers all go in at $0 spend. If you pay an agency fee for SEO and want it counted, go ahead. We left it out because we’re calculating the ad budget.

Step 2: Work Backward From Your Revenue Target

This is the part most plans skip. They start with a budget and hope it produces a number.

Flip it. Start with the number.

Your revenue target tells you how many sold jobs you need. Take out the jobs you’ll get from repeat customers and referrals, and you know how many jobs marketing has to sell. Your close rate turns that into leads. Take out the leads that come in organically, and what’s left is paid leads. Multiply by what each one costs, and that’s your budget.

Here’s the Tulsa plumber, one line at a time:

1. Revenue target: $2.3 million. Their average ticket was $953 in Q3. If you’re not actively training your salespeople or your CSRs right now, leave your ticket where it is.
2. Sold jobs needed: 2,414.
3. Repeat and referral jobs: 1,185. They got about 1,086 in Q3 and are pushing for roughly 100 more with a database reactivation campaign, an email sequence, bulk SMS and more maintenance agreements.
4. Jobs marketing has to sell: 1,229.
5. Close rate: 57%. It was 52.5% in Q3. There’s a lot of training going on at this company.
6. Leads needed: 2,157. About 750 come in organically and stay flat, which leaves 1,407 paid leads.
7. Cost per lead: $110. It was $103 in Q3. We budgeted higher because demand can drop going into the holidays.
8. Q4 budget: $154,770. That’s 1,407 paid leads at $110 each.

Then split it by month. This plan runs 36% in October, 29% in November and 35% in December, each month with its own revenue target.

Why monthly? Because you don’t want to find out in January that you fell behind in October.

Step 3: Pick Your Four Moves

Every Q4 plan comes down to four moves.

Capture demand now. Local Services Ads and Google Ads. Homeowners searching for your service who need you right now. This is the one you control most.

Work your Google Business Profile. More photos, more posts, more reviews. Widening your service area doesn’t really move the needle much.

Reactivate past customers. This is the one a lot of contractors miss. Your database is a gold mine. Customers you worked with two years ago still have a need. It’s just not urgent enough for them to call you. So give them a reason. A $49 maintenance tune-up. An $89 drain clearing with a camera inspection. A roof inspection.

Pause what you couldn’t score. If you found anything in Q3 you couldn’t attribute, pause it. You need your attribution together before you can make strategic decisions.

Step 4: Plan Every Channel by Month

Now you spend the budget, channel by channel.

Keep Local Services Ads relatively flat. You can’t control it the way you control Google Ads. Drop in what you spent in Q3. For the Tulsa plumber that’s about $92,000 across the quarter: roughly $32,000 in October, $29,000 in November and $31,000 in December.

Grow Google Ads. That leaves about $61,000, and it goes to Google Ads. Why? That 69% close rate and $192 per sold job from Step 1. It’s the lever you can pull, so you push spend there to close the gap.

Pause Meta. Their Facebook and Instagram lead ads produced 67 leads on $1,949 in Q3. That money moves to Google Ads, so the overall ad spend doesn’t get stretched.

Carry organic forward. No ad spend on the Google Business Profile or the website, so you carry their Q3 leads into Q4 as is.

Then check the plan against the target:

• Planned spend: $153,000 of the $154,770 budget, with $1,770 left to place
• Leads expected: 2,165 against 2,157 needed, a gap of positive eight
• Revenue: about $4,354 over the $2.3 million target

If that lead gap comes up negative, your plan won’t hit your number. Fix it now, not in December.

Leave yourself notes in the plan, too. In Q1 of 2027 you’re going to look back and ask: were we accurate? What do we need to adjust?

Step 5: Find the Front Desk Leak

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

The answer to every marketing plan is not spend more. Nine times out of 10, you need to fix the internal systems before you spend more. Because spending more isn’t going to correct a phone problem.

So pull your call tracking report. ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, CallRail. The numbers are all there.

The Tulsa plumber took 3,124 calls in Q3. 414 of them went to voicemail. That’s 13%. Not awful. But it should be under 5%, especially during business hours.

Their team called back and booked 90 of those 414. That leaves 324 people who called, waited on the line, got nobody, and went with somebody else.

Now run the math. 324 callers at a 57% close rate and a $953 average ticket.

That’s an estimated $176,000 left on the table. In one quarter.

Roughly $60,000 a month. That’s more than enough to hire another CSR and still keep your profit.

And here’s the thing. Their CSRs weren’t the problem. Of the 1,199 answered calls from brand new customers, they booked 506. That’s a 42.2% booking rate, and that’s a really strong number.

The problem was the calls nobody answered.

Recover just half of those 324 callers, 162 people, and you add about $88,000 in revenue. Or look at it the other way: that’s $17,820 in leads you don’t have to buy.

The fix in their plan is one line. Add another CSR on the phones from 8 to 5 and call back every missed caller within 15 minutes. That covers the 308 calls missed during business hours.

Step 6: Put It on One Page

The last tab of the worksheet pulls it all together. Your targets. How you’re going to hit them. What you’re pausing.

And a reminder of what the front desk fix is worth. For the Tulsa plumber:

• Recover half the missed callers and keep ad spend as planned, and they beat the revenue target by about $92,000
• Or keep the target and cut the ad budget by about $17,000

That’s a one-page marketing plan. Every number on it came from their own business.

What This Looks Like When It Works

A multi-trade home service company. Every trade got its own cost per booked job target, and every dollar was tied back to a ServiceTitan job before the budget moved.

The result: a 68% increase in new leads, a 73% increase in tracked sales and an 8.6x return on ad spend in July.

We didn’t spend more. We didn’t need more leads. We cleaned up the tracking and worked with their CSRs and ops team to get the most out of the leads they were already getting.

Another multi-trade company, in a very small rural market: $4.4 million in tracked closed sales on $163,000 in ad spend. A 27x return. That’s after 18 to 20 months of working together, so it takes time to get there.

But it’s possible in every market, for a business of every size. When you dial in your plan, your tracking and your attribution, you make decisions from data. Not from a guess that you need $5,000 or $20,000 or $50,000 every month.

Sometimes the Plan Says Spend Less

We have a client in the northern Colorado and Denver market. In mid-August we killed their AC repair campaign. It was sitting in the 60s and 70s. Nobody needed AC repair.

The budget moved to a plumbing campaign.

Their heating season doesn’t kick off until October 1, when the nights drop into the 40s. That’s when the money moves again.

The answer isn’t always spend, spend, spend. Sometimes it’s reallocation.

But it’s always a plan.

Build Yours This Week

Q4 is already underway. Every week you run on last year’s budget is a week of calls you’re either overpaying for or missing.

Copy the worksheet. Pull your Q3 numbers. Watch the replay and build it alongside me.

And if you want to walk through it one on one, I’m happy to. Book a strategy call and we’ll go through your plan together.