A pressure-treated deck and a composite deck with a roof over it are the same site visit and a four times difference in contract. The whole job of a deck builder's marketing is making sure the second homeowner is the one who finds you, and that they find you in February rather than June.
The terms, adjusted for a trade with a winter in it.
On seasonal trades the 90 days runs from the start of your selling season, not the day you sign. We put the dates in the agreement.
This trade has the widest gap between the enquiry and the job of anything we work on. Two identical form fills, and one is a $14,000 rebuild while the other is a $90,000 covered outdoor living space. Nothing in the standard contractor funnel tells them apart.
Homeowners arrive having read that composite costs more and stopped there. Without the lifetime cost laid out somewhere they can find it, every estimate turns into a material argument you lose on the sticker.
The research happens in late winter and the build happens in summer, so the enquiry that arrives in February goes cold unless something holds it. Most deck builders quote it and never speak to that homeowner again.
Shared lead platforms are heavily supplied in this trade. You pay for the enquiry, so do four others, and the homeowner learns to treat the whole set as interchangeable.
Same four channels as every other trade. The difference is that two of these four exist specifically to deal with the scope spread and the season.
The form asks about decking material, size, and whether a roof, screening or lighting is in scope. That single change sorts a $14,000 rebuild from a $90,000 outdoor living build before anybody drives anywhere.
Composite against pressure-treated over 20 years, with real numbers for your market. It is the most searched question in the trade and it does the upsell before the estimate instead of during it.
A winter enquiry goes into a nurture sequence that runs until the season, with design content and a booking window rather than a quote that expires. This is where most of the year's best jobs are sitting.
Your own completed decks, photographed properly, targeted at the neighbourhoods around them. Decks sell decks, and a homeowner who can see the railing detail is not comparing square-foot prices.
Deck search behaviour is dominated by two questions: what it costs and which material to use. A deck builder who answers both properly is in the conversation for months before the contractor searches even start.
The bulk of the volume and the front of the funnel. Whoever answers honestly gets the trust.
Mid funnel, and where the scope grows. Every term here is a bigger contract than a flat rebuild.
Highest intent. Map pack, reviews and how fast you answer.
A 16 by 20 composite deck is a solid job. Put a roof on it, screen it, run electrical and lighting, and the contract triples for perhaps a third more crew time, because the framing and footings were already there. The homeowner who buys that is not shopping decking per square foot, they are buying a room.
Which is why the screening question in step one matters more than any amount of extra lead volume. Adding leads to a funnel that cannot tell a rebuild from an outdoor living build just adds windscreen time, and windscreen time is the real cost in this trade.
The season does the rest. Seven or eight selling months against twelve months of overhead means the winter is not downtime, it is when the year gets sold. A deck builder with a backlog into July by the end of March prices from a completely different position than one quoting week to week in June.
Typical installed ranges, not our prices. Yours will differ by market and spec.
Deck engagements usually start with SEO and Meta ads in the autumn, so the winter research season is already covered.
Map pack, AI Overviews and page one for the searches below, town by town.
Facebook and Instagram built from your own job photos, with a form that screens.
Text, email and voicemail on every lead inside 60 seconds, day or night.
A site that loads on a phone in a driveway and asks for the estimate.
The Google Guaranteed badge above the map pack. Pay per lead, not per click.
The whole offer in one place, including how the guarantee is written.
Autumn for content and SEO, so the cost and material pages are ranking through the winter research window. Paid campaigns from January. Starting in May means paying the highest ad prices of the year to reach homeowners who are already comparing quotes.
Book a free game plan. We will pull what the deck and outdoor living terms in your market are worth, and show you what has to be live by January to hold the winter enquiries.
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