Digital Marketing for Contractors

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Most contractors who run Google Ads open a report every month. The report shows impressions, clicks, cost per click and leads, and it usually looks fine. According to FatCat Strategies hosts Meredith Medlin and Caitlyn Noble, that is exactly the problem. A report built from the ad account will nearly always say the account is working. It is grading its own homework.

In episode 4.15, the two hosts walked through a five-stop punch list for finding wasted spend in a paid search account. It picks up where the previous episode left off. Once a contractor has decided how to split budget between Google Ads and Local Service Ads, the next question is what happens to that money afterward.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

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Is your lead quality really the problem, or is it your follow-up? In this episode, Caitlyn Noble and Meredith Medlin sit down with Olly Whittle, co-founder and chief revenue officer of Aivi, an AI customer outreach platform that works across voice, SMS, and email. 

Olly explains why every lead is racing against three clocks: how fast you respond, how fast you qualify, and how fast you get a real human involved. He shares how Aivi was born from a client's "bad lead quality" complaint, why the first minute matters so much, and how AI can support your call center instead of replacing it.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

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What happens to your leads after the phone rings, the form gets submitted, or someone sends a message on social media? In this special episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, Caitlyn and Meredith share the full ClientServe.ai webinar, featuring ClientServe co-founder Sam. The conversation explores one of the biggest gaps in lead generation: speed to lead. When contractors can’t respond right away, potential customers may move on to the next company, even when the marketing did exactly what it was supposed to do.

During the webinar, Sam demonstrates how ClientServe.ai can use AI to respond to inbound calls, follow up with leads, engage website visitors, answer social media messages, and even book appointments around the clock. The episode also covers how contractors can use AI to fill after-hours and missed-lead gaps without giving up control of high-trust customer conversations, plus how faster response times can help turn more of the leads you’re already generating into booked appointments.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

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Google Ads or Local Services Ads: which one deserves more of your marketing budget? With Google moving Local Services Ads into the Google Ads platform, the two channels are becoming easier to manage in one place, but they still work very differently. In this episode, Caitlyn and Meredith break down the “click meter” versus the “lead meter,” explaining how each channel charges you, what you can control, and where each tends to make the most sense for home improvement contractors.

They also walk through a five-question scorecard to help you decide how to allocate your paid search budget based on factors like job value, call response time, reviews, promotions, and LSA eligibility. Most importantly, they explain why cost per lead can be misleading, and why cost per issued appointment and cost per sold job are better metrics for understanding which channel is actually driving profitable business.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

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Most contractors are sitting on thousands of old leads that never became a job, and most of them have no idea how many. In this episode, Meredith Medlin and Caitlyn Noble of FatCat Strategies explain why a brand-new lead is the most expensive lead a business will ever buy, and why the fastest revenue available to many contractors is already paid for and sitting quietly in their CRM. 

They introduce the Dormant Database Method - Mine, Match, Move - a repeatable framework for segmenting old leads by why they went cold, matching each segment with the right message and offer, and executing a multi-channel outreach cadence that gets them back on the calendar. The episode closes with a cautionary tale about a contractor whose agency never once looked inside his own database, and a five-step action plan listeners can put into motion this week.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

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In this episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, hosts Caitlyn Noble and Meredith Medlin reframe ad retargeting from a "creepy shoe-following" gimmick into a high-converting digital follow-up system designed specifically for home improvement contractors. 

Moving past basic, single-ad setups, they introduce the Digital Call Center Framework, a 4-seat retargeting approach that targets bounced visitors, half-filled forms, canceled appointments, and demo no-sells with tailored messaging instead of generic pressure. Tune in to learn how to capture hidden pipeline revenue, avoid agency setup traps like missing geographic fences, and implement critical "stop rules" and suppression lists to protect your brand and budget.

Access the Digital Call Center Framework here: https://bit.ly/4iBVgj2

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

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Most replacement contractors think the slow season gets decided during the slow season. January arrives, the phone goes quiet, and the panic starts.

On a recent episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, hosts Caitlyn Noble and Meredith Medlin argued that the quiet January was decided back in October. As Medlin put it, marketing runs on a delay. The seed planted today does not show up as a booked appointment for weeks, and sometimes not for months.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

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Caitlyn and Meredith diagnose the revenue plateau: the contractor who adds a truck, two people, and more spend, and finishes the year at the same $4 million. Their core idea is that growth is capped by one constraint at a time, so the job is finding the one ceiling you are pressed against instead of trying twenty things at once.

The Four Ceilings:

1. Lead source concentration. Too much volume from one aggregator or from word of mouth. Fix: build channels you own (organic, paid search, jobsite radius social).

2. Conversion and speed. Leads come in but set, sit, and close rates leak. Fix: faster speed to lead, tighter confirmation calls, real follow up on aged leads.

3. Brand and owned demand. Nobody searches your name, so every lead is bought at full price. The slowest ceiling to break, and the hosts warn against anyone promising fast brand results.

4. Systems and measurement. Owner is the bottleneck and attribution is guesswork, so budget gets spread by gut feel.

They illustrate all four with Summit Bath Solutions, flagged on air as fictional, a bath remodeler stuck at $4 million who spent two years buying more leads when the real constraint was conversion.

Monday morning action items: pull your lead source breakdown and flag anything over 50 percent, measure speed to lead in minutes, search your name against a competitor's, pick one number to trust (cost per issued appointment by source), and name your hardest ceiling out loud before spending another dollar.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

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Every replacement contractor who has crossed a million dollars in revenue earned that number the hard way, usually through years of long days, personal referrals, and an owner who answered every call that came in. On the latest episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, hosts Caitlyn Noble and Meredith Medlin of FatCat Strategies made a point of saying so before they said anything else.

Then they said the harder thing. The contractors who cross a million and stall out are almost never less talented or less hardworking than the ones who climb to five million and beyond. In most cases they are working harder. That is precisely the problem.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

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Caitlyn Noble and Meredith Medlin share the audio from a live webinar Caitlyn ran with Robin Day of WhatConverts and Tyson Dudley of JobNimbus, all about closed loop attribution for home improvement contractors. The big idea: stop measuring your marketing by leads, calls, or appointments, and start measuring it by revenue.

Most contractors cannot connect ad spend to closed jobs because the data lives in separate systems that do not talk to each other. The native WhatConverts and JobNimbus integration fixes that. WhatConverts captures every lead down to the keyword, JobNimbus carries the source data from intake through invoicing, and revenue flows back to WhatConverts and into your ad platforms so they optimize for money, not just clicks. The setup runs about a month, and it works for long sales cycles and for organic, paid, and LSA leads alike.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.