What Your Plumber's Marketing Gets Right That Your SaaS Company Doesn't

That's the uncomfortable starting point. We've scored more than 700 Australian businesses across 70 industries on six marketing dimensions. Auto mechanics scored 67.9. Commercial cleaning companies scored 68.1.

Crypto companies? 65.2. Cybersecurity firms? 65.0. EdTech platforms came in at 66.6 and Buy Now Pay Later fintechs at 66.9.

The businesses with no marketing teams, no martech stacks and no attribution models are outperforming the ones that have all three.

Here's the thing. Tech companies don't have a marketing problem. They have a noise problem.

A trades business has one person generating leads and one person doing the work. Often it's the same person. The feedback loop between spending money and making money is immediate. If the phone doesn't ring on Monday, you know Friday's ad didn't work.

In a tech company with thirty people in marketing, that feedback loop disappears. You've got the sales team talking to these guys and then the other guys talking to these guys. It becomes such a large, noisy place. When in reality, it's a one-to-one relationship on a smaller level with your trades business.

The guy that runs the job is the guy that gets the leads. That's all there is. The less noise there is, the more impactful and effective the campaign management can be.

This isn't about budget size. It's about distance. Distance between the person spending and the person earning. Distance between the decision and the result. Every layer of organisational complexity adds distance, and distance is where waste hides.

If you're just fishing in a singular channel, you can become really good at that, and you can absolutely dominate that singular channel.

A plumber runs Google Search. That's it. They don't need a TikTok strategy. They don't need a podcast. They don't need a brand awareness campaign on LinkedIn. Someone's bathroom is flooding and they type "emergency plumber near me." The decision-making cycle for that purchase is about ninety seconds.

So the plumber gets very good at one thing. They learn what works, they learn what doesn't and they don't spread their budget across five channels hoping one will stick. They spend $3,000 a month on search ads and they know exactly which calls came from it.

Compare that to a cybersecurity company running Google Search, LinkedIn thought leadership, display retargeting, email nurture, webinars, content syndication and an ABM programme. Each channel gets a fraction of the budget. Each one has a different team member responsible. Nobody can tell you definitively which channel closed the last three deals because every dollar that went in got diluted across a system too complex to measure.

It's hard to do quality on mass. It's hard to do quality at large volumes. It's hard to be consistent at large volumes.

That's not a constraint. That's an advantage masquerading as a limitation.

The gap between trades and tech isn't uniform. It moves depending on which dimension you're looking at.

On Brand and Positioning, trades businesses nearly match tech companies. The gap is 0.6 points. A local mechanic with a strong reputation, Google reviews and word-of-mouth referrals is doing roughly the same job on brand as a funded SaaS company with a brand strategist and a $200K annual awareness budget. The mechanic just doesn't call it brand strategy. They call it doing good work and people telling their mates.

On Data and Tracking, tech leads by 9.5 points. That's the widest gap and the most expected one. Tech companies have analytics teams, data warehouses and dashboards. Trades businesses often don't have GA4 set up properly. But here's what's interesting: all that data infrastructure isn't translating into a performance advantage in the dimensions that actually generate revenue. Acquisition Performance, Conversion Efficiency and Retention all show much smaller gaps.

Tech companies are collecting more data but aren't necessarily making better decisions with it. A tradie who checks his bank balance on Friday and knows exactly which jobs came from which ads has a crude but functional measurement system. A SaaS company with a six-figure analytics stack might not be able to tell you the true cost of acquiring a customer who actually stays for twelve months.

This isn't just an Australian trades business phenomenon. The companies that have scaled fastest in the last decade applied the same thinking.

Domino's positioned itself as a tech company that happens to deliver pizza. But the core insight wasn't technology. It was simplicity. One product, one ordering system, one delivery promise. More than 85% of Domino's sales now come through digital channels because they made the acquisition-to-delivery pipeline as tight and measurable as a tradie's Google Ads account.

Koala did the same thing to furniture. They looked at a stale industry full of complexity and said: we're going to make the same customer experience as Domino's. Take your order really quickly and ship it to your house really quickly. They hit $13 million in their first twelve months and $276 million in FY25. Not because they had the best product. Because they had the shortest distance between marketing spend and revenue.

The pattern is the same every time. Reduce complexity. Shorten the feedback loop. Know what every dollar does.

A lot of tech companies are tech only in theory. They sell solutions to others without practicing themselves. They have marketing teams full of specialists who've never built the systems they're supposed to be managing. People who've been given responsibility without capability.

And then the organisational misalignment starts. It's not necessarily a capability or a capacity issue. It's a comms issue. It's a misalignment between organisational goals from the executive team down to the guys doing the work.

When you've got fifteen people in a marketing function, the question becomes: do you understand what each of those people does? Do you understand how that's valued? Determine what is earning value and what is not adding value. Who is earning value and who is not earning value.

Most tech companies can't answer that. A trades business doesn't have to ask the question because the answer is obvious. There's one person. They either brought in work or they didn't.

The average cost per click on Google Ads hit $5.26 in 2025, with 87% of industries seeing CPC increases. When every click costs more, the businesses that know exactly what each click is worth have an enormous advantage over the ones that are spreading budget across channels they can't properly measure.

You can make it small, and you can make it tight. That's where the advantage is.

This isn't about becoming simpler. A SaaS company can't operate like a plumbing business. But there are three things any business can take from the trades playbook.

Cut the distance between spending and earning. If the person making the budget decision is three layers removed from the person closing the deal, you've got a noise problem. That's not a strategy problem, that's a capital problem. Shorten the loop. Get the people who spend in the same room as the people who sell.

Master one channel before adding another. If you're not crushing Google Search, what makes you think adding LinkedIn ABM will fix it? A trades business dominates one channel because they have no choice. You have the choice and you should make it deliberately, not because someone in a quarterly review said "we need to be on TikTok."

Know what every person on your team actually produces. A plumber knows the value of every hour. A tech company with a fifteen-person marketing team often can't tell you what three of those people delivered last quarter. If you can't tie a team member's work to a number, you need to figure out why.

The businesses scoring highest on our benchmarks aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest tools. They're the ones where the person spending the money knows exactly what it did. That's true whether you're running a plumbing business in Geelong or a SaaS company in Sydney. The principles don't change. The noise does.

See how your industry compares. Or find out how we score.