Yard sign or a two-mile Meta ad: two ways to sell the neighbors of the driveway you just poured
A finished pour is the best ad a concrete contractor has. A yard sign and a tight-radius Meta ad both put it in front of the neighbors. When each one wins.
You just finished a 900 square foot broom-finish driveway on a street of forty houses built the same year, with the same driveways, all of them cracked. Every one of those homeowners is a job. The only question is how to tell them.
There are two ways to do it that cost almost nothing. One is a yard sign in the fresh pour's front lawn. The other is a Meta ad aimed at a circle around the address. Most contractors do one out of habit and never try the other. They are not the same tool, and the right one depends on the street.
The yard sign
What it costs. Printed corrugated signs run roughly $15 to $40 each with a stake, less in quantity. You ask the customer at contract time, not at the end. Put a line in the agreement: sign stays up for 30 days after completion, customer can decline.
What it does well. It reaches everyone who drives past, which on a residential street is exactly the people with the same driveway. It works during the week the concrete cures, when the neighbors are already looking because a driveway they cannot park on is interesting. And it puts the actual pour next to your name, which no photo can do.
Where it falls down. It measures nothing unless you print a separate phone number or a QR code on it. The HOA may not allow it. The customer may say no. And on a street nobody drives down but the people who live there, forty households is the entire audience.
The sign that works. Company name, phone number, "We poured this driveway," and a QR code to a page about driveways in that town. Nothing else. Not a logo, not four services, not a slogan. Someone reading it from a moving car has two seconds.
The two-mile Meta ad
What it costs. Meta lets you target a radius as tight as one mile around a pinned address. Set one to two miles, put $10 to $15 a day on it, and run it for ten days. Call it $100 to $150 total. Cost per lead for residential flatwork on Meta typically lands in the $18 to $60 range covered in the Facebook and Instagram ads guide, so a run that size might produce three to six leads.
What it does well. It reaches the neighbors who do not drive past, including the ones on the parallel street with the same builder and the same problem. It is measurable to the dollar. And it runs while your crew is still there, so the ad and the trucks reinforce each other.
Where it falls down. You need the before shot, from the street, at the same height, or the ad is just a picture of a gray rectangle. You need the customer's permission to use their driveway. You need a page for the click to land on and a person to answer the form. And a one-mile radius in a dense suburb covers thousands of homes, not forty, so some of the budget goes to people three streets over.
The ad that works. One image, the before and after of this exact driveway, split down the middle. Caption: "Poured last week on [street name]. Same builder, same era, same cracks? Send a photo of yours and we will text back a price range." Nothing else.
When each one wins
Tract subdivision, cul-de-sac, heavy drive-by from the neighbors. The sign. The audience is small, drives past twice a day, and the sign is nearly free.
Rural property, long driveway set back from the road. Meta. Nobody sees the pour from the street, and the radius catches the five-acre lots around it that also have failing aprons.
Stamped patio in the backyard. Meta only. A backyard is invisible to the neighborhood, and the pattern close-up is the strongest creative you own.
Decorative front entry on a busy through street. Both. The sign catches commuters, the ad catches the neighborhood, and the same photo does double duty.
Your crew is booked six weeks out. The sign, and nothing else. It is slow and cheap, and paying for leads you cannot schedule until November is how you end up with angry voicemails.
The hypothetical math
Say a sign costs $25. If it produces one call all season and you close that one driveway, the sign paid for itself several hundred times over. There is no version of the sign that loses money, which is why every truck should carry five.
Say a Meta run costs $150. At a one-in-three close on flatwork leads, four leads is about one job. On a typical residential ticket in the thousands, that is a good trade, and the campaign is repeatable on every pour. The version that loses money is the one where the form fills sit for a day, which is a follow-up problem, not an ad problem.
Do both, and track both honestly
Print the QR code on the sign and point it to a page named for the street or the town. Use the same driveway photo in the ad. Ask every caller how they found you and write it down without leading them. After ten pours you will know, for your streets and your market, which one moves the phone.
One thing both depend on. The neighbor who sees the sign or the ad does not call from it. She searches your name first. 25.7% of the 80,873 concrete companies in our data have no website linked to their Google profile, and the median company has 7 reviews. If she searches and finds a bare listing with four reviews, the sign just sent her to the contractor with sixty. The website essentials guide covers what the page she lands on has to do, and the benchmark report shows where your profile sits against your state.
Neighborhood Meta campaigns and the landing page behind them are part of the free 14-day trial, any service, no card. Text or call (385) 832-6924.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, concrete contractors among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor