What should a marketing agency do in the first 30 days?

When you hire help, the first month tells you almost everything. Either real work shows up, or you get a kickoff deck and a promise that "results take time."

Here's what the first 30 days should look like, and why.

Start with the foundation, not more leads

Think about building a house. Nobody starts with the paint. You pour the foundation first, because everything after it sits on top.

Growing a business works the same way. The first month isn't about getting more calls. It's about stopping the leaks, so the calls you already get turn into jobs.

1. Answer every real call

Invoca, a call tracking company, reported in 2024 that 27% of calls to home services businesses go unanswered. That's more than one in four people who wanted to hire somebody and didn't reach a person.

Part of the problem is noise. YouMail counted just under 4.1 billion robocalls to US phones in September 2025 alone, about 60% of them scams or telemarketing. When half your rings are junk, it gets easy to stop picking up, and that's when the real job slips through.

So in month one: screen out the spam, make sure real callers reach a person, and text back every missed call.

2. Bring the website up to standard

Homeowners judge your work by your website before they ever meet you. If it looks like nobody's touched it in years, they wonder what you'll do to their house.

The first month should bring it up to the standard of the best in your industry: a clean look, your services in the words homeowners use, real photos of real jobs and an easy way to call or book.

3. Complete your Google Business Profile

For a lot of homeowners, your Google profile is your first impression. It's also what the AI answers read. In a 2026 study of 10,000 businesses by Insites, the ones ChatGPT and Perplexity both recommended averaged 133 Google reviews, while the ones the AI couldn't find averaged 11. Profile completeness was one of the strongest signals in the whole study.

That's a correlation, not a guarantee. But it points the same way as everything else: hours, services, photos and categories should all be complete and correct in month one.

4. Answer every review

A review with no reply looks like nobody's home. Answering every review, good and bad, shows homeowners there's a real person behind the business who still cares.

Then turn up the ads

Once calls are answered, the website holds up and the profile is complete, ads finally have somewhere good to send people. Turning ads up before that is paying to fill a leaky bucket.

That's exactly how we run the first month at Momentum. It's the foundation our setup fee covers. If you're comparing kinds of help, marketing agency or growth agency? What to ask before you hire anyone walks through the questions to ask.

Not sure which leak to fix first? Our free Growth Ladder assessment takes about four minutes and names it.

Written by AKFounder of Momentum. Former Executive Sales Coach Lead at Google.