Mariia Grachova on connecting contractor marketing to revenue
Mariia Grachova is CEO & Co-Founder of Loona Agency, a marketing agency serving US construction and home-services companies with SEO, local search, paid ads and analytics tied to revenue. She explains why the agency chose a specific niche, how it connects calls and leads to sales, and what contractors should measure before scaling their marketing.
Choose a clear niche, track leads through to deal value, and judge marketing by revenue rather than traffic or activity metrics. A small set of meaningful measurements can guide decisions better than being on every platform or tracking every click.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I started my career as a software developer, and I still approach marketing the way an engineer would: measure, test, iterate. After moving into marketing, I led marketing at a 150-person software company, where the inbound engine we built brought in $4M in revenue. In 2024 my co-founder and I started Loona Agency, and we chose to focus on US construction and home-services companies: roofers, HVAC, remodelers, plumbers and other contractors.
Most agencies that work with construction companies are either general digital shops that don’t really know the trades, or narrow specialists who run one channel without a system around it. We build the whole lead-generation system (SEO, local search, paid ads and content) and connect it to the client’s CRM. When we report, the owner sees a specific search query, the page it landed on, the call that came in and the $28,000 roof it turned into. We treat marketing as math: before we scale anything, we work out what a customer can cost and when the money comes back. Over the past two years this approach has helped our clients generate $51.5M in revenue.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Our first clients came through my network and personal recommendations. People who knew my work in marketing introduced us to business owners they knew, and those early projects were where we tested and shaped the approach we still use.
Today most new business comes from two places: referrals inside the industry and our own website. Working in one niche helps with referrals, because contractors talk to each other, and once a few of them know you as the agency that does marketing for roofers, they send other roofers your way. The website took more work. For a long time it converted 0.05% of visitors into leads. Instead of redesigning it, we interviewed 10 to 15 of our clients until the answers started repeating. A business paying $5,000+ for marketing looks for proof: reviews, cases, certifications and the faces of the team. We rebuilt the key pages around that proof with the same design and one clear next step, and conversion went to 1 to 4%.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision that changed our direction was choosing one niche: US construction and home-services companies. Around 80% of homeowners look for a contractor on Google, and most marketers who come into this space from e-commerce or SaaS don’t know how this buyer behaves. Once we committed to the niche, everything got faster. We learned the seasonality, deal cycles and objections of roofers and remodelers, collected cases and benchmarks from one industry, and could talk to an owner in his own numbers. We built our offer around two questions an American contractor can always answer: how much he is willing to pay for a customer, and when he needs that money back. PlumPro Exteriors, a Massachusetts exterior remodeler, grew from $1M to $10M in two years while we ran their local SEO.
The mistake that taught me the most was reporting the wrong things. Early on I would show a client a nice chart of organic traffic going up, the client would ask how much money they made from it, and I couldn’t answer. In home services 60 to 80% of inquiries are phone calls, and until calls are tracked, an SEO report tells you very little. Since then we track calls by source, keep the first touch and pass it into the CRM next to the deal amount, so the report shows revenue.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Search changed the most. Google now answers many questions with AI Overviews, and more people start in ChatGPT by asking it to recommend a roofer or an HVAC company in their city. For local services the traffic loss has been small so far (AI Overviews appear on about 12% of local queries), but the question every owner asks now is whether AI will mention their company. So on top of classic SEO we work on being cited: clear pages for each service and city, answers to the real questions customers ask, reviews and a strong Google Business Profile. The technical base, site speed and brand trust still matter, because the model has to learn about you from somewhere.
What stayed the same is how a homeowner decides. Someone about to spend $28,000 on a roof opens the project gallery, reads the reviews to the end and checks you on Google before calling. That’s why we treat gallery, case and review pages as sales pages and keep proof close to the call button.
Inside the agency, AI took over a lot of routine work. Clustering thousands of search queries takes minutes instead of two days, and we can analyze dozens of competitor sites in an evening. The final version of anything a client sees is still written by a person.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
First, pick one niche where you already have some results and where clients have money, and learn it deeply: seasonality, deal cycle, margins and the objections their customers have. Then learn the numbers. Before you spend a client’s money, work out the maximum they can pay for a customer, based on their margin and deal cycle, and how many months it takes to earn that money back. A roofing company owner knows these numbers, and when you speak in them, the conversation with the client changes. And set up tracking that connects a lead to the deal amount in the CRM. At the start, a spreadsheet works fine.
I would ignore metrics that have no dollar under them. On one of our roofing projects, scroll depth and time on page had zero correlation with deals, and tagging every click only created noise. Five events you understand will tell you more than fifty you get lost in. I would also ignore the pressure to be on every platform: get one channel working before you add the next. And I wouldn’t spend energy on marketing awards early on. Clients stay with you when their revenue grows, and that’s what to optimize for.
Thank you to Mariia Grachova and the team at Loona Agency for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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