These three get bought on instinct more than any other marketing you will ever purchase. The van looks bare, so it gets lettered. The job went well, so a sign goes in the lawn. It is quiet, so a box of door hangers gets ordered.
None of that is wrong. All three can work. But they are the least calculated spending in a typical local service business, and two of the three have constraints that nobody mentions until you have already paid.
Wraps: the cost data is good, the ROI data is not
Vehicle graphics price fairly consistently across independent sign shops, which is a decent sign the numbers are real.
Door lettering and spot graphics run roughly $300 to $800 per vehicle. Partial wraps, covering perhaps a quarter to half the surface, land around $1,000 to $2,000. Full wraps run about $2,500 to $6,500 depending on the vehicle: cars toward $2,500 to $4,000, pickups $3,000 to $5,500, cargo vans $3,500 to $6,000. Major metros run 15 to 25 percent higher. Some shops charge design separately at $300 to $800, others include it, and that is worth asking before you compare two quotes.
Material grade matters more than most people expect. Cast vinyl from 3M or Avery Dennison is generally rated five to seven years on a daily-driven vehicle. Cheaper calendered vinyl often fails in two to three, which makes the budget option more expensive across the life of the truck.
So far so useful. Now the part to be careful with.
You will be shown impression figures, typically 30,000 to 70,000 views a day per vehicle, and cost per thousand impressions that make wraps look like the cheapest advertising in existence. The problem is that those CPM claims range from four cents to forty eight cents to $6.41 depending on which vendor is publishing, and every one of those sources sells wraps. A spread of more than a hundredfold across the same metric is not a rounding difference. It means nobody is measuring the same thing.
The daily impression counts deserve the same scepticism. Thirty to seventy thousand views a day is a metro-traffic number. A contractor driving between jobs in a small town is not generating it.
Judge a wrap on what you can actually verify
Two things are true and checkable.
The cost per day is real arithmetic. A $1,500 partial wrap over five years is about eighty two cents a day. A $4,000 full wrap over five years is roughly $67 a month. Those are numbers you can compute from a real quote rather than from a vendor's impression model.
And the professionalism signal is real. A homeowner watching a lettered van pull up has a different first impression than one watching an unmarked pickup. That effect is genuine, it is worth money, and it is completely unmeasurable.
So treat a wrap as infrastructure rather than a campaign. It is not attributable, it will never show up in your lead tracking, and asking it to justify itself in booked jobs will only produce a made-up answer.
The thing that decides whether a wrap works
Legibility, and most wraps fail at it.
A person reads your vehicle for two or three seconds, often at thirty miles an hour, often from an angle. What survives that is a business name, one service, and a phone number, in large high-contrast type. What does not survive is a full service list, a website URL in small text, three colours of gradient, and a photograph.
Before you approve a design, look at it at the size of a postage stamp. If the phone number is unreadable, the design is decorative rather than useful, and you are paying several thousand dollars for decoration.
Yard signs: the sign is cheap, the permission is not
Corrugated plastic signs with a wire stake are inexpensive, generally a few dollars each in quantity, and they work on the simplest possible logic. A neighbour sees that the people two doors down hired you, which is a soft recommendation delivered in the exact geography where you want more work.
Two constraints, both easy to trip over.
You need the customer's permission, and asking well matters more than the sign does. The moment to ask is at completion when they are pleased, not on the estimate. And the ask lands better framed as a favour than as policy.
The second is that many municipalities and most homeowners associations restrict signage on residential property, including duration and size. That is the homeowner's rule to break, not yours, but you are the one whose name is on the sign when a neighbour complains. Ask the customer whether their association has rules, and take the sign away when you said you would.
Door hangers: the printing is not the cost
Printing is cheap, often cents per piece at volume. Distribution is where the money goes, and it is either your evenings or somebody's hourly rate. A thousand hangers is not a thousand pieces of paper, it is a person walking for many hours.
And one legal point worth knowing, because a surprising number of businesses get this wrong: you cannot put anything in a mailbox that has not gone through the postal system. Federal law reserves mailboxes for postage-paid mail, which is precisely why the format is a door hanger rather than a flyer. Hang it on the knob, tuck it in the door frame, and stay out of the box entirely.
Door hangers work best immediately adjacent to work you are already doing. Finish a roof, hang the street. The relevance is obvious, the truck is visible, and the neighbours have watched the job happen all week.
The order that makes sense
Wraps first, because you already own the vehicle and it is already driving past people. Even door lettering at $300 to $800 changes how you look on arrival.
Yard signs second, because the cost is trivial and the constraint is a conversation rather than a budget.
Door hangers last, because the real cost is hours and the return is thinnest of the three.
The honest read
None of these are lead channels in the sense that search or your profile are. Nobody can tell you what they produced, and any vendor who does is modelling rather than measuring.
What they are is presence. In a local trade, being recognised is worth something real, and these are the cheapest ways to be recognised in the specific streets where your work already is.
Buy them as that, price them honestly against the years they will last, and stop trying to attribute them.