Joinery & Carpentry
Marketing for joinery & carpentry
Bespoke joinery is sold on photographs and lead times, not on being the cheapest. A workshop that can build four kitchens a quarter does not need a full inbox — it needs the right four enquiries, and a way to stop the flat-pack and door-hanging work drowning them.
In short
Marketing for joinery & carpentry in the UK turns on three things that are specific to the trade. Joinery covers a wide price range and the advertising has to know which end of it is being fished. Second-fix carpentry — hanging doors, skirting, a bit of decking — is day-rate work at roughly £180 to £280 a day. Joinery is one of the few trades where Instagram genuinely earns its place rather than being a vanity exercise. The biggest source of wasted spend is hobby woodworking, searches such as dovetail joint and mortise and tenon, which has to be negatived out before the budget means anything.
The economics that should drive the budget
Joinery covers a wide price range and the advertising has to know which end of it is being fished. Second-fix carpentry — hanging doors, skirting, a bit of decking — is day-rate work at roughly £180 to £280 a day. Bespoke commissions are a different business entirely: alcove units and media walls at £1,200 to £3,500, fitted wardrobes at £2,500 to £6,000, a hardwood staircase at £4,000 to £12,000, a handmade kitchen from £10,000 upwards. One enquiry can be worth fifty times another.
Close rates split just as sharply. Second-fix enquiries close at around one in two, because the customer wants a price and a date and little else. Bespoke commissions close nearer one in four or one in five, and take a design meeting, drawings and often a paid design fee before anyone commits. A bespoke enquiry converting at twenty per cent on a £4,000 average still carries roughly £800 of expected value, which is why it supports a click cost that would be reckless for door-hanging work. Workshop capacity is the real ceiling: most joiners can only build so much in a month, so the aim is fewer and better enquiries rather than a busy inbox.
Seasonality
Joinery runs against the outdoor trades, which is useful if you plan for it. Interior commissions build hard from early September as people decide they want the wardrobes or the media wall finished for Christmas. That demand hits a wall in the second week of November, because a six-week workshop lead time no longer reaches December, and firms still advertising into December are usually paying for enquiries they cannot fulfil. Put the cut-off date in the ad copy instead. January is the second peak, driven by people who have just spent a fortnight tripping over their own house, and it is the strongest month of the year for design meetings. Late spring and summer are the soft spot, when money goes on holidays and gardens, and external joinery — gates, sash windows, garden rooms — is what keeps the bench busy.
What we configure
- Separate campaigns for bespoke commissions and second-fix work
- Negatives for woodworking-joint, college course and flat-pack searches
- Portfolio pages by room type and property age, not one gallery
- Instagram treated as the portfolio, with a same-day reply habit
- Budget band and desired timescale asked on the enquiry form
- Lead time and design fee stated plainly before the home visit
- Retargeting across a 60-day window for people who browsed the gallery
What people actually search, and what it is worth
| Intent | Typical search | Value | How we handle it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bespoke commission | fitted wardrobes [town], bespoke staircase maker, handmade kitchen | High, slow | Own campaign with portfolio landing pages by room type and a budget band asked on the form. |
| Second-fix and repair | carpenter near me, door hanging, skirting fitted | Low, fast | Kept in a separate campaign or excluded entirely, depending on whether the day-rate work is still wanted. |
| Trade and developer | joinery contractor [county], site carpentry subcontractor | Medium to high, repeat | Separate ad group. Credibility copy, insurance and capacity rather than photographs of finished rooms. |
| Design research | alcove unit ideas, staircase cost UK, bespoke wardrobe prices | Low direct, high SEO | Content and Instagram, not paid search. Capture early, retarget for the six weeks it takes them to decide. |
Where the budget leaks
Every sector attracts searches that can never become a customer. These are the ones specific to joinery & carpentry, and they go into the negative keyword list before launch rather than after the first invoice.
| Category | Example searches | Why it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Hobby woodworking | dovetail joint, mortise and tenon, japanese joinery, woodworking joints | The word joinery means woodworking joints to most of the internet. Huge global volume with no buyer anywhere in it. |
| Employment and training | carpentry jobs, joiner wanted, NVQ level 2 carpentry, City & Guilds | Constant and expensive, and worse near a college town. It never stops arriving unless it is excluded. |
| Materials and flat pack | MDF sheets, timber merchant, buy skirting board, IKEA wardrobe fitter | People buying wood, or wanting a £90 flat-pack assembly. Neither is a commission. |
| Name collisions | the joinery bar, joinery cafe, carpenter brothers, carpenters arms | Venues called The Joinery and the surname Carpenter soak up broad-match budget in every town that has one. |
Want this checked against your own numbers?Two minutes on the phone is usually enough to say whether the arithmetic works for a joinery & carpentry business your size.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppWhat the buyer is actually checking
A bespoke joinery customer is buying taste and nerve. They are handing over several thousand pounds for something that does not exist yet, cannot be returned and will be screwed to their house. So the first thing they do is look at your photographs, and the second is look for a house like theirs — a Victorian alcove, a 1930s bay, a loft landing with the same awkward slope. A portfolio organised by room and property type does more work than any amount of copy.
The cycle usually runs three to eight weeks and involves a home visit, a drawing and a deposit. Lead time qualifies in both directions: somebody who needs it in three weeks is not your customer, and somebody happy to wait until March is a very good sign. The job is won at the visit — a joiner who measures properly, says plainly which of their ideas will not work, and sends a clear itemised quote within a few days. The job is lost to silence. A fortnight after a home visit with no quote and they have booked the other maker whose Instagram they were also watching.
Which channel wins here
Joinery is one of the few trades where Instagram genuinely earns its place rather than being a vanity exercise. The product is visual, the buyer is looking for a maker whose taste matches theirs, and saved posts and direct messages turn into real commissions. Post finished work, work in progress and the workshop itself, tag the town, and answer messages the same day. Paid Meta then works on top of that, particularly retargeting people who have already been through the gallery.
Google Ads works, but only narrowly. “Fitted wardrobes [town]” and “bespoke staircase maker” carry proper intent and convert well. What does not work is bidding on “carpenter near me”. It is the highest-volume term in the trade and it fills the diary with door adjustments and flat-pack assembly at a hundred pounds a time, which is precisely the work a bespoke workshop is trying to leave behind. The other honest warning is the trade directories. Checkatrade and its equivalents produce handyman-tier enquiries priced against handymen, and very rarely a five-figure commission.
Questions from joinery & carpentry
Why does my carpentry advertising bring flat-pack and door-hanging jobs?
Because ‘carpenter near me’ is the biggest search in the trade and it is dominated by small jobs. If you want commissions, bid on commission language instead — fitted wardrobes, bespoke staircase, alcove units, handmade kitchen — and add flat pack, assembly, IKEA and handyman as negatives. State a minimum job value in the ad copy. You get fewer calls and considerably better ones.
Does Instagram actually generate work or just followers?
It generates work, but only when it is treated as a portfolio rather than a broadcast. Commissions come from saved posts and direct messages, usually weeks after the post went up, so follower count is a poor measure of anything. What matters is whether the grid shows finished rooms in houses like your customer’s, and whether messages get answered the same day rather than the following week.
Should I publish prices for bespoke work?
Publish ranges and the variables, not a price list. “Fitted wardrobes typically £2,500 to £6,000 depending on span, finish and whether they are painted or veneered” costs you the people who thought it was eight hundred pounds and saves everybody a wasted home visit. Refusing to indicate anything reads as evasive, and it is the most common reason a good enquiry goes quiet.
How far should I travel for a fitted furniture job?
Further than for second-fix work, because the job value carries the travel. A £5,000 wardrobe commission an hour away is usually worth it; a day-rate job at that distance never is. Set the radius on the commission campaign wider than the general one, and remember that a fitting week means five round trips, not one.
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