Painters & Decorators
Marketing for painters & decorators
Decorating is a trade where the enquiry is cheap to win and the customer is easy to lose, because half the people searching want a price per room and the other half want a sprayed finish on a new build. The advertising problem is volume control: enough work to keep two or three teams busy, without paying for anybody who was really after a tin of paint.
In short
Marketing for painters & decorators in the UK turns on three things that are specific to the trade. Values sit lower than most trades and that changes everything about how the account is run. A single room repaint lands at £250 to £600. Google Search carries the reactive demand and the map pack carries a large share of it, so Google Business Profile is not a side task here, it is roughly half the local visibility. The biggest source of wasted spend is paint products and colour research, searches such as dulux colour chart and farrow and ball [colour], which has to be negatived out before the budget means anything.
The economics that should drive the budget
Values sit lower than most trades and that changes everything about how the account is run. A single room repaint lands at £250 to £600. A whole-house interior with woodwork runs £2,500 to £6,000 on a three-bedroom semi. Exterior masonry with fascias and windows is usually £1,800 to £4,500, and it comes with access costs if there is any scaffold involved. Contract work — voids for a letting agent, communal areas for a block manager, a new-build site — is priced by the decorator day, commonly £180 to £280 a man depending on region and whether materials are supplied.
Materials are typically ten to fifteen per cent of a domestic job, which is unusually low, so the whole thing is a labour business. Gross margin on well-quoted domestic work sits around forty to fifty-five per cent. Close rates are high compared with the bigger-ticket trades: a decorator who quotes in person on a domestic job wins one in two or one in three, because the customer has fewer quotes and a smaller sum to worry about.
Run the sum on an average domestic job of £1,200. At forty-five per cent that is roughly £540 of gross profit, and at a one-in-three close rate each genuine enquiry carries about £180 of value before you have driven anywhere. That supports a cost per enquiry somewhere around £20 to £45. The catch is the average: single-room enquiries drag it down hard, so the number has to be tracked per job type or it tells you nothing useful.
Seasonality
Two seasons run in opposite directions and a good account swaps between them. Exterior work needs surface temperatures holding above roughly eight degrees and a dry substrate, which gives a practical window of late March to early October. Interiors, by contrast, sell hardest from September to the middle of December, because people want the house right before visitors arrive, and that run of weeks is often the most profitable quarter of the year.
January and February are the genuine trough, and they are the reason contract work matters. Letting agents turn properties round in winter, block managers spend budget before a year end, and landlords redecorate between tenancies regardless of the weather. Shifting the budget towards void and commercial keywords for those eight weeks, rather than switching the account off, is what stops a decorating business having a hungry first quarter.
What we configure
- Interior, exterior, specialist finishes and contract kept as separate campaigns
- A large negative list covering paint brands, retailers and colour names
- Artist and vehicle-respray negatives applied before the first click
- Per-room indicative ranges in ad copy so cheap enquiries self-filter
- Radius drawn on team travel time, since a van hour destroys the margin
- Google Business Profile with close-up photographs of edges and cut lines
- A winter budget shift into void, communal and letting-agent keywords
What people actually search, and what it is worth
| Intent | Typical search | Value | How we handle it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interior repaint, whole house or room | painters and decorators [town], house painters near me, interior decorating quote, hall stairs and landing painted | Core volume, medium value | Main campaign with copy that states a rough per-room range so the click self-selects. We route it to a page showing finished interiors rather than a generic services list, because interior buyers are judging cut lines and tidiness. |
| Exterior and masonry | exterior house painting, masonry painting [town], render repainting, soffit and fascia painting | Higher value, weather-bound | Its own campaign with its own budget, pushed hard from March and tapered from October. Access and scaffold questions get answered on the landing page because they are the reason exterior quotes stall. |
| Specialist finishes | wallpaper hanging [town], spray painting kitchen units, airless spraying contractor, lime wash specialist | Premium, low volume, high margin | Small tightly matched ad groups. These searchers have already decided on the technique and will pay for someone who names it, so a page per finish beats one page mentioning all of them. |
| Commercial, void and contract | commercial decorating contractor, void property decorating, letting agent decorators, communal area redecoration | Repeat, invoiced, day rate | Separate campaign, wider radius, and a landing page about capacity, public liability cover, RAMS and turnaround times. Nobody procuring a void repaint cares what your colour advice is like. |
Where the budget leaks
Every sector attracts searches that can never become a customer. These are the ones specific to painters & decorators, and they go into the negative keyword list before launch rather than after the first invoice.
| Category | Example searches | Why it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Paint products and colour research | dulux colour chart, farrow and ball [colour], best paint for radiators, wickes emulsion offers, paint calculator | Retail intent at enormous volume, and it swells every bank holiday weekend. These people are buying a tin, not booking a team. |
| DIY instruction | how to paint a ceiling, how to strip wallpaper, painting over artex, cutting in without tape, best roller for emulsion | The searcher has already decided to do it themselves and is looking for a video. Every click is a full price paid for somebody who will never hire anyone. |
| The other kind of painter | portrait painter, watercolour artist, painting classes near me, car body paint respray, spray painter wanted | The word does two entirely unrelated jobs in English and broad match will happily serve both. This is the single largest source of nonsense in an unmanaged decorating account. |
| Employment and training | painter and decorator jobs, NVQ level 2 decorating, decorating apprenticeship, day rate for decorators | Job hunters and rival firms checking what to charge, arriving through vocabulary identical to yours. The day-rate searches in particular are almost entirely trade. |
Want this checked against your own numbers?Two minutes on the phone is usually enough to say whether the arithmetic works for a painters & decorator business your size.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppWhat the buyer is actually checking
This customer is letting strangers into the house for a week, and that shapes every check they make. Before ringing they look for the same two or three faces appearing in the photographs, for public liability cover being mentioned somewhere plain, and for reviews that talk about tidiness, dust sheets and whether the team turned up when they said they would. A surprising number of enquiries come from women who will be alone in the property during the work, and named, photographed staff move that decision more than any offer.
The quote itself decides the rest. Customers cannot judge paintwork, so they judge the document: how many coats, whether filling and sanding are included, who moves the furniture, whether the price is fixed or a day rate that could run on. Vagueness on any of those reads as a trap. The decorator who writes three specific lines about preparation almost always wins against the one who writes a single figure, even at a higher number.
Which channel wins here
Google Search carries the reactive demand and the map pack carries a large share of it, so Google Business Profile is not a side task here, it is roughly half the local visibility. Organic search compounds well because the head terms are stable and unglamorous, and a genuine gallery of local streets outranks directory listings faster in this trade than in most. The pages worth building are the ones nobody else bothers with: what a whole-house repaint actually costs, how long a three-bed takes, what preparation is included.
Meta earns its keep in one specific place, and that is sprayed kitchen units and dramatic colour changes, where the before and after is genuinely striking on a phone screen. It does not work for a magnolia refresh. The bigger warning is broad automated shopping-adjacent campaigns: paint is a retail product with colossal search volume, and any campaign type that is allowed to chase cheap conversions will find its way into that traffic and report a triumphant cost per lead built entirely out of people pricing emulsion.
Why keeping them matters more than winning them
Decorating has the most reliable repeat cycle of any trade and almost nobody works it. Interiors want redoing every three to five years, and the customer who has just had the lounge done will do the hall, stairs and landing next, then the bedrooms. A dated list with the rooms you painted and the month you painted them, mailed once a year, produces work at a cost that no advertising channel can match.
Referral density is the second asset. Decorating is visible: scaffold up the front of a house, a van on the drive for a week, and neighbours who have been putting off the same job. Firms that leaflet the twenty nearest houses while the team is still on site consistently pick up a second job on the same street, and the travel time is already paid for.
The genuine annuity, though, is agency and management work. One letting agent with two hundred properties on the books produces a steady flow of void repaints for years, and block managers rotate communal decoration on a cycle. It pays less per day than domestic work and it is worth more, because it fills the weeks when nobody is thinking about the colour of their hallway.
Questions from painters & decorators
Why do my decorating leads cost more than the jobs are worth?
Usually because the account is buying paint shoppers and DIY researchers alongside genuine enquiries. The word painter also returns artists and vehicle sprayers. Once retail brands, colour names, how-to phrasing and the artistic senses are excluded, and single-room work is separated from whole-house work, the cost per genuine enquiry usually falls to a level that a £1,200 average job can carry comfortably.
Should I advertise interior and exterior work together?
No. They peak at opposite ends of the year, they are worth different amounts, and the exterior buyer has questions about access, scaffold and weather that an interior page never answers. Split them at campaign level so you can push exterior hard from spring, taper it in autumn, and let interior take over for the run up to Christmas without either budget starving the other.
Is it worth putting prices on a decorating website?
Indicative ranges, yes. A per-room band and a rough whole-house figure will lose you the enquiries that were never going to book and win you credibility with the ones that were. Decorating customers are not price shopping the way driveway buyers are; they are trying to work out whether they can afford it at all before they spend an evening ringing round.
How do I fill January and February?
With work that ignores the weather and the calendar. Letting agents turn voids round all winter, block managers redecorate communal areas against a budget year, and landlords repaint between tenancies. Shifting spend towards those searches for eight weeks, and having a page written for a property manager rather than a homeowner, is far more effective than discounting domestic work nobody wants doing in the cold.
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