The Kitchen Marketing Playbook We'd Run on $5K/Month
A working spend ramp, channel mix, and qualification gate for kitchen and home remodelling contractors targeting $500K+ in closed projects. No theory. The numbers we'd actually deploy.
If you handed us $5,000 a month to grow a kitchen remodelling business, here's the channel mix, week-by-week ramp, and qualification rules we'd actually deploy. No 'omnichannel ecosystems'. Four channels. Three months to first booked deposit. The exact spend split below.
Stop optimizing the wrong number
Cost-per-lead is a vanity metric for high-ticket trades. The number that matters is cost-per-closed-deal. For a $60K average project at 35% gross margin, you can spend up to $3,150 to land one deal and still grow. Most kitchen contractors stop spending at $200 cost-per-lead because the math feels uncomfortable — and then wonder why their pipeline is empty.
The four-channel mix
Google Local Service Ads at 40% of spend. Meta paid (Reels-first) at 25%. SEO + content at 20%, mostly time. Referrals + post-project re-engagement at 15%. No tenth channel. No 'we should also try TikTok'. These four cover the entire customer journey from immediate-intent search to passive consideration.
Why this mix, in this order
- LSAs catch the buyer who already decided — Google's green-checkmark trust signal closes more cold inbound calls than any landing page ever will.
- Meta paid catches the buyer who's two months out — Reels of finished kitchens build the desire that LSAs convert later.
- SEO compounds — month-12 organic typically pulls as many calls as paid spend, free of click cost.
- Referrals are the cheapest channel and most contractors leave them on the table because they don't have a system.
The month-by-month spend ramp
Month 1 you spend $2,000 and lose money — paid lift hasn't compounded, SEO hasn't ranked, you're paying to learn the channels. Month 2 you book 9 calls and close 2 ($100K revenue). Month 6 you cross 20 booked calls per month. Month 12 you're at 34 booked calls per month, closing 9, doing roughly $450K. Total marketing spend for the year: $65K against $3.15M revenue. Marketing as 2.1% of revenue is the long-term steady state.
The seven gates that protect your calendar
Your calendar is more valuable than your ad spend. A booked discovery call with the wrong prospect costs more than no call at all. Build a Google Form intake that gates on budget, decision-maker presence, timeline, permit comfort, prior-contractor history, scope clarity, and property ownership. Anyone failing any of them gets routed to a six-month nurture sequence, not your calendar.
What this week looks like
- 01Pull the last twelve closed projects, calculate average project value and gross margin.
- 02Compute your cost-per-closed-deal ceiling using the formula above.
- 03Verify your Google Local Service Ads listing — license, insurance, photo gallery, three city service-area pages.
- 04Photograph one finished kitchen this week. Phone footage is fine.
- 05Write the seven qualification questions into a contact-page form.
- 06Email three past clients with a $200 visa-card referral offer.
Most contractors quit at month 2. The ones who reach month 12 build a moat.
