If you’re marketing a home improvement company, you’ll know that nobody buys a new kitchen on impulse. Your customers live with the old one for years, talk about replacing it for months, and then one day decide the time has come. When they do, they ring two or three companies for a quote, and if you’re not one of them, you never even hear about the job.
The whole aim of your advertising is to be one of those two or three, and it has to do its work early, because by the time somebody picks up the phone the list has usually been made. For a regional home improvement company, television is one of the most reliable ways of getting onto it.
How the shortlist gets made
If you ask customers how they chose the companies they rang, very few will say they researched the market. One name was on a van outside a neighbour’s house, another came from a relative who’d had their windows done, and another was simply a company they’d heard of. A search only fills whatever gaps are left, and that’s the most expensive place to win a customer, because you’re listed beside every other installer in the area, and an enquiry bought through a lead-generation site has often been passed to several of your competitors as well.
A company whose name is already familiar gets a better kind of enquiry. People look for it by name or walk into the showroom, and they arrive with some confidence in it already, which matters a great deal when they’re about to let strangers into their home and pay a deposit before any work starts. A company that’s on television looks established, and likely to be around for the length of its guarantee.
Television also fits the way these decisions get made. A new bathroom or a conservatory is nearly always a joint purchase, and an advert that both people see at once, in the house they’ve been talking about improving, has a way of starting the conversation up again. There’s no point advertising beyond the distance your fitters will travel, and you don’t have to, because airtime can be bought for your ITV region or narrowed down to the postcodes you choose.
What to put on screen, and who should say it
Our first piece of advice is to show the work, and to show it being enjoyed, because people want to picture their own home looking like that, and a finished bathroom or a new set of bifold doors will sell itself on a big screen in a way no leaflet can. A warm, well-shot advert with real installations will do more than a list of products and a shouted discount. A showroom is a real asset too, if you have one, because “come and see for yourself” is a much softer thing to ask than “book a quote”.
After that, the question is who should speak for you, and four companies we’ve made adverts for each answered it differently. Tyneside Home Improvements put a great deal into their customer service, which over the years has earned them thousands of loyal customers who are happy to recommend them, so the idea for their advert, made with the agency Gibson Media, more or less suggested itself. Real customers were filmed speaking honestly about the difference the company had made to their homes, because in a trade that runs on recommendation, a real review is about the most convincing thing you can put on screen. We’ve written separately about using real customers in an advert.
A well-known face can do a similar job by a different route. Our advert for Windows Plus Roofs, made with the agency WriteSound, is fronted by an actor who’s well known and well liked in the North East, and who appears on screen and provides the voiceover. The advert was a success and his role grew from there, until he could be seen on billboards, vans, leaflets and the signage at the company’s stores, and had become known across the region as the face of the brand. We’ve written about when a celebrity is the right choice, because it isn’t for every business.
The person speaking for you doesn’t have to be famous, either. Boldon Bathrooms had already tried TV once, and it had gone well enough that for their second advert they were ready to put more into the production. What they wanted most was a presenter to represent the brand, so, working with the agency SD Advertising, we filmed one in Boldon’s own showroom, where viewers could see the range of kitchens and bathrooms for themselves. Low prices are one of Boldon’s biggest selling points, and that message was carried by strong on-screen graphics and by the way the presenter delivered it.
The homeowner may not be your customer at all, of course. GKC Interiors wanted to reach tradespeople, who have different things on their mind, so the advert we made for them with Gibson Media has a lead character who talks straight to camera, as if speaking to the viewer one to one. You can also watch our adverts for Conserv and Save and Enhance Conservatories.
Offers, finance and the rules
Boldon’s advert shows that price can be part of the message, but a discount or a sale is the part of any advert that gets the closest look. Home improvement advertising has a long history of big discount claims, so Clearcast, which checks every TV advert before it goes on air, looks at them carefully, and so does the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) if anybody complains afterwards.
A ruling from June 2017 shows what they’re looking for. A national double glazing company had been running TV adverts that offered 60% off all windows and doors. When the ASA went through the firm’s promotions for the previous year, it found that the periods with a sale on were about as long as the periods without one, with no sign of significant sales at the higher prices in between. If a sale runs for about half the year, the sale price is really the normal price, so the saving was judged to be exaggerated and the adverts couldn’t be shown again as they were.
The same questions will be asked about your own offer. A saving such as “50% off” has to be measured against a real price that you’ve actually charged, for long enough to count as your usual price. “Up to” claims need a reasonable share of products at the top figure, and a sale needs an end date, which has to be a real one. Three other things come up regularly in this trade.
- Finance offers bring extra wording, shown as supers, the lines of small text at the bottom of the screen. We’ve covered what’s needed in finance offers in TV ads.
- Guarantees and accreditations need to be current, and you’ll be asked to show them.
- Savings on energy bills need evidence that customers would really achieve them, which is where a newspaper advert for solar panels fell down in an ASA ruling of March 2026.
Our advice is usually to build the advert around your name and your work, and to keep any offer simple, because a simple offer needs less small print and leaves more of the screen for the work. An advert that doesn’t depend on this month’s promotion can also run for much longer. Either way, we handle the clearance for you and settle the wording at the script stage, before anything has been filmed.
When to advertise
Enquiries in this trade tend to rise in the new year and again in spring, and airtime in January is often good value. But because people take so long to decide, and somebody who first notices you in March may not ring until September, the companies that do best are usually on air steadily, with extra weight at the busy times. We’ve explained that pattern, and the alternatives, in how to schedule a TV campaign.
The seasons affect when the advert is made as well as when it’s shown, since doors opening onto a garden are far better filmed in summer than in November, even if the advert won’t be on air until the new year.
Starting the conversation
A good place to begin is with the kind of job you’d most like more of, and with what your customers tend to say about you once the work is finished, because the best ideas in this trade usually come from there. We’ll turn that into a free storyboard, so that you can see what your advert would look like before you commit to anything. Get in touch when you’re ready, and in the meantime there’s more of our home improvement work to watch.
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