22 September 2026 · 5 min read · Oscar Markham
Why kitchen showrooms waste half their marketing budget
A kitchen is one of the largest discretionary purchases an Irish household makes, and the decision takes months. That length is what makes the category profitable and also what makes most kitchen advertising wasteful.
The showroom hour is the real cost
Ad spend is the visible number. The hidden one is designer time: an hour with someone who was browsing, plus the drawing-up afterwards, repeated for every enquiry that was never in the market.
Count those hours for a month and the true cost per order is usually far higher than the advertising report suggests.
Ask about budget before the appointment, not during it
The conversation everyone dreads is the one where a designer discovers, forty minutes in, that the customer was thinking of a quarter of the price.
Asking for a budget band in the enquiry form avoids it entirely. It costs you a proportion of enquiries, almost all of which were going to end that way, and it makes every remaining appointment worth having.
The eight weeks nobody advertises into
Most of the value in kitchen marketing is not the first click. It is staying visible during the two months between somebody looking and somebody ordering, while they visit three other showrooms.
That is retargeting, it is cheap, and a striking number of kitchen companies have never set it up. They pay full price to find someone and then let them go.
Photograph your own work properly
Kitchens sell on images, and manufacturer imagery is recognisable and generic. Your own completed installs, shot in good light with the room tidy, outperform it consistently.
It is also the one asset a competitor cannot copy, which matters in a category where everyone is selling broadly similar units.
Written by Oscar Markham, founder of Dublin Growth Digital. We run lead generation for Irish estate agents and trades, reported every Friday in enquiries and booked work.