"How much per metre for a worktop?"
Every carpenter who has tried online advertising knows that message. It arrives by the dozen, usually late in the evening, always without context: no address, no dimensions, no project. Answering takes five minutes and leads to silence nine times out of ten.
The instinct is to conclude that advertising attracts the wrong people. It is more precise than that: advertising attracts exactly the people it invited. An ad built around a price, a free quote or a discount summons people who compare prices. An ad built around a finished room summons people who are picturing their own room.
The real issue: a carpenter sells two very different trades
Before talking about campaigns at all, you have to decide what you want to sell.
On one side there is short, standardised work: a worktop, a door to replace, a few metres of wardrobe. The customer compares, decides quickly, and price carries most of the weight. On the other side there is custom joinery: a full kitchen, a built-in bookcase, a walk-in wardrobe, a staircase. The customer hesitates for months, looks for ideas long before looking for a tradesperson, and decides on trust as much as on the quote.
Meta works well for the second and badly for the first. For short jobs, someone who needs a worktop types their search into Google the moment they need it. You will not create that need inside a news feed.
For custom work, the opposite is true. Nobody wakes up searching for "fitted joinery". But thousands of homeowners in your area are vaguely dreaming about a bespoke bookcase without having started looking. A photo of a finished job tips them from a fuzzy dream into a project with a date on it. That is where social advertising creates value.
The practical consequence: if your turnover rests on short jobs, Meta ads are probably not your priority. If you want more fitted joinery projects, it is a serious channel.
What the image has to show
In this trade the picture does almost all the work. Three rules hold up.
Show the finished room, not the workshop. Your machines, your shavings and your craft fascinate you, and rightly so. The customer projects nothing onto a workshop. They project themselves into a tidy living room, a bright kitchen, a wardrobe where everything has its place. Sell the result in the setting where it will be lived in.
Photograph your own jobs properly. An average piece of work photographed well beats an exceptional one snapped in a hurry at the end of the fit. Go back once the room has been tidied, in daylight, and take twenty photos. It is the best hour you will ever invest in your marketing.
Forget stock images. A generic kitchen found online is recognised instantly, and it destroys the exact thing you are selling: the fact that you built it, here, for someone local.
Before and after shots work particularly well because they make visible what the customer cannot picture on their own: what becomes of a dead wall, an unusable loft slope, an awkward corner.
The form does the filtering, not the targeting
Meta's targeting options have narrowed over the years, and the algorithm now finds your buyers better than your manual settings do. The real filter sits elsewhere: in what you ask before you accept the enquiry.
Three questions are enough, multiple choice rather than free text.
The type of project, listing only the work you genuinely want to sell. No "other" box, no "small jobs" box. Anyone who recognises themselves nowhere gives up, and that is the point.
The room involved, which gives you an order of magnitude immediately. A bookcase and a full kitchen are not handled the same way, and you know which one you are dealing with before you pick up the phone.
The timeline, with three simple options. Someone who answers "more than a year away" is not worthless, they go into slow follow-up instead of eating your calling time this week.
These three questions will cut the number of enquiries, often by half. That is the goal. You stop paying to ring back people who only wanted a price per metre.
Call back within the hour if you can
Someone who fills in a form in the evening has filled in two or three others from other tradespeople in the same sitting. The first to call speaks to someone who still has the project in mind. The third speaks to someone who has already booked an appointment elsewhere.
That is a genuine constraint for a trade that spends its days in the workshop or on site with both hands busy. It has to be faced before anything is launched: if nobody can call back the same day, advertising will fund the contacts your competitors convert.
Two simple settings help a lot. Have enquiries sent straight to email or SMS rather than leaving them asleep in Meta's lead manager, where nobody goes looking. And add a question about the preferred time to call: you ring when the person expects to be rung, and the pick-up rate climbs noticeably.
The question people forget to ask
Before spending anything: do you have the capacity to absorb these projects?
A carpenter booked out eight months ahead does not need more enquiries. They may need better enquiries, which is a different thing: replacing small jobs with more profitable ones, smoothing out a quiet season, or covering an area they never reach. Those goals are legitimate and they change how the campaigns are set up entirely.
But if the diary is full and the margins are healthy, advertising solves nothing. It creates a problem instead: unanswered enquiries, and a local reputation that starts to erode in the reviews.
Where to start, concretely
Pick one type of fitted work, the one you do best and sell at the highest price. Photograph three recent jobs properly. Build a form with your three qualifying questions and no "other" box. Organise how enquiries reach you before launching, not after.
Then let it run for several weeks before judging it. On joinery projects, the gap between first contact and signature is measured in months. A campaign switched off after ten days has proved nothing, except that it was not given the time.