Five rules a kitchen and bath marketing agency must know

Mid-February is when a kitchen and bath firm’s calendar fills with design consults for spring and summer builds, and it is also when the agency pitches arrive. Plenty of them are written for any contractor, with the nouns changed. That matters more in this trade than it looks, because the homeowner you want is rarely choosing between you and another specialist.

Houzz’s 2026 Kitchen Trends study, published last month from a July 2025 survey of 1,780 homeowners, found 87% hire at least one professional for a kitchen. General contractors were the most common hire at 48%, ahead of building specialists at 42% and cabinetmakers at 34%, and 22% brought in a kitchen designer. An agency that has not absorbed that will sell you the campaign it sells the generalist across town.

So before anyone shows you a strategy deck, check whether they know the rules that decide what your ads may say. Here are five that any agency in this trade should know cold, us included.

The rules that reach into kitchen and bath ad copy

• The license number, and no “bonded.” California’s Contractors State License Board requires the license number in all forms of advertising, with a civil penalty of $100 to $1,000 for a first offense. Its advertising guide also says a contractor may not tell the public, in an ad or a presentation, that it is bonded, which turns the familiar “licensed, bonded and insured” into a liability there. Florida wants the registration or certification number in every advertisement, regardless of medium.
• Lead paint certification comes before the ad, not only before the job. The EPA’s renovation rule says firms cannot advertise or perform covered renovation in homes built before 1978 without firm certification, sole proprietorships included. Interior work counts as minor only when it disturbs six square feet of paint or less per room, a line a cabinet tear-out usually crosses on the first morning.
• A monthly payment needs the full credit terms. Under Truth in Lending, an ad that states a down payment, a number of payments or a repayment period, a payment amount or a finance charge must also state the down payment, the terms of repayment and the APR. That holds even when the term can only be worked out from the ad. “Financing available” on its own triggers none of it.
• A sale at the kitchen table can be undone. The FTC’s Cooling-Off Rule gives three days to cancel a sale made at home, including one where the homeowner invited the salesperson in, and the clock runs to midnight of the third business day, with Saturday counted. California’s consumer guide allows three business days on a home improvement contract, five when the buyer is 65 or older, unless the deal was negotiated at the contractor’s place of business.
• California caps the deposit. A home improvement down payment there may not exceed $1,000 or 10% of the contract price, whichever is less. “Reserve your spring install for 10% down” on a large kitchen is an offer the law does not allow.

Questions to put to an agency in the first meeting

The answers show quickly whether you are talking to people who know remodeling or only ads.

• “Show us a kitchen ad you wrote for a California or Florida firm. Where is the license number?” If the answer is the footer of the landing page, they have not read the rule.
• “What will our financing ads say, and who checks them against Regulation Z?” A good answer names the trigger terms. A weak one says the lender handles compliance.
• “Half our jobs are in pre-1978 houses. What do you need from us before you advertise that work?” The answer should start with your firm certification.
• “How long will you follow up a design consult that does not book?” Kitchens are planned over months, not days. If the sequence stops after two weeks, most of the value walks away with it.
• “How will you show we are the specialist?” With generalists hired on nearly half of kitchen projects in Houzz’s study, the site has to say what you do that they do not.
• “Which Local Services categories will you apply for?” Kitchen remodeling and Bathroom remodeling are separate. Kitchen runs business and owner background checks on every advertiser, Bathroom only on some, and both have carried the single Google Verified badge since last October.

What the first ninety days should look like

A plan we would sign off on spends the first month on proof, the second on measurement and the third on reach.

• Month one: proof. Galleries rebuilt from your own jobs, each labeled with room, town, scope and duration. License number and RRP certification on the site and the Business Profile. Review requests to recent clients, because BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, published this week, found 47% of consumers will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews and 74% only care about reviews from the last three months.
• Month two: measurement. Every inquiry tagged by source and room, with CRM stages for consult booked, design agreement, proposal, signed and cancelled. Without this, a contract that signs in the fall cannot be traced to the search that started it.
• Month three: reach. Separate kitchen and bath pages for the towns you work, Local Services applications, and search campaigns on major-remodel terms. Houzz’s Kitchen Trends study puts a major kitchen at $55,000 at the median against $20,000 for a minor one, so the targeting should lean toward the bigger job.

An agency that wants to start with ad spend in week one is skipping the part that decides whether the spend works.

What a good monthly report shows a kitchen and bath firm

• Consults booked and consults kept, by source and by room.
• Design agreements and proposals, then contracts signed and contracts cancelled.
• Cost per signed contract beside cost per lead. LocaliQ’s 2025 home services benchmarks, covering April 2024 to March 2025, have no kitchen and bath line; the nearest, Construction & Contractors (General), shows a median cost per lead of $165.67 and a conversion rate of 2.61%.
• Review count and review recency against the two or three firms you lose to most.
• A look back at which sources from six months ago produced this month’s contracts.

What we are telling clients this month

• Read every live ad, post and page for the license number, and take “bonded” out of anything that runs in California.
• If you work in pre-1978 homes without firm RRP certification, stop advertising that work until you have it.
• Rewrite any financing line that names a payment with the full terms beside it, or drop it to “financing available.”
• Ask every client finished in the past three months for a review, with a photo of the room.
• Take these five rules into every agency meeting this spring and note who answers without checking their phone.

An agency that already knows these rules spends the first meeting on your towns and margins, not on learning the trade at your expense. Our page for kitchen and bath remodelers sets out how we sequence the work, and our website builds show how we make the galleries and consult requests that everything else depends on.