Grow Your Painting Business by A Factor of 10 With These 5 Steps

If you want to expand your painting business, you must commit to taking the steps to grow. By just doubling your leads (at the very least), you will have more work coming in than ever before.

This is when things become a little complicated and people get confused.

“How exactly do I double the leads for my painting business?” is a commonly asked question.

The honest answer is that you should try a variety of options and find what works best for you and your company. Lead tracking strategies will be required in order to determine what is working and what is not.  This will tell you where exactly to spend your marketing budget.

Let’s go over a couple methods (or combinations of methods) for doubling your leads.

Marketing Tactics To Try To 2X Your House Painting Leads

Marketing Tactic 1 For Painting Companies – Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads, as indicated in Part 1, may be an efficient strategy to attract new clients. 

Because video outperforms photos, make sure you record a number of short videos at your next job site.  Most clients will be ecstatic to have their house transformation featured.

You’ll need to make two video sets. Videos that do the following should be included in Set 1:

• Provide an answer to a frequently asked question about home painting.
• Talk about getting a house ready to paint.
• Discuss why and when to paint certain areas.
• Discuss how the weather affects the painting process.

Video set 1 should consist of videos that people would watch solely if they were considering painting their interiors, exteriors, cabinets, or other surfaces.

Set 2 of the video should introduce your company and explain why they should hire you. The following should be included in these videos:

• Showing off the quality of your work
• Awesome before and after shots
• How tidy you keep the work area
• Anything else that makes your stand out

Set 2 videos should also have a call to action for them to contact you or make an appointment.

Schedule Video Set 1 to individuals in your region. The following options are typically recommended to get your Facebook targeting a bit more specific:

Age – 40+

Gender – Female (Women tend to make the household buying decisions)

Radius – Within 20 (or 30) miles of your business

The radius should really reflect how far you are willing to travel for house painting projects.

You’ll want to schedule Video Set 2 after Video Set 1 has been running for a few days. Only those who have seen at least 25% of one of the videos from Set 1 should be shown these videos. This way, you know you’re reaching out to people who are at least considering painting their home.

If you have the Facebook Pixel set up correctly, you can also show Video Set 2 to users who have visited your website.

Marketing Tactic 2 For Painting Companies – Google Ads

Google Ads may be a powerful tool for generating online leads. In fact, we’ve seen leads for companies we’ve worked with come in for less than $50 per lead. When it comes to the settings, though, Google Ads can be a little complex.  This complexity typically leads to mistakes and can cost a painting business money if they are not careful.

Let’s look at some of the most frequent Google Ad “gotchas.”

First, you must choose the type of advertisement you wish to run:

• Search Ads are the text ads that you see at the top of the results page, before the map and the organic results
• Display Ads are the image ads that you see across the web when browsing

Although both types of ads have advantages, you should never create a Search Ad that also targets the Display Network or vice versa.

Second, double-check that you’re utilizing keywords in the way you intended.

Google has multiple types of keywords:

• Broad match
• Phrase match
• Exact match

According to Google, a broad match keyword is one that “may show on searches that are related to your keyword, which can include searches that don’t contain the keyword terms”

One of your keywords, for example, may be House Painters In My Area. However, those hunting for famous painters or automobile painters may see your ad.

Rule #1 of not overpaying for Google Ads – DO NOT USE BROAD MATCH KEYWORDS.

Google defines a phrase match keyword as one where “ads may show on searches that include the meaning of your keyword”.  To denote a phrase match keyword, you’ll need to put it in quotes.

To use the example above, you would define one of your keywords as “House Painters In My Area”.  Now, if someone entered in that term, your ad would appear. It may also appear if someone types in “Painters Near Me” or “House Painting Near Me.”

These are acceptable keywords (as long as you have a good negative keyword list, which we will discuss in a few moments).

Exact match keywords are the last type of keyword from Google. You put the keyword phrase in square brackets to indicate this.  Google defines these as “Ads will show on searches that have the same meaning or same intent as the keyword.”

This type of keyword gives you the most control over when your ad appears, but it also restricts the number of people who see it. In the previous example, you would type [House Painters In My Area] as one of your keywords. Then, when someone types in this phrase or anything extremely close, such as the same words in a different sequence, your ad will appear.  One example of this would be someone typing “House Painters My Area” into the search bar.

You’ll also want to make a list of negative keywords after you’ve entered your keywords. This is a list of terms and phrases that you input into Google Ads that informs them not to show my ad if this word appears in a search phrase. It allows you to filter out buyers who aren’t qualified.

Good negative keywords to use for your painting company:

• Any painting or store brand, like “Home Depot” or “Behr”
• “How To” or “How Much” (People searching these phrases are typically in the education phase of their searching and aren’t looking to purchase yet)
• Automobile, car, auto etc.
• Boat
• Bicycle
• Paint and Sip
• Face Paint
• Etc.

Put any terms or phrases that come to mind that are linked with painting but aren’t related to home painting on the list.

Finally, double-check that your keywords correspond to what you state in your advertisements, and that the landing pages you lead visitors to correspond to your ads. This is known as “Ad Congruity.” 

For example, if you utilize the term “house painter” in your keywords and ads, make sure the page they are directed to emphasizes that you are a “house painter.”  In fact, “house painter” should occur in your H1 header and your page title.

DO NOT SEND ANY OF YOUR ADS TO YOUR HOME PAGE! This is a significant, costly error that we see a lot of painting companies make.  When people get sent to the home page, they don’t know what action you want them to take.  A confused mind never buys, so be explicit in what you want all of your prospects to do.

Some Other Marketing Tactics For Painting Businesses 

We wanted to review a few tactics in depth in this article.  However, there are tons of other tactics to try, like:

• Door hangers
• YouTube ads
• Radio ads
• Appear on Podcasts
• Networking
• Find non-competing partners
• SEO
• TV
• Get featured on the local news
• And more!

Always Important to Remember – Measure Your Results

You must measure your results to determine which approach or tactics performed best. Call tracking is one technique used to accomplish this. For each tactic type, use a different phone number to determine which one generates the most leads. One vendor that provides this service and makes it simple to set up is CallRail.  You get 10 phone numbers included with the basic account and the cost is less than $50/month.

You might want to attempt one tactic every month, though seasonality may have an impact on the results…or you can try them all at once!

To separate them out, each ad might be sent to a different landing page. Then you’d be able to tell which ad was the most effective according to your website’s analytics.

You just want to make sure that everything is measured, regardless of how you go about it.  Once you know your metrics, you don’t have to limit yourself to just one!  It’s best to eliminate the duds though.

Let’s Return To Our Example Company With Double The Leads For Our Painting Business

Again, let’s see how powerful doubling the number of leads that we bring in actually is.

Remember, ABC Painting started with $45,000 monthly gross revenue.  Then, we implemented a follow-up system, which will increase the leads by about 60%.  This took the gross monthly revenue to $70,000.

Now, through the tactics discussed in this article, we have doubled our leads from 96 to 160 192 per month.

If that 15% close rate remains, this will result in 29 new clients and a monthly gross income of $145,000!  We have already more than tripled the revenue using just 2 steps of this proven system!