Get More Leads with Your Website – Page 5

How to Create a Landing Page on Your Website For Your Painting Business

Spending money on digital advertising but not receiving the desired results – more leads?

This issue can sometimes be caused by problems with your Landing Page. A landing page is the webpage that you direct people to after clicking on your advertisements.

If you want to generate more leads for your painting business, you need to create a well-designed landing page with laser focus. In this article, we’ll discuss the fundamentals of what a landing page is and offer advice on how to improve each element to boost conversions.

So, What Exactly Is A Landing Page?

A landing page is a dedicated web page built for the sole purpose of receiving visitors from advertising campaigns. When someone clicks on one of your digital ads, they will “land” here.

This is a single page that explains to potential clients why they should hire you for a certain project and how to get started. There should be only ONE action that they are able to take on the page.

What Conversion Factors Should Be Considered When Creating A Landing Page?

Although homepages are still crucial, they are often meant to cover all that you do. They’re also made to let site users dig deeper into your company in various ways.

With a landing page, you are able to control how visitors arrive on your site and direct them to do ONE THING. When someone is searching for an exterior painter and clicks on an ad, they should be directed to a page that details the exterior painting services that your company offers. If an ad for handyman services is clicked, the user should be sent to a page with detailed information about handyman services.

If you want a greater lead conversion rate, sending visitors to a landing page is your best bet.

Here are seven best practices for developing a conversion-optimized landing page for your painting company.

#1 - Have Only One Call-To-Action (or CTA for short)

Simply put, your call to action (CTA) is the desired next step for your site’s users. You should make the CTA highly visible immediately by placing it at the top of the page.

PRO TIP: For optimal results, have your CTAs be buttons of a consistent color throughout your landing page. Each button’s text must be an EXACT replica of the others. These buttons should stand out, so make sure that they are a contrasting color to your site color scheme.

If you want a visitor to take action after clicking on your ad and getting on your page, don’t overwhelm them with options. Make sure the goal is crystal clear and easy to understand.

Make sure that your landing page consistently encourages your target action, whether that be a phone call, a scheduled consultation, or a subscription to your newsletter. Try to narrow your attention to a single step that they should take. Having too many options available can make decision making more challenging.

Be sure to provide a call to action (CTA) at the conclusion of each paragraph to help direct readers to take the next step. You shouldn’t leave your audience looking for what to do.

#2 - Make Your Ad Wording Match The Wording On Your Landing Page

Landing Pages require that you be consistent. Obviously, your ad must have interested the visitor enough to click on it. People will click on an ad because it addresses an issue they’ve been thinking about or because it came up at just the right time.

The term for this is “Ad Congruity.”

PRO TIP: Google will decrease your cost per click if the advertisements you’re running are relevant and consistent with the landing page.

Inconsistency between advertising and website content can turn off potential customers. For example, offering a free consultation for interior painting services in an ad but only discussing cabinet painting on the landing page. If your landing page is not perfectly tailored to your ad, you risk losing more visitors and leads than you gain.

#3 - Emphasize Value

Everyone who lands on your page is thinking about hiring your painting firm. They’ll decide if they think you can really help them out. This is where you need to focus on your clients’ problems and not yourself.

To get a conversion, you need to provide your site visitors something they really want.

There is a limited window of opportunity to persuade site visitors that they have arrived at the answer to their problems. Do your best to focus on what’s in it for them as you try to sway them into working with you. Describe in detail how you will manage their project stress-free from start to finish.

You need to prove your worth as a house painting business to them.

PRO TIP: reframe the conversation so that it’s about the client. Use “you” and “your” in place of “we” as much as possible.

#4 - Landing Page Length Matters

How long your landing page is will depend on what you want to achieve. Do you want people to fill out a form when they visit your site? You want them to call you? Or just to teach them something in a download?

For example, if you want a visitor to call you instead of downloading a house painting brochure, you may need more content. This is because It takes a lot more work to pick up the phone and make an appointment for an estimate than it does to send an email address to find out more. So, you’ll need to give them more information to show them why your company is the best choice and that you are deserving of their time.

#5 - Use A Video For Extra Persuasion

This study shows that having a persuasive video on your landing page can help increase conversions by 86%.

Now, putting any old video on your landing page won’t help you get ahead faster. Adding video can be a real power move, but it could also keep people from clicking on your CTA. This video needs to go with the rest of your landing page and tie everything together. Keep it short and to the point, but don’t make it your landing page’s main focus.

The best place for a video is in the middle of the page, above the fold. Here, it won’t take away from your call to action or value proposition, but it will show that you have more to offer as the visitor scrolls down the page.

#6 - Feature Social Proof

Your clients will be the best source of social proof. Include quotes and testimonials from real customers who talk about their experiences with your business. When you talk about yourself, it’s usually seen as marketing fluff, but when someone else does it, it’s more powerful.

Did you know that 79% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation from a friend or family member? Putting these reviews on your landing page will give potential painting clients the proof they are looking for.

PRO TIP: Use reviews from third-party, trustworthy sites like Google or Facebook. These look a lot better than just using text from a client on your website.

#7 - Optimize Your Forms For Conversions

Conversion rates can be made or broken by how many fields are needed. You need to get as much information as possible from a potential client so that you can follow up with them. However, if you ask for too much information, it will hurt your conversions. People don’t want to fill out a lot of fields.

We recommend using the following fields on your landing pages:

Name
Email
Phone number
Message (describe project)

By giving visitors the option to leave a message, they can talk about their project and get in touch with the person who will be in charge of it. This will give you a chance to get ahead of the game and find out what they want before you set up an estimate.

Landing pages are the best way to turn as many visitors as possible from online advertising campaigns into customers, and you now know everything you need to know to get started!

Still not sure where to begin? Let us help you. Send me (Stacey Ivol) an email at si@iftsdesign.com or give IFTS, Inc. a call 412.715.6266 for a FREE consultation.

10 Of Our Favorite Marketing Hacks For House Painting Companies In 2022

Would you like to know about our 10 favorite super sneaky marketing hacks that you can implement today?

We use these marketing secrets to help our painter clients rank their website #1 for their favorite keywords, get more organic traffic and ultimately, get more leads to grow their business.

In this article, we are going to cover ten actionable strategies that you can use RIGHT NOW.

The best part?

You don’t have to be super tech savvy or Elon Musk to get them implemented.

Let’s start this section with our favorite Google Business Profile hacks.

Hack #1 - Social Proof Will Get You More Leads

The best two platforms to get reviews on are:

Google
Meta (Formerly Facebook)

Google reviews are the best type of reviews that you can receive because not only do they talk you up and show people how great you are, they also help your website with its SEO. As an added bonus, once you have 100 reviews, your star rating will be shown when you run Google ads.

Meta reviews are great to have as well because of the platform’s popularity in a house painting company’s target market. Most house painters that we work with have a target audience of women that are between the ages of 35 to 64. Consequently, that is the majority of Meta users. By using this platform, you are more likely to get in front of your ideal client than any other social media option.

If you can get a video testimonial from a client, that can go a long way as well. A lot of people get stuck on the logistics of creating the video, but it shouldn’t be that hard. You can interview them via Zoom and record that call or just have them use their phone to record a quick video.

The more authentic the video looks, the better. This is for two reasons. One – if the video is over-produced, it will seem scripted and less credible. Two – if people see that someone took time out of their day to create a quick video for you, it shows that they really liked you and your work.

Once you have these videos, be sure to put them everywhere a potential audience may look. This could include:

YouTube
Your website
Social Media
Your Google Business Profile
and more!

Reviews are a great way to show how great you are without you ever having to say a word.

Want some help getting more reviews? Check out our article on implementing a review system.

Hack #2 - Get Your Listing On Google Maps

Getting your business listed in the Google Maps results is based on many factors. A few big ones are:

how close the searcher is to your business location
your review ranking and volume (which we discussed above in Hack #1)
profile completeness
local signals

To start, make sure that your profile is completely filled out with correct information. Your name in the Google Business Profile should match exactly the name on your website. This goes for your address, website, and phone number as well. Then, be sure that your business categories and services are filled in completely.

The final part of your profile that should be completed is the “Photos” section. Be sure to add as many photos as you can as this is a feature that not many painters take advantage of.

For a complete walkthrough of filling out a Google Business Profile, check out our article here: https://blog.iftsdesign.com/introducing-google-my-business/

“Local Signals” are another big factor for showing up early on Google Maps. These are website links to your website from other local businesses or services. A few examples of this would be:

a back link from the local chamber of commerce
a back link from a local scholarship that you sponsored
a mention or link to your business from a local paper

Anything that you can do to get your business associated with your area is a great “local signal” to Google.

Hack #3 - Ask and Answer Questions Via Your Profile

An easy way to get keywords and locations associated with your Google Business Profile is through the question and answer section.

Previously, you were not able to add questions to your profile yourself, You had to wait for someone to ask and then you could answer them. This has now changed.

The Q&A section of your Google Business Profile is a great way to show all of your most frequently asked questions up front to prospective customers.

Write down the 10 questions that you receive all of the time from prospects and then answer them in 3-5 sentences. While you are answering them, be sure to use common keywords/phrases as well as locations that you want associated with your house painting business.

Once you have accomplished this task, copy and paste them to your Google Business Profile.

Now, we’ll move to our favorite Paid Ad Hacks.

Hack #4 - Solve Your Prospects’ Small Problems For Free In an Ad

What are the questions you most commonly get asked? If you’ve already implemented Hack #3 from this article, you should have this list already.

Side Note – Need some inspiration? Check out https://answerthepublic.com/ or https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/ for commonly asked or searched questions in your field.

Make videos answering these questions and position yourself as the expert in your area. Again, just like the testimonials, the videos do not have to be fancy or highly edited. They should be authentic and can be filmed with your cell phone. Some painters will even film on the job site.

Sample Common House Painter Questions To Get You Started:

How often should I paint the exterior of my house in this area?

What is the best time of the year to stain a deck?
How many coats of paint should be used on the exterior of your house?
How many coats of paint should be used on the interior of your house?
What does it mean for a painting company to be bonded and insured?
Should I paint my kitchen cabinets or should I replace them?

Once you have your videos, post them to your social media, YouTube channel and on your website.

You should also run them as Meta ads to your local audience. You don’t have to spend a lot of money, just one to five dollars per day. This helps you get in front of a fairly large group of people in a small amount of time.

These videos will help you create an audience that already knows/likes/trusts you when it comes to painting topics. When they have a painting project come up, you will be the one that they know they can trust.

Hack #5 - Make Your Ad Stand Out

When creating your video, you want to be sure to stand out amongst the crowded marketplace.

The first way to do this is to use contrasting colors to the platform that you are running the ad on. If you are going to run the ad on Meta (Facebook), we recommend having a red or yellow bar at the top of the video because it helps you stand out from the Meta blue color scheme. An easy way to do some small edits to your video is through Canva.

Don’t want to take the time to do any edits to the video? Try wearing a brightly colored red or yellow shirt.

The second way to stand out is to immediately call out your audience or target market. So, if you were advertising kitchen cabinet painting to the residents of Dallas, you could start your video with the sentence:

“Are you living in the Dallas area and thinking about redoing your kitchen?”

Or, you could do some video editing and add that sentence as text to the beginning of the video.

A final way to stand out is to start your video with a big action or a memorable prop at the beginning. You want to grab someone’s attention – movement or something unexpected will typically draw the eye.

A few big actions you could try:

come in through a door
big wave and a smile
use a paint sprayer or other tool of the trade
jump into the frame

A few memorable props you could try:

Comically large-sized paintbrush
Wall of stacked of paint cans
stand halfway up a ladder

The important thing to remember is you want to get their attention within the first 3 seconds of the video and keep them watching. These tactics all use “pattern interrupt”. This basically means – do something to get a person to stop scrolling through their feed and watch your video/read your ad.

Hack #6 - Use Retargeting Ads In Multiple Ways

The average consumer is only prepared to make a purchase about 3% of the time.

So, how do you attract the other 97% of people?

Retargeting Ads

Retargeting allows you to stay in front of someone that is interested in your services until they are ready to make a purchasing decision. If you are advertising on Meta (Facebook), you can do this in 2 ways:

Meta Pixel
Video Viewers

The Meta Pixel is a small piece of code that you install on your website. It then tracks who has visited the site and allows you to show them ads on Meta.

One caveat – The usefulness of the Pixel has diminished over time as Apple now requires users to opt in to being tracked. Only about 10% of people opt in (not surprising). Advertisers now have a much harder time reaching Apple users via this method.

The other way you can retarget someone is through their video views. Meta tracks who watches your videos and for how long. So, you can advertise to people that have watched at least a certain percentage of a video.

We recommend retargeting people who have watched at least 25% – 50% of a video.

Sample Retargeting Strategy For House Painters

A good video strategy for painters is to run 3-5 FAQ ads to women 35-64 in your local area. Then, retarget the women who have watched at least 25% of one of the videos with an ad that has a special offer or a more direct call to action.

Finally, let’s cover our favorite psychological marketing tricks.

Hack #7 - Get an Awesome Business Card With Your Picture

One strategy that isn’t commonly used by painters is to get a really nice business card with your picture on it.

Why use your picture?

First of all, people want to do business with people, not a faceless business. Secondly, it will help them remember who you are.

Now, how nice is nice, you may ask…

Stand out from the crowd of people that are handing out the white, one sided business cards that they ordered by the thousands from VistaPrint for under $50 and get a card that is plastic, like a credit card. Check out plasticprinters.com for decent pricing.

Not only that, make the card graphically pleasing and “cool looking” by having it designed professionally. Look on fiverr.com for a great deal on the design aspect.

Because the card is so nice, people feel bad about throwing it away. So, you’ve got a tangible remarketing tool that they will keep, unlike other painting companies. This will set you apart from the cheap lookalike cards that are thrown away easily.

[On an aside] We do recommend having 2 sets of cards created. One set should be plastic and lux for giving away to potential customers. The other set can be on paper. These paper ones should be given away to people that may not necessarily hire you, but you may use as a contact or meet at a networking event.

Hack #8 - Make Your Voicemail Work For You

Your clients should never reach your voicemail. Preferably, you’d have a call center in place to make sure that they never had to talk to a machine.

However, if the perfect set of circumstances happen and they do manage to reach your voicemail, there is one phrase you should add to the end of the message:

Add “I will call you in the next 15 minutes”

When people hear this, they will be much more likely to leave a message because they have that expectation of receiving a call back soon. Even if you aren’t able to call back in that amount of time, you still get a chance at that lead.

Hack #9 - Give a Compliment At the Beginning

People want to be liked and this plays into that psychology.

Before you start an estimate, give a compliment to the prospect. It could be about the house, the neighborhood, a family picture, furniture, their pet etc. People like people who like them. People also HIRE people who they like.

Most of the time, people don’t remember what you say, but they do remember how you make them feel. This applies to most human interaction. So, if you make them feel good about themselves at the beginning, the feeling should carry through the whole experience.

By making a prospect feel good about themselves, it puts you in a better position for you to get their business.

Hack #10 - Go Get Started

Getting started is half the battle. Choose one thing from this list that you want to accomplish in the next 24 hours and GO DO IT! You’ll be ahead of 95% of your competition.

Want Some Help?

Is there something on this list that you would like to implement, but aren’t quite sure how or don’t have the time to do?

This is where IFTS comes in. We have been working with house painters (and other businesses) for over 5 years on all aspects of their marketing. Give us a call at 412-715-6266 or send us an email (si@iftsdesign.com). We’d love to help you grow your painting company.

Grow Your Painting Business By A Factor of 10 With These 5 Steps – Part 2 of 5

Are you looking to grow your painting company but aren’t sure where to start?

It’s difficult to know what steps to take or where to invest your time and money. However, we have created a proven roadmap for you to follow that will help you 10X your painting business.

In part 1 of this series, we discussed how to set up a follow-up system on multiple platforms. If you haven’t already read it, you’ll want to start here.

After the follow up systems are in place, your next step is to increase your number of leads.

Step 2 – 2X (At Least) Your Number of Leads

In order to grow your painting business, you will need to commit yourself to taking the steps to get bigger. By doubling your leads (at least), you will have more work coming in than ever before.

This is where it gets tricky. People will ask us, “How exactly do I double the leads for my painting business?”

The truthful answer is this – you need to test multiple avenues and see what works best for you. In order to know what is working and what’s not, lead tracking tactics will need to be in place.

Let’s talk about a few ways (or combinations of ways) to double your leads.

Marketing Tactics To Try To 2X Your House Painting Leads

Tactic 1 – Facebook Ads

As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, Facebook Ads can be an effective way of attracting new clients. Video tends to perform better than images, so make sure you take a bunch of little videos at your next work site.

You’ll want to make two sets of videos. Set 1 should have videos that do the following:

Answer a common house painting question
Talk about prepping a house for painting
Discuss when to paint certain areas and why
Discuss how weather affects painting

Video set 1 should be videos that people would watch if and only if they were thinking about painting their interior, exterior, cabinets etc.

Video Set 2 should showcase your company and why they should hire you. These videos should consist of:

Showing the quality of your work
Cool before and afters
How clean you leave the house
Anything else that makes you stand out

Set 2 videos should also close with a call to action of contacting you or scheduling an appointment.

Schedule Video Set 1 to show to people in your area. To get your targeting a little more specific, we generally recommend the following settings:

Age – 40+

Gender – Female (Women tend to make the decisions)

Radius – Within 20 miles of your business

Then, after Video Set 1 has been running for a few days, you’ll want to schedule Video Set 2. These videos should only be shown to people that have watched at least 25% of one of the videos from Set 1. This way, you know that you are targeting people that are at least thinking about painting their house.

You can also show Video Set 2 to people that have been on your website if you have the Facebook Pixel setup correctly.

Tactic 2 – Google Ads

Google Ads can be a highly effective way of getting leads online. In fact, we have seen leads come in for companies that we’ve worked with for under $50/lead. However, Google Ads can be a bit tricky when it comes to the settings.

Let’s discuss a few of the common Google Ad “gotchas”.

First, you need to decide what type of ad you want 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

Both types of ads have their merits, but you should never create a Search Ad that also targets the Display Network and vice versa.

Secondly, you need to make sure that you are using keywords in the manner that 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”

For example, you may enter House Painters In My Area as one of your keywords. However, your ad may show for people looking for famous painters or automobile painters.

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, your ad would show for someone that typed in that phrase. It also might show for someone that type in “Painters Near Me” or “House Painting In My Area”.

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

The last type of keywords are exact match keywords. To denote these, you enter the phrase in square brackets. 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 of when your ad is shown, but it also limits the audience. Using the previous example, you would enter one of your keywords as [House Painters In My Area]. Then, your ad would show to people who type in this phrase or something very similar, like with the same words in a different order.

After you enter your keywords, you will also want to create your list of negative keywords as well. This is a list of words and phrases that you give to Google that tells them – if this word is in a search phrase, do NOT show my ad. It allows you to weed out unqualified buyers.

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
Automobile, car, auto etc.
Boat
Paint and Sip
Etc.

If you think of words or phrases that are associated with painting, but not house painting, put them on the list.

Finally, you want to make sure that your keywords match what you say in your ads AND that your landing pages that you send people to match your ads. This is called “Ad Congruity”. If you call yourself a “house painter” in your keywords and your ads, make sure that the page that you send them to highlights the fact that you are a “house painter”.

NEVER SEND YOUR ADS TO YOUR HOME PAGE! This is a huge, costly mistake that we see painting businesses make all of the time.

Some Other Marketing Tactics

We wanted to review a few tactics in depth. 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!

Important to Remember – Measure Your Results

In order to know what tactic or tactics worked the best, you have to measure your results. One way you can do this is through call tracking. Use a different phone number for each tactic type and see what number brings in the most leads. CallRail is one vendor that offers this service and makes it simple to set up.

You could try one tactic per month, although seasonality may affect these results a bit.

You could send each ad to a separate landing page. Then, your site analytics would allow you to know which ad had been the most successful.

However you choose to do this, you just want to be sure that everything is measured.

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 $40,000 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 $64,000.

How to double the leads for your painting business

Now, through the tactics discussed in this article, we have doubled our leads from 80 to 160 per month.

If that 20% close rate remains, this will result in 32 new clients and a monthly gross income of $128,000! We have already more than tripled the revenue using just 2 steps of the system!

Next week? Step 3: Work On Increasing The Closing Rate For Your Painting Business!