IFTS, Inc. Blog

Have you ever heard that your business doesn’t exist if it isn’t on Facebook?

This is because your clients may already be “friends” with your rivals if they utilize social media to follow other companies.

When it comes to reaching new clients and prospects, social media marketing is an extremely effective method! If you aren’t on social media, no one will know about your company. How could they?

In another post, we share 5 social media marketing secrets that nobody has told you about…

With sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, companies can communicate directly with their customers. If you aren’t doing this, you’re losing out on key opportunities.

Local companies should always have social media campaigns as part of their marketing plans. Making and distributing content on social media sites will assist you in achieving your marketing and branding objectives quickly.

Using paid social media advertising in conjunction with regularly posting updates, videos, and other material to engage your audience will help you reach more prospective customers, build loyal brand supporters, and increase sales.

To connect, engage, and develop your business, here are 11 reasons why you should work on your social media presence:

1. Speed

Using social media to market your business is a quick and easy way to get your message out there. You can start promoting your business in minutes after creating your profile.

2. Price

Because of the low cost of social media campaigns, you have more control over your advertising budget and may expand your social media presence at a rate that is right for you.

3. Effectiveness

To contact your target customers and construct a successful marketing campaign, you need to use multiple social media channels.

4. Brand Awareness

Social media is used by millions of individuals every day all over the world. Consider social media marketing as a surefire technique to raise exposure of your brand.

5. Relationship Development

General marketing methods do not “talk” to the client in any meaningful way. You can, however, develop genuine relationships with your potential clients by connecting with them on social media.

6. Trust Building

Customers are more likely to believe in your brand when you use social media to build trust with them. Successful social media campaigns should help you become a leader in your market.

7. Website Traffic

Making your social media updates engaging will raise your click through rate and drive more attention to your website, increasing sales.

8. More Leads

To produce more leads, you’ll need social media marketing. With social media marketing, it’s easy to run free social media campaigns or pay for advertising.

9. Content Promotion

You should make use of the social media channels to spread the word about your work. If you’re doing content marketing well, you should use social media to get the word out about your products and services.

10. Involved Followers

Increase the link you have with your fans by getting them engaged in your initiatives. Your followers will become more engaged if you just ask them what they want.

11. Spy on Your Competition

Spying on your competition is a cinch with social media. Don’t let your guard down whether it comes to your friends or foes. With social media, it’s simple to monitor your competition on multiple platforms.

Need help getting started with social media?  Call IFTS today for a free strategy session at 412.715.6266 or send an email to si@iftsdesign.com

Are you afraid to raise your pricing for painting jobs?

Most painters are…but you shouldn’t be because competing on price is an intrinsically bad idea.  Your only two options are to be the highest or lowest.  No one will care if you are the second or third lowest pricing in town.

When you are the lowest price, there is an implied low-quality factor as well.  Typically, services that are the cheapest are never the best.  You don’t want that stigma associated with your painting company!

However, if you are the most in-demand painter in town, people will pay your prices, no matter what they are.

So how do you become the most in-demand painter in town?  You become the most known, liked and trusted.  You can accomplish this with the videos, content and Facebook ads that we discussed in Step 1.  Here is a link to that article in case you missed it.

By providing content and value through your videos and articles to people in your area, they already know, like and trust you.  They know that you are an expert at what you do and they have seen proof.  

Therefore, when it comes time to hire a painter, they will automatically think of you.  In fact, there is a good chance that they won’t shop around at all.  They will need to hire you because you are the one that they trust.

When this happens, they will pay whatever you ask for…and because you are providing value and excellent service, you can definitely charge at least 50% more than you are charging now.  You will get just as many clients and make more money.

Let’s Return To Our Example Company With A Premium Offering For Our Painting Business

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 with a close rate of 20%.

Next, we doubled our leads from 80 to 160 per month using the tactics in Step 2 of this series.  This resulted in 32 new clients and a monthly gross income of $128,000.  

Then, we doubled the close rate from 20% to 40%, which gave us 64 clients per month with a monthly gross income of $256,000.

In step 4, we added a premium offering at $12,000 that 10% of our clients chose, resulting in 90% of our new monthly clients (58) with the regular offering at $4000 and 6 of them at $12,000.  This gives us a total revenue for the month of $304,000.

Finally, in this step, we are going to increase the regular pricing by 50%.  The 90% of our monthly clients (58) will now be at $6000 and 10% of our monthly clients (6) will be at $12000.  This gives us an end result of $420,000 for the monthly gross income.  

We have just 10X’d your monthly revenue in 5 easy steps!

BONUS Tip For Increasing Your Recurring Revenue

Would you like to start each year knowing that you have at least $500,000 on the books?

You should be able to count on at least 10% of your customers from the year before having a job for you in the current year or referring you to someone that has a similar job.  

To make sure that they think of you, you want to stay at the “top of mind” for them.  There are a few ways to stay in front of your current customers.

First of all, send out a monthly newsletter via email.  It doesn’t have to be fancy, and it shouldn’t be all about your company.  Just like your videos and content, send out some monthly helpful advice that would apply to your ideal client.  

For instance, if you were a painter located in Virginia, sending out an email with tips on weatherproofing your deck would be perfect for September or October.

IFTS offers a service that does this automatically for painters for under $300 per month, so it pays for itself if you get just one repeat client.

Another way to stay in front of current clients is to turn them into a Facebook audience.  You just upload your list of clients to the Facebook audience wizard.  Then, you can be sure to periodically place helpful videos and content in front of them via Facebook.

Side Note – This audience is also great to use to create a lookalike to send videos and new content to via Facebook Ads.

A final way to get in front of current customers to send them something via snail mail.  Most companies will send Christmas cards or something similar, but this doesn’t really make you stand out in the crowd.  We recommend choosing a holiday that most other companies don’t really acknowledge, like St. Patrick’s Day.  Send them a “We’re Lucky To Have You As A Customer Card” and watch how many people find a way to hire you again!

By staying “top of mind”, you should see at least a 10% repeat from the year before.

If you followed the 5 step process that we discussed, you’d have a monthly revenue of at least $420,000…which is over $5 MILLION DOLLARS annually.  So, if you have at least 10% of the people from last year hire you this year, you will start off knowing you have over $500,000 already on the books.

Have you ever heard of the 80/20 rule or the Pareto principle?

It states that “80 Percent of Your Results Come from 20 Percent of Your Efforts, and 20 Percent of Your Results Come from The Other 80 Percent.” 

The rule applies to your customers as well.  80% of your revenue typically comes from 20% of your clients.  Now, let’s apply the 80/20 rule again to the top 20% of your clients.  64% of your revenue comes from 4% of your clients.

What does this tell us?

There is always a small percentage of people at the top that are willing to pay a premium price.  

However, are you offering that chance to them?

There are ALWAYS at least 5-10% of your clients that would be willing to pay a premium price to get a premium service.  

A premium service is going to be better, faster or easier than the services that you currently offer…and it’s going to cost 2-3 times as much.

To create your premium service offer, you need to ask yourself 3 questions:

1. What can you do to offer a better painting service than other companies?
2. What can you do to be faster than other companies?
3. How can you make your process easier than other companies?

Let’s look at a few examples for each question…

What can you do to offer a better painting service than other companies?

To offer a better painting service, you need to increase the quality of the experience.  You could use a more expensive paint that lasts longer and doesn’t require as many coats.  You could give a guarantee to the homeowner that you run criminal background checks on all of your employees.  Because a lot of people are now working from home full time, you could offer a whisper guarantee – they won’t even know that you’re there while you’re working.

To create a better experience for the customer, you will need to go the extra mile.

What can you do to be faster than other painting companies?

To offer a faster service, take the time that it normally takes you to complete a job and decrease it by 30% or more if possible.  Offer kitchen cabinets done in a week (obviously kitchen size matters, so there can be a disclaimer).  Offer rooms done in a day with quality work.

When you provide a quicker service, it really makes you stand out from the crowd.

How can you make the painting process easier than other companies?

There are a ton of premium options here that you can offer, starting with the sales process.  As soon as someone contacts you, you could FaceTime them and do the estimate immediately.  This also puts you ahead of your competition as the first quote.

You could offer a free stay at a hotel or a small vacation (built into the price of course) while you work on their house.  They don’t have to deal with the mess/upheaval…and you don’t have to deal with them as a little bonus. There are many companies that do this.  You can get great deals on pricing from travel businesses.

If they are pet people, you could hire pet sitters to take the animals away for the days that you work.  This way, there are no accidents and the pets don’t have to deal with an unfamiliar situation in their home.

Think of the problems that are created by you painting their house and provide solutions to create your premium offering.

How To Present The Premium Painting Offerings

Make the premium offerings part of your proposal.  People like to have choices, but not too many.  According to a study done in 2000, people are more likely to make a purchase when presented with less choices.  So, offer 2-3 options max when it comes to the premium offerings.

This also allows the people choosing your regular pricing to feel like they received a “deal”.

Let’s Return To Our Example Company With A Premium Offering For Our Painting Business

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 with a close rate of 20%.

Next, we doubled our leads from 80 to 160 per month using the tactics in Step 2 of this series.  This resulted in 32 new clients and a monthly gross income of $128,000.  

Then, we doubled the close rate from 20% to 40%, which gave us 64 clients per month with a monthly gross income of $256,000.

Now, if we add a premium offering at $12,000 that 10% of our clients choose – we’ll have 160 leads per month with a 40% close rate.  That gives us 64 clients.  90% of them, 58 clients, choose the regular offering at $4000 and 10% of them, 6 clients, choose the premium offering at $12,000.  This gives us a total revenue for the month of $304,000.

This is an increase of 6.6X

Stay tuned for the finale next week (Step 5) where we will talk about being the irresistible option, which allows you to charge what you want!