Creative Tips to Grow Your Painting Business

Whether you’re a paint contractor, industrial job shop, powder coat job shop, or a commercial paint contractor growing your painting business can often be a goal that you want to achieve. While a lot goes into growing your painting business one key area to consider is generating awareness of your company which will help you to have new opportunities. Often this can be one of the most challenging aspects of growing your painting business. This article will serve as a guide on tips to help you grow your painting business.

Tip 1 – Encourage Word of Mouth From Current Customers

Current customers are in many ways your biggest source of opportunities. After all they agreed to work with you and if they got a good result why wouldn’t they want to share about the service you provided. There are a few key ways you can increase the likelihood of your current customers sharing about your service with friends.

• Provide an incentive – Whether its an incentive for them on a future job or for their potential referral offer a bonus for why they should share.This could be a discount on their next job, a gift card to a place they love, or entry into a trip you offer for previous customers who share about your company to others.
• Ask on Site – When you complete a job invite your customer to walk through and review your hard work. Ask if they are happy with the result and if not go out of the way to help fix the issues. Once they have agreed that you have done a good job for them ask if they know any neighbors or friends who may need some painting work done.
• Get Social – Social media can be a great way to generate local buzz about your company and allows an easy way for customers to share the work you have done for them with others. Again you could offer incentives to share completed photos of your work. You could even take before photos for the customer and then after completion put together a short slideshow that would be available for them to share through the social media channel of their choice. The key is to make it easy for your customer to speak about the good you have done for them. It is also good to connect with your customers on relevant social networks. This will keep you in their mind and gives you a chance to continue connecting with them over time.

Tip 2 – Generate qualified Leads!

While getting referrals is often more likely to lead you to customers who are likely to see the value in what you offer, at some point referrals may slow down and you have to have other ways of getting new opportunities to pursue. That is where lead generation becomes critical to helping you grow your painting business.  Here are a few ideas of how you can generate leads for your painting business.

• A website – A website in many ways may serve as the backbone of your marketing whether you use search engine marketing, direct mail, or social media ads your website should be well designed to showcase the work you do and make it easy for an interested customer to contact you to take a next step. One easy platform to build a website on affordably is wordpress.  You will typically want to select a theme that allows for a photo slider to highlight the work you have done and ensure there are good details about the scope of work you do as well as an easy way to request a quote. Don’t forget to optimize your website so that you show in local search results (more on this in a minute)
• PPC Advertising – Depending on your target customer pay per click advertising will allow you to target customers based on geography and the term that is searched. This can allow great granularity in determining when your search engine ad shows.
• SEO – Search engine optimization is essentially designing your website so that it naturally ranks high for terms that matter to you. For most painters this may mean ranking for the term painter and a given city. There is a great course on local SEO along with a variety of the other topics covered here available on Udemy
• Social Media Advertising – Facebook, in particular, can be a source of good leads. Facebook allows you to show ads to people only in certain areas and has one of the largest user bases with active users. Since painting is visual work be sure you use photos to help sell the work you offer, it can often make sense to hire a photographer to capture your work in a way that makes it stand out.
• Direct Mail – While direct mail has become less thought of as a advertising channel it still can be tremendously effective especially for older demographics. Direct mail is beneficial because it is also highly targetable or can be done in mass. Additionally, it can highlight your work visually which is often a great way to help sell your paint contracting business.
• Networking – A final area to consider is good old fashioned networking. In particular you could consider working with your paint supplier to see if they would refer potential needs to you. You could also try organizations like Business Network International which essentially serve to help companies network and make connections to new companies that could benefit from a given companies services.

Tip 3 – Stay in Contact with Previous Customers

• Painting projects may not come up everyday and so you may or may not receive any suggested people who may need painting done when you ask a customer you are finishing a project for. However, having a system to stay in contact with your previous customers can also be a great way to generate further opportunities. This could be done by connecting with them on a relevant social network, a card during holidays, or similar creative ideas.  The key is to be thoughtful and to only send these type of reminders at relatively infrequent intervals.

Ultimately marketing your painting business is a bit different than what we typically think of when we think marketing rather it is usually more  targeted in who you try to reach and to reach them with a message that will resonate when they have painting needs. Your existing customers are often your strongest opportunity for future leads but you may also want to consider some of the other ideas as well. How about you what creative ways have you used to help grow your painting business?