14 Online Marketing Ideas for Painting Contractors

Are you looking for marketing ideas for your painting company?

Like nearly all local businesses, painting contractors often face stiff competition when it comes to marketing.

And online marketing is no longer just an option for them. It’s mandatory.

Promoting a business online is getting difficult. It’s not enough to have a website. You need to have a strong social media presence, set-up effective ad campaigns and have a strong long-term promotional strategy in place.

Online marketing is a versatile field. There is no one-size-fits-all formula for success here. That’s why different marketing ideas are needed for different types of businesses.

At WebAlive, we develop and implement various marketing strategies for our clients. In this article, we are going to present some ideas that are effective for painting businesses.

You can apply these to reach more qualified customers and give your painting company greater local exposure.

1. Focus on local search engine optimisation

The way people search for information online has changed a lot over the past few years.

Directories, Yellow Pages and Yelp have been superseded by search engines like Google, Bing and social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. Thus, SEO is not just an additional marketing strategy, it’s a compulsory element of online marketing.

In fact, the most essential part of your online marketing strategy is local SEO. If you are thinking about whether you should invest in SEO for your painting company, it’s time to stop thinking and start doing.

The first thing you need for good SEO is a search engine friendly website that is optimised to generate as many conversions as possible. There are many nitty-gritty aspects of the SEO process that you’re probably not going to have the time or the inclination to fuss around with.

Check out these basic SEO tips to get you started. But eventually, subscribing to a good SEO service provider will help your painting business always stay visible in the competition.

Premier Painting and Priority One Coatings are good examples of search engine and conversion-friendly painting company websites:

2. Design custom landing pages

Your visitors always want relevant information.

Suppose a visitor comes to your website by searching for “commercial painters Melbourne” or by clicking on a similar ad. Chances are they will want to know about your company’s commercial painting expertise and to be able to access pages, such as recent projects and client testimonials, from the landing page. This is also true for search engine crawlers and ad platforms.

So each of your painting services should have a landing page. Also, you should consider creating separate landing pages if you want to promote any special offer.

There are several reasons why you should do this:

• You cannot always customise your homepage to meet with specific offers or services. Suppose one of your ads is about industrial painting. Now, if interested customers click on that ad and reach your homepage that contains links to all your other services, they may get confused.
• To ensure the maximum conversion rate, a landing page must match with the message presented in the upstream ad or search engine result pages. For example, if your ad is about a 20% discount on interior painting, clicking on it should take the visitor to a specific page that contains details about that offer. Otherwise, they may get impatient and leave the site.
• The use of landing pages means you can create segmented promotional offers. Suppose you want to offer a special rate for your previous customers. A custom landing page enables you to create private, personalised pages to advertise this, which is separate from your regular service pages.

3. Clearly mention your business hours, contact number and location on your website

This should be obvious. Still, many local business sites unintentionally make it difficult for visitors to find their address or mobile number on the website. The same thing can be said about business hours. These are possibly the most important aspects of your website and need to be easy to find for visitors.

So don’t forget to make your address, contact number and business hours clearly visible. It is best practice to include a Google Map widget to make things even easier for your potential customers.

4. Run “call-only” ads

Call-only ads can be very effective for painting companies. Painting work will often need a customised approach and it’s best if the potential customer calls you directly to discuss their project. Call-only advertisements are available on both Facebook and Google AdWords.

These ads will let the customers bypass the landing page and get onto you without too much fuss. There are customers in the market that will find it much more convenient to have a phone conversation rather than having to fill out an online form.

5. Utilize the geo-targeting and scheduling features of AdWords

A painting company usually has a local customer base. Using AdWord’s geo-targeting feature, you can maximise the visibility of your painting business in specific areas where most of your prospective buyers are.

There are several ways to set the target area of your ads. For a local painting contractor, the best option is to select a radius around your service location. More details can be found here.

Combining Ad scheduling with geo-targeting, you can also specify the particular time of the day when your ads are displayed to Google users. For example, you should set the display time of your call-only ads according to your business hours.

6. Use targeted ads on Facebook

Facebook lets you create targeted ads to reach any particular demographic. If you can identify a specific group of local people (based on age, interest, location, income etc.) as your potential customers, using Facebook ads is the easiest way to reach them.

For a local painting contractor, some important targeting parameters are – age, location, income, home type, etc. Note that some of the parameters may not be available in certain countries.

Another thing to remember is not to make your target too broad. A broader target may show your ads to more people, but many of them will be far from your service location and won’t count as your potential customers.

You can read more about the available targeting parameters here.

7. Focus on creating content with a local focus

Content marketing is essential. But what type of content will work best for a painting company? For a small business, it’s often hard to find time to generate enough content. But content that is locally focused and relevant to your potential customers can help you push your business ahead of the competitors.

Locally focused content increase your visibility in local search results, improves your presence in social media and eventually makes your business more well known in your area. Here are some topics that you can write on – local news, resources that your potential customers may find useful, tips on painting, DIY considerations, etc.

8. Promote positive customer reviews through your website, social media, emails and online ads

If your painting company has an active online presence (which it should), then customers will naturally leave reviews about your business. While it’s your duty to deal with the customers who leave any negative reviews, don’t forget to interact with the positive reviews as well.

Engage with positive reviews and increase their visibility. You can even consider providing special offers and/or discounts for customers that submit reviews online.

9. Maintain your Google My Business page

Google My Business is very important to ensure the local visibility of your painting company. Always keep your business data updated there. If you haven’t already claimed your business or your business isn’t listed in Google My Business – take care of this immediately!

Here are some tips on how you should utilise your Google My Business page:

• List your business under the “Painter” category
• Upload photos of your recent painting projects
• Request your customers to post reviews
• Keep your business name, address and the phone number the same as what you have on your website
• Utilize ‘Google Posts’ if you have special offers

10. List your business in popular directories under relevant categories

Find relevant directories for your painting business and list it under the right categories. This improves your search visibility. As well as big directories like Yelp and Yellow Pages, you should also try local directories that have categories like “Painter & Decorator”.

Source: yellowpages.com.au

11. Use third-person voice in copy

While creating copy for your online Ads, use a third-person voice in the ad copy. In other words, instead of talking about yourself, like – “Best painting company in Melbourne”, write the sentence from a customer’s perspective, like – “We hired them for an industrial painting project, and they were perfect.” You can actually use lines from real customer reviews in your ad copy.

12. Do extreme localization of your mobile ads

Your mobile ads should focus on a very local group of people. Here are some ways you can hyper-customise your mobile ads:

• Include the postcode in the ad headline
• Mention how far your business office is from a well-known local place. Example: 2 min walk from the City Center market.
• Use local phone numbers

13. Create service pages for each location you serve

If your painting company serves multiple areas, you should create individual location pages for each of those areas. At the very least, your site should have individual pages for the popular suburbs. In your site’s header, the service areas tab should expand to a list of location-specific page links.

Clicking on a particular link will take the prospective customer to the customised service page for that location. Creating separate service pages not only improves your search value but also provides a better experience for your customers.

14. Sponsor local events

Sponsoring local events and supporting local community is a proven way of establishing a good image for your business. It will also make your painting business more recognisable.

It’s not just about spending a lot of money. Supporting an important local cause is going to be appreciated by the community and improves the overall profile and brand awareness of your business.

Conclusion

Here we’ve discussed some helpful marketing ideas for painting contractors. We hope these tips will help you reach more customers and pick up more qualified leads on your website.

However, as local marketing is getting more and more competitive, your marketing strategies need to be evolving continuously too. More importantly, you should keep an eye on what your competitors are doing.

You might find it difficult to manage your online marketing campaigns in-house. In that case, our expert marketers are ready to help you.