If you are a painting contractor, then generating painting leads is one of your primary goals. After all, without them, how are you going to find clients?
We know what you’re thinking now, “Ha! Like it was that easy,” and you are right, it isn’t. However, everything is about choosing the right methods and knowing where to invest most of your effort, time, and money.
If you ask a professional on this topic, they will say that you should pay for professional services. It isn’t like we don’t understand where they are coming from, but if you are here, you must be trying to optimize your money the most, especially when there are options to generate those leads initially.
This is why we won’t give you the usual answer and instead help you get a better result when it comes to getting the quality leads every painting contractor needs.
Remember to Maximize Referrals
Positive word of mouth is the most powerful way to generate leads for painting contractors, and anyone who tells you the opposite clearly has a problem.
Suppose you are offering outstanding services that leave your clients satisfied or at least wanting to rely on you again. In that case, you already have a great tool to start generating more leads: those clients’ opinions and recommendations.
To better understand it, suppose you are not the contractor but rather the client who hired the services. Then, the painters you hired did an amazing job, and satisfying kind of falls short when describing how happy you are with the result.
Now, let’s move four weeks in the future, and a friend is asking you if you know someone that could paint his bathroom because the people he had hired performed poorly. You will be bound or inclined to recommend the services you used because of the great results, right? Well, this is what you want as a contractor.
You have to keep in mind that clients will remember the last 15 minutes of a job, which is why you want to work well from the beginning but doing some emphasis in the end.
How? It’s important to clean up after a job is done and go over it again for any touch-ups. This will encourage clients to refer you and help propel your business forward.
Customers who are satisfied with your work will refer you to friends and family. Referrals are unlikely to happen naturally, but a friendly push will be appreciated.
Be Smart with Marketing
Since investing in printed materials such as flyers, signs, and business cards is inevitable, you have to think in your next step to strategize how and where they are used.
It might seem tempting to place your sign on a busy street corner or pin business cards to the bulletin board at a diner. However, it is better to be more selective and less general when considering covering more terrain.
The best way to advertise is to place a lawn sign at the curb of the house or property you recently painted and share your business cards with people you’re meeting at some events or who seem like potential clients.
You can also be creative in advertising and marketing by innovating with strategies others have not thought about. Therefore, don’t be afraid of being different.
Another tip we can give you is to keep your business cards at hand for your clients’ neighbors. If they ask, be prepared to give them the job details and how long it will take.
These interactions can lead to professional friendships and future employment opportunities. Flyers are handy in case these conversations require a deeper dive into your offerings.
Incentives Generate More Leads
Many contractors offer incentives to customers in order to provide added value and make them feel valued.
Some contractors would argue it is a waste of money, and we can understand where they are looking when saying this.
However, you have to consider the bigger picture. For example, did you know that over 50% that get a discount, coupon, or even freebie decide to continue hiring services or purchasing products after using them?
People will choose you above others if you provide great services + offer opportunities for them to save money and appreciate their preferences in hiring you.
All this can be achieved with some investment and losing money in certain jobs, which ends up being revenue very far from what we could consider losses.
If you are unable to afford big incentives, don’t worry about it. You can start with small discounts, a few offers, or sales for a day or two, and focus on what you know won’t bring a big impact to your business if it doesn’t work because we won’t lie, sometimes doing this can be tricky and ends up backfiring.
But we’re confident that if you take the time to combine everything and work around other strategies and methods, there’s no reason for this option not to work as you expect.
Persuasion Over Pricing
Most painting contractors believe that an in-person appointment is only to give a quote to the client. Well, this is incorrect.
It is important to understand the true purpose of every sales appointment and that pricing is crucial for all leads, visitors, or potential clients. However, it isn’t everything, and determining what truly matters in your appointments and whenever you connect with a lead will influence if you seal the deal.
If you have been making this mistake so far, we don’t blame you. Painters are forced to compete on price rather than value, and persuasion is forgotten in this process.
The important part is that you start changing this and make sure you communicate with the client and attend to all their needs.
What does persuasion have to do with this process? An appointment or connection isn’t about a lead that is ready to convert but rather waiting for you to give it a good reason to do it and choose you above others.
The scope of work does not win the job. This is accomplished by persuasive messaging and proper tools used before, during, and after an in-person appointment or online connection with potential clients.
Regardless of the communication and media, you want to follow this idea and remain loyal to it.
Let’s Say “No” to Buying Leads
Painting professionals spend thousands or hundreds of dollars each month to use online lead services that generate the leads for them. You might think there’s nothing wrong with this, but there’s a big difference in working with professionals that use organic and real ways to generate traffic, while others just sell you numbers that aren’t even worth it.
If you make the decision of going for the latter or maybe do it by accident, it is counterproductive for two reasons:
- You won’t have real traffic or audience to work with since those are numbers from which less than 30% will actually be clients.
- Your local competition is being funded and subsidized by paying for those leads since they are just painting companies trying to improve their services but usually lack the resources for it. Thus, they use your money to do it while selling you the leads they usually generate for free.
When you invest your money and time in building websites that are optimized to generate online leads organically, you will have better results in the short but especially, the long run.
Also, these properties can continue to generate leads week after week at a fraction of the cost of buying leads online.
Target the Commercial Market
Most painters concentrate on the residential market. However, there is a huge and under-tapped market for commercial painters that you are probably missing.
Although it is difficult to generate commercial painting leads at first (not like leads, in general, are super easy to generate), investing in this market can result in larger pay-days, more recurring revenue, and much-needed interior winter work.
You would think this market would be full of painting contractors generating their leads and clients. However, they are way too focused on residential owners to pay attention to commercial ones.
We are not saying you won’t find competitors, and it will be simple to close deals in this part of the field. However, it should be easier or less difficult.
What you can do to get started is to research and find companies and commercial properties around you that require your painting services or seem like it.
You can contact them or find information about them looking for services like yours. If any of the people you contact replies to your emails (which is the method you should use to communicate formally when they’re not the ones taking the first step, follow up with another email and share your phone number until you are confident that the decision has been confirmed.
Your primary goal is to make your first face-to-face visit. You can add them to your email newsletter or email list to keep the list warm and active.
You can also create a personal outreach calendar to ensure that each prospect is being reached at least once per month via multiple marketing channels.
Ready to Work All Day?
Generating painting leads will require hard work initially and later on. Therefore, don’t expect it to be a simple journey that will be done once you have obtained a few.
Indeed, it gets easier and less stressful the more you work around it, but don’t low your guard if you don’t want the numbers to be reduced.
Now, we’re confident you will achieve results by just following the previous methods and developing them into a full strategy for your company.
Results won’t be achieved in a day or two, that’s for sure, but you will have a huge advantage later when you generate your first leads, and this keeps going.
Work will definitely be the least you have to worry about, and you better prepare to have more than you can handle.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Painting Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Painting Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Painting Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.