7 Ways To Save Money On Marketing Your Painting Business

When you’re in the painting business, you generally want to focus on what you know best – managing paint crews and landing more projects – while spending less time on other things… like marketing.

An average small business owner will spend about twenty hours a week doing marketing – and it can get pretty pricey!

Here are 7 ways to save money on marketing your painting business:

1. Ask The Experts

When you’re looking to save money on your marketing, you might find yourself a bit confused by how many different media platforms are out there.

For every place you might want to market your painting business, there are experts that can help you, often at no cost.

There are even sites that are specific in marketing on the different social media platforms and figuring out your strategy for them.

By doing so you can lower how much money you spend on the different social media platforms and perhaps even only choose a few better ones for your business.

Here is a video tutorial on how to dominate social media.

[Related: Painting Contractors: 9 Blogging Tools for Writing, SEO, Marketing, & Content Creation]

2. Work On Your Relationships

So much of your marketing can certainly be in the form of making ads in different media as well as social media.

You should think about the time that you spend working on your more one on one relationships – as opposed to what you broadcast to many.

While you are working on paint work for any given customer, you can talk about what they are looking for from the paint job.

This kind of conversation can ultimately lead to your asking them if they could recommend you to their friends who might also need paint work.

Through building these kinds of conversations you can find more customers — and build relationships with them as well.

Here is a video on getting referrals from your customers:

3. Keep Running Ads That Work

Often times you will find that companies will put on ad campaigns and if they happen to be successful, want to move on to another.

They will say to themselves, “Let’s try to make another ad campaign that is as good as that last one!”

Instead of doing this, you should consider continuing to run the same ad campaign — if it’s working, why stop running it?

Not having to come up with new ads regularly means that you don’t have to spend the time and money to create them.

You can of course think about winding down the ad campaign if you start to see it not working as well.

4. Offer An Incentive To Sign Up For Your Email List

When you have an email list, you have a built in way to get in touch with both past customers and potential customers.

You’ll be able to communicate deals that you have to offer to them — a great way to land some painting work.

To get your email list even bigger, you can have an incentive on your website to get people to want to sign up for your list.

This can come in the form of a pdf that you create that will give them tips on something painting related that could really help them.

Since they’re going to want to get those tips, they’ll sign up for your list and so join the people who get your regular updates.

5. Retargeting Gets More Customers

When you are looking to advertise on social media, think about using retargeting in addition to normal advertising.

Retargeting refers to advertising to people who have already been on your website at least once, meaning they have to have at least some interest.

It is said that it can take up to fourteen times seeing your message for a possible customer to become interested.

Retargeting will be one way for you to get your advertisement in view of a person who might hire you in the future.

6. Keep Your Marketing Simple

You might think that you need to explain what you do as a painting contractor in great detail when marketing, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

You will find, for example, that having a website that has more pages doesn’t make it better than one with fewer pages.

More complicated sites can actually get a bit confusing — people might try to find information about one thing and get annoyed how long it takes to find it.

In making an ad, this tends to be true as well — having shorter ads and certainly ones with fewer words is better than longer ones.

Here, for example, is an ad from Slack — only a few words but the message really comes across.

7. Consider Outsourcing

As you may not well be an expert in any way when it comes to marketing (but you certainly are when it comes to painting!) you may want to consider outsourcing your marketing.

Even though you may look at the prices that some marketing agencies ask and want to back away, consider what they do and how well they know marketing.

It could be that you will pay a little more up front but then you will not have to spend the time to make your own advertisements and posting on social media.

The expression ‘time is money’ is quite true — time you spend doing marketing is time you could be out on a job!

Quick Recap:

1. To help you with your advertising and social media posts, consult with experts — you can often get free advice that will help you better market your company.

2. Work on your relationships, specifically one on one relationships with individual customers that will help lead to future customers

3. Keep running ads that work — why spend more money on creating new ads when what you have is going well?

4. To increase the chances that people will sign up for your list, offer an incentive for people to sign up for your email list.

5. Make use of retargeting — advertising to people who have been to your site once — to get more customers.

6. Some of the best marketing isn’t too wordy or complicated — keep your marketing simple and you may do better with potential customers.

7. Lastly, if you find you just don’t have time for marketing but still need it for your business, consider outsourcing your marketing efforts.