7 Tips To Grow Your Local Painting Business During A Pandemic
Up to 94% of small businesses in the United States of America reported a negative impact on their business in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Let’s be the other 6%!!!
There are things you can do to help your painting business — which will help you even beyond the eventual end of this current pandemic.
Let’s look at 7 tips to grow your local painting business during a pandemic:
1. Stay in Touch With Customers & Make Sure You Are Reachable
Whether you are reading this during the COVID-19 crisis or not, you’re always going to need to be reachable to your customers.
These days this means that you regularly are looking at your different methods of communication and see if you have any new messages.
There are online tools that let you combine and check all of your messaging inboxes at the same time like Podium.
What Podium and tools like it do is to combine your inboxes and let you respond to your customers from one place.
Here is a tutorial on how to use Podium:
2. Improve Your Google My Business Profile
Google My Business is an essential thing for you as a local painting business — if you don’t have it set up, start by doing that.
[Related – 7 Google My Business Tips For Painting Contractors in 2020]
If you already have a Google My Business profile, there are a few ways that you’re going to be able to improve it.
The easiest thing you can do is to make sure that all of the information about your business is correct – hours you’re open, what you offer, etc.
Next, it’s important to take advantage of how Google My Business lets you post updates, like when you offer new services or change your hours.
To really make your profile look its best, get reviews from your customers.
You can contact them once you are done with your paint work — directly or using tools like Podium, which let you ask for reviews from your customers.
3. Take Advantage Of Local Paid Marketing Strategies
You already may be advertising online — but are you advertising for your local area as well as you could be?
As a paint contractor who services a particular area, you’ll do better advertising your painting company if you specify those areas.
A painter in Des Moines will have better success with a Google Ad that comes up with the keyword “Des Moines Kitchen Cabinet Painter” than just “Kitchen Cabinet Painter.”
A good targeted ad on Facebook can also do well using the same strategy.
If you target that same ad on Facebook to people who say they live in Des Moines, it can be quite successful.
4. Improve Your Digital Marketing
There are so many ways that you can be marketing your local painting business.
That said, if you’re not focused on any one of them and just put out the same content everywhere you won’t get results.
One aspect of digital marketing that people don’t think about is the content you put out – the words and images and even videos.
Meaning you need to be careful to choose the right words to represent your brand.
You will want to also double check that you’re spelling everything right and you aren’t using any words that sound like the right word but mean something else.
5. Improve Your Site Performance With Google Analytics
Another thing you should do to help grow your local paint business is to improve your website performance.
A useful (and free) tool you can use to improve your site performance is Google Analytics.
If you haven’t done so, sign up for a free account – there are a number of reasons it’s worth it.
Using Google Analytics you can see how many of your visitors are organic versus how many are non-organic.
Organic visitors find your site because of content you put on your site and usually makes up 80% of your traffic.
Non-organic visitors are there because of your paid advertisement, pay per click ads, etc.
You can also see how your various pages are performing.
Google Analytics can be a tricky thing to learn — here is a tutorial video for learning how to best use it for your website:
6. Think About The Perspective Of Your Customers When You Interact
As a local painter who is working during the time of this once in a lifetime pandemic (we hope!) it’s important to think about your customers and their needs.
What you do and how you speak with your customers is important any time, but certainly during a pandemic such as the COVID-19 global pandemic.
You can also take the time to think more about how your services can be helpful to people still coping with things related to the pandemic.
With time, for example, there will be paint available that will be able to kill germs including COVID-19 – just the thing that your long time customers may need.
Other things you should think about is how to emphasize the protocols you use to make sure that both you and your customers are safe and healthy.
7. Make Sure Your Online And Social Information Is Correct
Lastly, a seemingly small thing you should do but an important one – to make sure that your online and social information is correct.
You can start by looking at all of the pages of your website and making sure that your phone numbers and address are up to date.
Since it’s possible that your hours have changed and could change from month to month, it’s a good idea to regularly do this.
You can also look at your various social media accounts and check to see that they are also up to date.
Doing this regularly will make sure that people who are trying to find you and make contact with you are able to do so.
Quick Recap:
1. To keep the customers you have and get more, make sure you are reachable and reach out to customers
2. To help your future customers find you, improve your Google My Business profile
3. Take advantage of local paid marketing strategies to expand your local reach and find new customers
4. Improve your digital marketing so that you can find customers or be found by future customers
5. To get better results from your website, improve your site performance with Google Analytics
6. Considering how hard the pandemic has been on people, think about the perspective of your customers when you interact
7. To be sure you aren’t losing people to incorrect information, make sure your online and social information is correct.