7 Image Ad Practices To Implement For Your Painting Business

Image ads receive about 20-45% more revenue than regular text ads.

Of course, it’s always great to learn a strategy that works best for your painting business before you start advertising.

With that in mind, let’s look at 7 image ad practices to implement for your painting business.

1. Contrast Your Ad Colors To The Platform

Every social media platform has a default set of colors that are associated with it — Facebook has a blue and white color scheme.

If you are going to be advertising on Facebook, it makes no sense for your image ad to be largely blue and white.

The reason this is the case is that if you do a blue and white image ad, there’s a good chance it will confuse people.

They’ll look at your ad and think it might be a Facebook ad — think about how quickly people look at ads.

If all your ad gets is a quick glance, just seeing blue and white will not want to make them stop.

After all, why look at an ad for Facebook if you’re already on Facebook?

When you are posting image ads to other social media platforms, pay attention to their color palettes and avoid those.

Snapchat, for example, uses yellow, black, and white — so you can use yellow, but not also black and white in the same ad.

Click here for the canva.com guide to picking the right colors for your brand

<Related:Painting Contractors: 7 Deadly Facebook Ad mistakes>

2. Use The Right Image Ad Format

Depending on where you put your image ad, you will want to make it different sizes and dimensions.

What works for Facebook isn’t going to be good to use for Instagram, and what works for Instagram might not be good for a news website.

An Instagram ad can be square, vertical, or landscape, and can have a variety of sizes.

Facebook image ads come in even more sizes, and the sizes they require depend on what kind of ads you use.

The kind of image that you would use for advertising on the news-feed for a person using their desktop is bigger than the one you would use for the Facebook mobile app.

For more information about Facebook image ad formats, check out this tool they offer that tells you sizes based on what you want the ad to do.

Here is a video tutorial from Google on helping you choose the right image ad size:

 

3. Have A Visible Call To Action

As a professional painting company, there are a few things that you do, and you do them well.

In your image ad, you are going to want to use the small amount of text that you do have (more on this later) to have a call to action for the person who sees the ad.

A call to action is something you write that encourages the person who reads or hears it to do something.

A simple example of a call to action is “Click here to buy now!”

When you put a call to action on your image ad, you’re going to want to make sure that people can see it.

One way to do this is to make sure that the text that is your call to action is different enough from the rest of the ad text that it’s noticeable.

You can make it a different color from your other text as well to really make it stand out.

4. Avoid Too Much Text

When you have an image ad, you should avoid having too much text as it can distract people from your message.

The fewer words you can use to send across the same message, the better you are — and the happier Facebook will be, certainly.

Facebook does not allow for more than 20% of your image to be taken up by text.

The words that you do have on your image ad should ideally be on a more solid color and less on pictures.

Here is a video tutorial for what to do about too much text on an image ad:

 

5. If You Have People, Make Sure They’re Smiling

If you have people in your image ads, you should make sure that the people appear to be happy.

Though this probably sounds like odd advice for advertising, it’s worth noting that ads that convert best on Facebook include a smiling woman looking at the camera.

For a service based company like a painting business, you can have a photo of a woman who was happy with the paint job she got.

6. Use Images From Your Service Over Stock Photos

When you have images in your image ad, the best place to source the images is from your day to day painting work.

Though you can get stock images of well painted homes and people who are happy with a paint job, there’s nothing like the real thing.

In this case, it’s your clients for whom you’ve done work in the past — and in some cases when you get testimonials from clients they will allow you to use the photos they submit.

If you absolutely need to, you can use a well chosen stock photo to highlight something where you don’t have your own photo.

Try to make stock photos the exception rather than the rule, however.

7. Try An Odd Or Funny Image

Lastly, you might want to consider an image that is either odd or particularly funny for your image ad.

A funny image will make them stop as they are scrolling mindlessly and see it and have a good chuckle.

That might be exactly what they need to do in order to actually notice what you are advertising in your image ad.

Similarly, having an odd image will get them to slow down just long enough to pay attention to your ad.

That’s exactly what you want — attention — and once you have that attention, your call to action can get them onto your site, booking your service.

To wrap things up, here’s a video tutorial on creating the perfect image based ad:

 

Quick Recap

1. So that people don’t confuse your image ad as being an ad for a social media platform, contrast your ad colors to the platform.

2. Depending on the social platform you are using, you will want to use the right image ad format so your image ad looks as good as possible.

3. To increase the number of clicks you get, you should have a visible call to action on your image ad that prompts the person looking at it to want to click and book your services.

4. People get overwhelmed when there is too much to read on what’s supposed to be an image ad — avoid too much text.

5. To be sure your ads convert well, if you have pictures of people in the ad make sure they are smiling

6. To improve your image ads, try to use real images from your service over stock photos

7. To grab people’s attention and get them to look at your ad, use an odd or funny image