Welcome to the Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast, the show created to help painting company owners build a thriving painting business that does well over 103 million in annual revenue. I’m your host, Brandon Pierpont, founder of Painter Marketing Pros and creator of the popular PCA Educational Series to grow marketing for painters. In each episode, I’ll be sharing proven tips, strategies and processes from leading experts in the industry on how they found success in their painting business. We will be interviewing owners of the most successful painting companies in North America and learning from their experiences.

Join Brandon Pierpont as he dives deep into the latest 2025 marketing trends, AI advancements, and proven strategies to scale your painting business. This episode covers overcoming challenging market conditions, mastering holistic marketing, leveraging AI for growth, and real success stories. Whether you’re aiming to dominate a tough year or plan for exponential growth, tune in to gain actionable insights and elevate your painting business to new heights.

If you want to ask Joshua and Cody questions related to anything in this podcast series, you can do so in our exclusive Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast Forum on Facebook. Just search for “Painter Marketing Mastermind Podcast Forum” on Facebook and request to join the group, or type in the URL Facebook.com/groups/PainterMarketingMastermind. There you can ask them questions directly by tagging her with your question, so you can see how anything discussed here applies to your particular painting company.

You guys, very, very excited. Uh, I will leave questions. If, if for anyone who has heard me present before, uh, I do tend to Stack a lot of material. I’ve been told sometimes too much material. Brandon Lewis gave me some constructive criticism on that, on the painting profit summit earlier this year. So I’m, I’m gonna get through a lot, but I am gonna leave some questions at the end. So if I, if I kind of fly through something you’re a little bit unsure, uh just make sure that you, you jot it down and then ask at the end, submit it in the Q&A, and we’ll make sure that we get that answered for you at least as many as we can.

Uh, so key 2025 marketing trends, uh, AI video and more. I want to take this opportunity again to thank our sponsors. Uh, we have bookkeeping for painters and gold sponsor. Thank you so much, Daniel. We have Academy for Professional Painting Contractors, Brandon Lewis, you just heard from him. Tanner Mullen of Drrip Jobs, he is coming up, and then we have our bronze sponsors, uh, Contractor Freedom with Jason Phillips and Annie Newton ProfitWorks. Appreciate you guys. Thanks so much for supporting the event, uh, and for, for contributing your expertise.

So a little bit about me, I’m very involved in the PCA. I’m an ambassador for the PCA. I have served on many of their committees. We’ve actually conducted, uh, marketing for the PCA. I’m on the Bureau of Speakers to speak at some Sher and Williams events and other events, uh, and I’ve presented at a whole host. Of events. I’ve written two books on scaling painting businesses, one of which is a number one Amazon rated bestseller, so I’m very proud of that. I run a podcast, Painter Marketing mastermind podcast.

It’s listened to by quite a few painters. If you haven’t checked it out, you can do so at paintermarketingpros. com and then find the podcast. And then I am a proud veteran of the Florida Army National Guard. So this has nothing to do with anything, but, but I uh I went to the PCA commercial painting conference, uh commercial contractor conference in Arizona. It was, I think, about a month, month and a half ago, and I rode a bull, and I decided, I called my wife and I told her I’m going to ride a bull because Jesse Ramos, who’ll be on the commercial panel coming up here in about an hour and a half.

He’s a wild man. He told me he’s going to ride a bull. And so I said, OK, well then I’ll ride a bull. Uh, not really a whole lot of thought given to it except that I’ve, I’ve, I’ve passed over opportunities before in my life and I regretted it, so I just don’t do that anymore. So I said, OK, I’ll ride a bull. Uh, I called my wife. I realized this is a real thing. It’s not the bull’s not contained, like it’s an actual rodeo. The bull’s going to go out and, and things are going to happen and maybe you’ll die.

Um, I called her, she thought, wow, great, he’s calling me, tell me he loves me. I just said, I don’t, I don’t want the breathing to take it out. Just I needed to make sure. I’ve told her that before. I needed to make sure before I get on this bull and see what happens that she knows because I don’t want that. Um, but I also said, if I make it through this and I walk away from this bull, then I’m just going to talk about it all the time, even though it doesn’t really have anything to do with anything.

So this was about a month and a half ago, PCA conference. This is the kind of stuff that can happen, uh, really cool stuff when you put yourself out there and you go to these conferences and you network with some wild entrepreneurs like Jesse. All right, a little bit about painter marketing pros. Uh, so we have, this is neat. I haven’t announced this publicly. We have that marketing column, uh, the painter’s playbook. This is the first day I’m announcing this, uh, in the APC magazine. So every, every issue that you get at the APC magazine will be, will be addressing and marketing, a topic and deep diving and making it accessible for you.

And then we contribute to In Paint magazine or Ask a pro section, and as Janelle said, the proudest moment, quite honestly, of my entire entrepreneurial career to date was when we were awarded PCA Industry Partner of the Year 2024. We were given that award at PCA Expo based on our marketing expertise, our reputation within the industry, how we’ve contributed to the PCA. Uh, including marketing for them directly, and then we were handed that award in front of about 1000 people at Expo. That was a very big deal. Almost cried on that one.

It was, it was huge to me. Uh, we have a lot of partnerships where leading industry experts in this space. We’ve been around for a long time, over 5 years serving painting contractors exclusively. We are, uh, partnered with Brandon Lewis Academy for Professional Painting Contracts. We work with a lot of, um, a lot of the same clients. We are Google partners, uh, Facebook partners, all kinds of different partnerships. We work with a lot of Fresh coat franchises, so we saw Sarah Ross, she’s a highly successful, um, fresh coat painters franchisee.

She runs multiple. Territories, work with her as well as a whole lot of other ones. If you are considering a franchise, if, if you run your own independent painting company, but you’re, you’re considering buying into a franchise, I highly recommend Fresh Coat. We have worked with franchisees from many from many franchises. Fresh Coat is by far and away the best. So I highly recommend that little plug for them if you do want to buy a franchise. Uh, today’s agenda, we will get into 2024 industry recap. We covered some of that with a residential panel.

I’ll dive in. Uh, how do you dominate challenging years? So we got some good advice from that from the panel. What am I seeing, uh, from, from the hundreds of painting companies we’ve worked with? How do you dominate challenging years? Current marketing trends. This will be neat cause it does shift a lot. It’s very timely, it’s, it’s rapid. Winning with AI, kind of the elephant in the room. What can you do? What can’t you do, what what is actually AI actually good for, and then planning a 10X 2025.

Theme of this conference, uh, 53X doesn’t have to mean 10X revenue. By the way, I want to specify that. So it’s like Dave Scaturro who will be coming on soon, I think, presenting next or or the one after, uh, he said, hey man, you know, why are you doing 10X? Um, the grant Cardone 10X, it doesn’t have to mean 10x revenue, that would obviously be a probably a bad decision, but it can mean 10xing your, your process, 10X in your your success in terms of your improvements, right?

So a lot of ways to think about that, but that’s what we’re covering here. So a little bit of recap of 2024. 2024 was a rocky year for a lot of painting companies. Our our partners tended to do well. Um, but it was a rocky year. 2023 was, was really a cakewalk compared to 103. We have persistently high inflation. We have the, the high interest rates that that don’t seem to be coming down as quickly as we like, uh, in an election year. Election years are always challenging. So election years, they present uncertainty, they have a flood of ads spent that comes onto platforms like Meta, so Facebook and Instagram.

They have a flood of it, which you’re then competing against. If you run ads, you’re gonna compete against and it’s gonna drive up your cost per lead. And they just make everyone sort of hit the pause button because we don’t know who’s going to get elected and therefore we don’t know what policies are going to be implemented or what’s going to happen. You’ll see that the stock market start to start to stall out. Everyone goes into sort of a holding pattern, especially with the last couple of cycles, they’ve been very tumultuous.

So we had to deal with that, uh, some on ongoing global turmoil. So wars, so anytime there are wars, anytime there’s uncertainty, global uncertainty that that causes unrest that causes insecurity, and when we have that, people are less likely to want to move forward with the discretionary purchase and then uncertainty again about those future policies. So depending on who’s actually going to to be president, uh, and what that whole political hierarchy is gonna look like, what does that actually mean for us? Uh, so we saw a shift labor market versus leads two years ago.

It was, hey, can’t get painters, I have the work. I, you know, nobody wants to work. I can’t hire enough uh painters to take, take all this over. I’m having to pass up all these jobs to now it’s the other way. Now it’s typically, you know, we have this the team, but the leads are, man, these leads are expensive. Man, these leads aren’t closing, you know, I’m reaching out and they’re just taking a long time dragging their feet. That’s more of what we saw in 2024. Uh, and it might be a little bit early in 2025 as well.

I am bullish on 2025. I think it’s gonna be a great year, um, but the beginning might be a little bit slow. We’ll see. So leads costing more, that was a a recurring theme, uh, and then slower buying. So not no buying, not, not in absence of buying, but just slower buying. So a longer buying cycle, meaning people wanted to take their time, they wanted to make sure they’re they’re moving forward with the right company, and as Cody said in our residential uh painting success panel, he said, Picking the right company to invest their hard earned money with.

So I think that’s the right way to think about it. They’re not, not going to do it, they just really want to pick the right company to invest their money with. Um, so how do you dominate years like this one? How do you dominate down years like 2024? We had Michael Chaney, she came on and she said, you know what, we had the best year ever. It was a great year. There’s a lot of stuff that she’s doing that led to that, and we’re gonna cover cover that right now.

So number one is when it is a down year, the natural tendency of the market is hibernate. You know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna, hey, let’s turn off our marketing. Let’s just, let’s let’s pull back, let’s hunker down, let’s grind through the winter, we’ll we’ll just try to get whatever projects we can, and then we’ll resume in, in March when it’s safe, then we can start investing our marketing again. Well, that is. Not a very abundant oriented mindset, right? So being contrary and saying, hey, people are pulling back, it’s a little bit of a tougher market. Awesome.

I’m going to go out and I’m going to take market share. I’m going to go out and I’m going to market aggressively. When other people are pulling back, I’m going to do contrary to the market because most people are losing. Most people are not winning. So I’m going to do the opposite of what they’re doing. I’m going to take market share. I’m going to recruit labor. Hey, you guys are being laid off uh by other teams. You, you don’t have a full schedule. Cool, I’ll give it to you.

I’m paying a little more for my lead. I’m following Brandon Lewis’s lead, and I’m reaching out to all my past customers, my past leads, I’m filling my calendar. I’m shaking the trees everywhere I can, in addition to the paid ads, and I’m actually able to keep people’s calendar full. And so I’m taking labor, and I’m positioning myself for scale, uh, come the next year. So taking market share, all of that is to be said, you still need to to account for cash flow. So that is the idea of, hey, we’re going to hibernate, we’re going to wait, you don’t want to go out of business.

So the number one rule of business is don’t go out of business. So I’m certainly not telling you to be reckless, to not know your numbers. You must know your numbers. You must account for your cash flow, but the general mindset needs to shift. Uh, if you’re uncertain what 2025 will hold, a lot of the, some of the case studies I’m gonna present you guys with today are companies that do holistic marketing. So if you’re, if you’re a company and you only get your leads through one source, or the primary, primarily one source, you only get them through Angie, or you only get them through Facebook ads, right, or it’s just word of mouth.

That one source, word of mouth will will remain, um, but it’s not gonna scale you very fast, but that one source can go away from you. So an example is Google Paper click ads. We used to do a ton of Google Paper click ads. There were some some changes in the algorithm. Google Paper click ads are very expensive right now for residential painting companies. If you guys have run them, you know, uh the cost per click, and then how many of those clicks actually turn into estimates.

It’s expensive, it’s not unheard of, 2 to 300 plus per estimate, or or even per per lead, right? For a uh for a a Google Paclick ad. So you have to have a variety of different lead sources. And the companies that are doing the best, they have a strong organic presence. They are showing up on Google and they are running paid ads, so they’re doing a variety of different things. Holistic marketing works best. So when you’re running ads, when you have a presence, you want to pair it with social media posts.

So the first thing, going back to thinking about the buyer’s journey, um, Brandon Lewis talked, talked a lot about this, about, about the mindset of who you’re selling to. When you have, when you run an ad or even when people find you on Google. They’re going to do their homework on you, right? They, they see your ad, maybe it’s a Google ad, maybe it’s a social media ad, they’re on Facebook and and you pop up and the ad is constructed well enough to get your the lead information.

OK, awesome. You know, I’m interested, I’m gonna give you my name, phone, email, whatever it is you’re asking for. Now I’m gonna probably look you up. Cause I, I just gave something to you. I, I wanna get a little bit of information about you. I’m gonna go look at your website, and especially if I’m on social media already, I’m gonna go look at your Facebook page, because I want to know a little bit about your business since you’re about to contact me. Right, if you are not professionally posting, if you’re not super polished, if you don’t have this stuff consistently going out, this content going out, if I look in the last post from you was a year and a half ago, I don’t feel phenomenal.

I don’t feel great. I’ll have the conversation with you, probably, but I’m not super bought in at this point. If I go and I’m seeing, hey, all these reviews are. Constantly being generated on Google. Wow, they’ve gotten 6 over the past month, gotten 15 over the past month. I’m seeing posts, man, I think they’ve posted like 20253 times over the past month on Facebook. I’m seeing their crew, I’m seeing photos. I’m seeing reviews. I’m seeing this stuff. Now I’m gonna trust this, I’m feeling pretty good. I’m ready to have the conversation.

OK, let’s see what you can do for me. So I have this. Have this holistic presence. People need to be touched 5 to 7 times. I think anyone who’s who’s studied sales or marketing at all, you know, Brandon’s advice on in terms of what to do is do all of it. That’s what you do in sales. People need to be touched by a lot of different channels, a lot of different ways. Um, so have your marketing be holistic, show up online, offline, do direct mail, what Garrett Martel’s teaching, uh, do door hangers, pepper neighborhoods, everything.

So organic SEO, local SEO, that’s a big focus. It’s what It’s really what Pater marketing was built on. Um, so Brandon talked a lot about the, the leads that we’re able to generate with paid ads, and we do, we generate a lot of leads with paid ads, um, but a big core focus of ours, which I think is a, is a big differentiator from a lot of agencies out there, is really the organic, because ultimately we are about partnering for the long term and building a resilient business.

When there’s ad spend. So there’s there’s an election year ad spent, we’re gonna put $10 billion into into all these obnoxious political ads, and then we’re gonna drive your lead cost up. That’s not gonna affect your organic. Your organic is going to remain intact and your cost per lead is not going to increase. When Google Pay per click says, hey, we’re gonna, we’re gonna make some Some adjustments here to our algorithm and we’re gonna basically 5x the cost of a lead for you, and we’re not gonna tell you about it, you’re just gonna figure it out.

That’s not affecting your organic. There are changes being made to the organic, but not nearly as quickly, not nearly as as uh drastically as are made to the paid ads. So paid ads can work, you should do it. I’m, I’m a big believer in paid ads as well, but you shouldn’t fully rely on it or the rug can be pulled out from under you, really at any time. Uh, tying in with the buying journey being longer. So the follow-up is critical. One of you guys asked, um, what was the biggest mistake that that he, that Bernon Lewis had seen with the companies he works with, I will tell you one of the biggest mistakes we see is a lack of a true true sales process.

Right, so a lead comes in, it’s treated as though it’s order taking versus sales, um, maybe the estimates set, maybe it’s not set right away, but ultimately that lead is not followed up with. So the follow up is critical, uh, lack of a yes does not mean a no. So if somebody hasn’t signed on the dotted line, they haven’t paid you, it doesn’t mean they’re not going to, uh, it just means they haven’t, right? So follow up until somebody actually tells you no. And then have automations.

We’ll be hearing from Tanner. Uh, we have a system we use as well, um, but drip jobs can also have automations follow up for however long you want. So set up these automations that follow up for a year and then mix it with manual. I think a big temptation, very few companies actually have any of this set up, by the way, but when you set it up, I think a big temptation is to say, hoof, I’m done. It’s done, uh, all the, all the automations will take care of it.

I don’t have to work anymore. It’s automation plus manual. So you have the text, you have the emails, you have the stuff, but you also, you can automate that in a way, you can set reminders for yourself and and it programs it to message you, um, but you’re gonna pick up the phone, you’re gonna call, because ultimately people do business with people. Longer timeline to close, how do you evaluate your sales? How do you evaluate your leads? View it on a rolling 90 day basis. So as opposed to well we got uh 25 leads in December and and we closed 5 of those leads and therefore, you know, our close rate was 20%.

If you think about the fact that maybe some of those leads are only 1 week old, half a week old, 313 weeks old, and, and we know that sometimes it can take multiple months for projects to close, it’s better to look at your marketing on a rolling 90 day basis cause that’s going to be a truer, a truer perception of how well you’re actually closing on your leads. Uh, here are some things that we, that we helped our partners that we work with this year. So we created QR customer happiness cards.

Um, these are little cards that you can create and hand out at the end of a project to get a 5 star review. Our, our barometers, we want you getting one or more 5 star reviews for every 3 projects you complete. And then as Michael and Sarah talked about, we ran a database reactivation at supermarketing fancy speak for we set we set up a whole lot of emails and a whole lot of text messages to be sent out strategically with offers at strategic times to your past list of customers.

And, and leads, so people that maybe came in and gave you their information, but they didn’t actually do business with you yet. So we sent out all these messages. We strategically tied both email and SMS. Email by itself will not be nearly as effective. 97% of text messages are read. Email we’re, we’re oftentimes used to ignoring those, and then we, we saw a lot of dollars get pulled in for free, right? for free. There was a small usage fee on our end, um, but essentially it’s free, it’s not paid ads.

So these are a couple examples of things we put together. So, uh, and it worked really well. Here’s a case study. So Daniel, I don’t know if you’re listening, if you are, uh, it’d be cool if you, if you put something in the chat or maybe come up at the end, uh, when we do the Q&A. But Daniel Stroud of Emerson Paints, we worked with him, I think we’ve been working with him for about a year now, um, phenomenal. Young, young guy, young kid, uh, really hungry.

He joined. I spoke with him because I was running the, running all the sales when he came in. And uh he was at 270,000, so he’s gonna hit 270,000 in 20253, and I think his goal, I think it was 400,000, I believe, for this year, he’s at over a million by the end of October. He will hit over 1.2 million, and it’s, it’s not, it is because of us, but it’s also because of Daniel, because Daniel invested into the marketing, he leaned into the marketing, he’s doing our full program, so he’s doing organic, and when you look at these, these numbers, These are where his leads are coming from, and this is valuable to see cause he didn’t have this stuff a year ago.

So he’s getting 321 phone calls, 241 web forms, over 5000 people are seeing his Google Business profile. This is through, um through now, year to date. He generated over 100 Google reviews, that helps build some trust, that helps build some authority on Google. Uh, he got 455 Facebook leads, so it’s easy for us to say, well, it’s, it’s the Facebook leads. He also got 313 LSA leads, local service ad leads. I see a lot of people either not running LSAs, or I see people ignoring them. You know, the call comes in. They, they ignore it, they don’t answer it.

Google’s not going to keep giving you those leads if you do that, or if they call them back, if they do actually get back in touch with that lead, they don’t use the app, so Google doesn’t even know you did it. They still think you ignored them. There’s a lot that goes into playing this game the right way that a lot of painting companies don’t realize. He’s getting 23 million organic impressions, so we’re doing doing all organic social posting for him as well. And then we don’t even have his organic lead flow here, but he got a lot of leads directly to his website.

So all of this stuff is tying together, and I think there’s this. Some companies do grow because, hey, I, I spent, you know, $15,000 a month. Brad had some pretty aggressive numbers. You got to spend $10,000 a month in Facebook ads. That’s fine, right? Brad is going to spend it on everything, so he’s still balanced. But some people will say, hey, I want to spend $10,000 a month on Facebook ads, and that’s it. I think you need to diversify. It’s gonna make you have a more stable company, and when one lead source goes down, another lead source will typically go up.

Uh, Daniel put this case study up. I’m just gonna read it. I’m just gonna read it. Um, it, it’s, I’m extremely proud of it. So he put this up on November 1st, uh, in some Facebook groups. He said, I don’t celebrate wins well, so here’s my attempt. Second full year in business, we did 270K in 2023. July and August of 7003, we did over 100k for the first time. September of 2024, we did 177K. October 2024, we did 10, 1980. So could not have done it without Brandon Pierrepont with painter marketing pros.

They took us from 270K to over 1 million, and we have our eyes set on 3 million. In 7003, and they will be a huge partner in helping us reach that goal. Absolutely, we’re going to hit it. Uh, we’ll talk about it next year when we have this event. This is not a paid ad. I just cannot recommend PMP enough. They offer the most value I’ve seen out of a marketing agency as they do everything from posting on our social media to me ads and Google Ads, SEO, creating our website and offering amazing customer service.

I know I can get them on the phone. Email anytime I need them. The results speak for themselves. Huge shout out as well to Jason Phillips. We’ll be hearing from him soon with Contractor Freedom for helping us with our sales system, as well as Bradley Ellison. He kicked us off today for letting me pick his brain. Will Reyes, Big Will for our phone calls and Carl Utter for sales coaching, and countless others who have allowed me to ask stupid questions. We’re also extremely excited to be working with Bully and Review and Automation.

To help us automate and create freedom in our company, Chris Gefer, Nathan Tenniel. Awesome. 3 million in 2025, here we come. There’s a lot to do there. Obviously, it’s a great testimonial for painter marketing pros, but you can also see he’s hungry. He’s not just working with us and calling it a day. He’s getting on calls with Jason, he’s getting on calls with Brad. He’s signing up with automated software to to help with his back end. This is the kind of aggressive forward thinking attitude that takes you places uh in this industry.

Sarah Ross, she was on our residential painting panel. Uh, she has moved from 2.4 to she’ll be north of 210 million this year. There were a lot of painting companies, especially in the franchise that declined in 22025. So she has seen healthy growth, again, a wide dispersion of leads where those leads are coming from because she is one on one of our. Holistic programs. So this stuff matters. I say it to you, not to work with us. Obviously I hope you do work with us, but if you don’t be holistic, think about your marketing as a holistic program.

Don’t just say, well, which avenue is the best? OK, this is the one I’ll just do that. That’s not the way to long term success. All right, current marketing trends, what are we seeing right now? It’s exciting. So stuff is changing at a rapid rate, a rate I have not seen before. Uh, AI really accelerated that for us. So we’re seeing right now a whole flood of content. So basically I would classify it as spam. So a whole lot of AI writing tools are flooding the internet with generic content.

Uh, I’m sure you see ads for it. Hey, we’re going to spin up all these pages, build all this SEO, uh, and what it’s doing is it’s making all this generic repeated content, saying essentially the same thing being being spread out across the web. Uh, regarding painting, the painting industry and really every industry. Uh, and what Google is doing is they’re getting better at recognizing and devaluing this content. So we, we’re gonna dive into what Google wants and why they would do that. Uh, Google wants. Eat, so experience, expertise, authority, and trust.

They want to prove that you are a real painting expert. They do not want to prove that you can use AI to to search around the internet, uh, pull up stuff and then just regurgitate it back out, because that’s not actually adding anything. So when you can showcase actual painting experience, when you can share specific expertise, stuff that you’ve done, photos, videos are huge, videos are becoming much, much more important. Uh, and you can demonstrate authority in your local market through things like, like, uh, linking with local, local groups, like, for example, Little League or church, things like that, then it shows Google, you are real, you are authentic, and Google loves that.

And Google’s main goal is to aim to show users genuine valuable content and keep Google as the go to search engine uh for users because that’s how they make money. They make money because we use them, and because we use them, they sell ads. That’s Google’s whole strategy. Uh, so the Google search documentation leak, this is, I think it’s hilarious. I think it’s hilarious. I think it’s super helpful. I think it helped, um, a lot of marketing agencies, anyone who’s paying attention, it, it, it didn’t change our trajectory at all, but it did verify a lot for us.

So Google had a search. Documentation leak, so they have their their algorithm, uh, they don’t reveal their algorithm. I’ve never revealed it, even though their engineers only know little snippets of it. Uh, they actually had a a leak, I think it was from, I think it was an intern somehow was able to leak this, um, which showed all the ranking signals, and so we found out. Lo and behold, there are over 231,22025 ranking signals. So over 22,2700 pieces of data are being used to decide where to place your painting company on Google.

When people search and they say, hey, we’re gonna get you the top 33, we’re gonna get you to the top of the Google. It’s 23,28 things, right, is, is what we’re actually playing against. However, of course, only a few of those really matter. And what we found was things like domain age, content age, backlink building, which Google had said didn’t matter, backlink building, uh, authoritative backlink building, so local and industry relevant backlinks, all of the stuff that Google tried to pretend didn’t matter, uh, got proven to matter. So this was a really, really big deal for us.

It was. Um, it was confirmation that we’re doing it the right way. We, we already felt very confident in that, but we got the proof. So that was a cool thing. These are updates, uh, this is relevant. These are all the core updates that Google has rolled out in 227. A core update is just, hey, we’re gonna, we’re gonna make some serious changes to the algorithm, enough that we’re actually gonna announce it, uh, it’s gonna span over years a period of several weeks, and, and it’s, it’s gonna.

You know, ruffle some feathers. Some rankings are going to change. They’re usually doing 2 or 3 of these a year. This year they’ve done 4, as well as a whole lot of key updates, key updates enough that they announce them. So the whole point of this is Google is, is updating more frequently, and they are primarily attacking AI, attacking spam site reputation. They are trying to make sure they can make Google as legitimate as possible, so that it remains the world’s leading search engine. Uh, key ranking factors, technically sound website that loads fast and functions well as content and other things get commoditized, the technical of what you do, how you actually build these sites, how you structure on the internal linking, all that boring stuff is going to become even more relevant.

A strong local presence, including customer reviews, accurate business information. Again, some more technical, so correctly structured schemas, implementation of technical best practices, and then the stuff that that you guys could definitely start doing is real projects, uh, photos, real videos, the more real stuff you can get showing your area. I mean this stuff’s meta, there’s metadata in it, right, when you’re taking it on your phone and and you’re in different areas that Google knows where you took it. So there’s metadata in your photos, there’s metadata in your videos.

When you’re uploading it, Google is is valuing that, right? So. Uh, use that, and then voice search. So prepare to dominate this. This has not been a big factor in the homes home contractor industry yet. It hasn’t been a huge factor in in painting, but as these large language models of AI evolve, this is going to become more pertinent. So voice search is going to increase in importance, uh, so you wanna make sure that whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re building is built for that. Um, so, They might ask, Hey, who’s the best painter for my home in Portland?

Find a painter who can match historical paint colors. What painting company near me has the best reviews. These are things that could easily be asked, and that you would want to write for. You’d want to be presented as as the option. So more people are using voice search while driving or multitasking. Uh smart home devices are as common as smartphones, and then voice searches are longer and more conversational. And what this means for a painting business question-based content, such as how much does it cost to paint a 2000 square foot house, uh, what’s the best time of year to paint my house exterior, and can I get my house painted in winter.

A lot of these searches that are conducted by a voice will be things like near me, so painting company painting company near me, they’ll be reputational based, so best painting company or painting company with the highest reviews, or they will be question based. So how much does it cost to paint XYZ? What’s the best time of year to paint XYZ? So that means you would need to write the content, structure your content in a way that is going to rank for those things. That’s irrelevant for for typing as well, but the, the types of searches are a bit different on voice and how you value those.

So how we help you prepare is we structure your website to answer these natural questions. If you’re writing authoritative natural content, it’s not spammy, it’s not AI. It will naturally tend to answer questions like that if the blogs are interesting, if they’re based on questions in in Google’s hierarchy that that we research, it will tend to answer things like that. Uh, we ensure your business shows up for neighborhood specific searches. We optimize for the near me searches, and then we make sure voice assistants can easily find and understand your business information.

They are scouring the web. You have to have a very strong presence. It’s SEO. It is leveraging Google’s database um to get you to show up. Google local service ads. I touched on this briefly when I showed the, I think the 300 some leads that Daniel had generated from Emerson Paints from LSA. Um, this is what it looks like. There are changes happening here. I’m gonna tell you guys the, the, the key takeaway you need to know is that LSAs are becoming more important. So, so Google Business profile and LSA are becoming tighter and tighter, and LSA is the future of Google.

I’m gonna publicly claim that right now. Uh, so if you’re not running local service ads, if you haven’t gone down that, that path yet, This is your wake up call to do it. Uh, you do not want to wait. It is where Google is going. Uh, so right now brand name searches just means somebody searching for your, your specific name of your company, you’ll show up. That didn’t used to be the case. Uh, you have to be have a verified Google Business profile now to run LSA, so they’re, they’re getting closer to merging those platforms, and then they are combining the Google Business profile and LSA reviews used to generate reviews separately, how you gonna generate them in one spot.

Um, And I covered that. I wanna quickly run through. I do put a lot of content, told you guys I do too much content. All right, so Master, master video for SEO and ads. Video is the future for SEO, uh, that video, put them up on your specific service and service area pages is going to help you and video establishes. A level of trust in ads that’s oftentimes difficult to replicate. You do need to test it. Sometimes we find static imagery can perform better in certain areas, certain platforms, uh, versus video, but it’s something to test.

And at the very least you want to put that video content on your site and you also want to put it on your organic social media. So again, there’s a big difference between you guys listening to me right now and you guys just seeing a thumbnail of me on Facebook. There, there’s a, we have a much better connection. When you listen to me and and you’re kind of seeing me move and oh he’s a human being, versus just a picture. Um, so you want to establish that same form of connection with your, with your homeowners, your, your commercial property owners, the people you’re targeting.

This is, this will be the next step for, for us, one of the next steps, we have a very exciting year for painter marketing post planned, multi-step funnel marketing. um Brandon Lewis talked a little bit about the different stages of the funnel. It goes typically well beyond what most painting companies are doing, but what you’re typically seeing is, hey, get, get, you know, get a free estimate, we’re offering 10% off. That’s the bottom of the funnel, it’s going immediately with the offer. What we are going to start doing, and it is a much, it’s a more advanced, it’s a, it’s a slower.

Um, but ultimately better form of marketing is creating educational entertaining content, essentially top of funnel. We’re not pitching you anything. We’re just trying to get you to watch. We’re just trying to get you bought in. We’re trying to get you to know who we are. This is for the painting companies. Move down for me that would an example would be the podcast. I run the podcast, a lot of see it, a lot of people see it, a lot of people listen to it. I don’t know who they are for years, but they follow it, they’re listening to it, they know who I am, right?

They know who painter marketing Prose is. And then we move down, we build trust and credibility. So now you can retarget with case studies, you can retarget with testimonials. Now they know you, they know your painting company. Now they’re starting to see really good things about your painting company. You’re, you’re warming them up, they’re feeling really good, and then you move down to where you actually make them an offer. And so now you’re only sending that offer to that list, pay, you know, 83% off, 15% off your, your close rate, your conversion rate will be much higher on that.

Um, that’s something we’re gonna roll out. It does require a little bit of a larger marketing budget. Uh, a lot of painting company owners will not do that, but the ones that will, will, will go to the next level. So wanted to at least show that. Winning with AI. So AI’s current capabilities, uh, right now we’re building on major advances in, in the large language model, so we have GPT 40, uh, we have Google’s Gemini Flash, and they are setting the standards in what’s possible. The the key thing that’s happening right now is you can leverage text, images and voice all all at the same time, and that didn’t used to be the case.

You could previously only work with one medium. And what they’re doing is essentially starting to operate more like an actual human brain, taking in all different forms of input and being being able to process it and respond and and, you know, think uh in a in a natural way, the way that human beings do. Uh, we have some really good voice technology platforms. There are very few of them are still at the point that you’d probably want to use them, but they’re very close. So where you could actually have appointment settings for people on the phone.

Um, some of these softwares are bland, Vappy, play HT, handling phones, scheduling appointments, even providing customer support. We all know the, the AI that sounds like a robot. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about one where you think it’s a person. Um, AI video generation, so Open AI just just really Sora. Um, if you go to, you know, sor. com, you can actually put in some, some stuff on OpenAI and actually create little videos. It’s pretty crazy, but this is early stage, but video will become the new content.

There will be stuff put out there. Again, it’s gonna be watermarked, it’s gonna be digitally tagged that it is AI, so the actual videos that you take in your locations of your project photo of your crew, that is still going to be uh very, very critical for you. It’s not going to be replaced by this AI video. Um, the next phase is really gonna be multiple AI AI agents working together. So you’ll have some someone handling, you know, an AI agent, someone handling the customer calls, another processing the project videos, if they doing estimates and plans.

You, you’re gonna start to be able to put together a team of AI agents. It’s very neat. Uh, we spent a lot of time on it. We have a, a technical team dedicated exclusively to this actually, because we think it’s very much the future for marketing. And what it means for business, you’ll have technical advantages, you’ll also be moving toward general AI capabilities. Yes, so AI use cases, yes and no. Yes, draft initial emails, um, review them, don’t just send them, uh, create templates for common questions like FAQs.

You can help brainstorm blog social media ideas, assist in drafting marketing materials. You can generate initial website content ideas and brainstorm. Don’t have it just send emails for you, don’t have it handled sensitive customer complaints. It’s not that good yet. Don’t create fake reviews or testimonials. Obviously, we just don’t want to do that. We, we don’t want to be a company that does that, that will catch up with you. Um, don’t use AI generated images if you try to do that as portfolio work, there are little, little, uh, discrepancies in it, it doesn’t work.

Um, don’t spend hundreds of pages and call it SEO. That’s what a lot of agencies are selling. They’ll they will just do like a billion pages for you, um, through AI it doesn’t work. Google smacks those sites down and then don’t have it just create these paid ads without evaluating the paid ads for you. This is Google A, the AI overview. I’m sure a lot of you have noticed when you go to Google now, you’ll get this AI um summary at the top, and we think, well, maybe SEO it doesn’t matter anymore.

It does because they’re pulling those from the links and you see those those links on the right, um, we have 5 Star painting, we have Russell, I think Russell’s here, we have Peach painting over there, uh, wrote a blog about when is the best time to paint the exterior of a house. And so if I search what is the, what is the best time to paint my home exterior in Tampa, his, he has a blog here that shows up. So I’m, I might click in, go read through it, and now he’s already built trust with me.

His SEO is working the way it’s intended to. Uh, planning at 10X 2025. So looking forward, set your revenue goal, set your marketing budget, select your marketing platforms, and allocate your budget. This is a pretty simple process, and then tap into past leads and customers to start the year off with a bang. Don’t start in January just running paid ads. Let’s get Some free leads for you. We will offer this this killer deal for you, um, where we’re going to run it for you for free. So anyone who signs up with us prior to December 31st, go to PMP2025.

com and we will launch your year with a free customer reactivation campaign to generate leads for free. All right, I, what is my timing? Let me see if anyone has any questions. Go ahead and raise your hand. We’ll let you in. It’s kind of weird. I’m seeing my own presentation. I’m not not done that before. But if you got a question, OK, Bill? You can speak Um, starting about 2 years ago when the people first algorithm and the helpful content came out. Uh, I was real big into AI kind of when it first came out.

And we were doing content and uh we had to redirect like 700 pages on our website when that came out. And um I’m just curious, is it, do you have any kind of like best practices or any kind of search tools or anything like that to identify poor content on the on the blog? You’re saying that you guys had to redirect it because Google penalized you for all that content? Yeah, we looked and saw that Google had dropped certain pages from their, uh, from their search, um, crawling.

They didn’t want to present that data because they thought it was so, so poor that they didn’t even want to display it anymore. Yeah, I mean that that’s exactly what I was talking about the spinning hundreds of pages. So if you guys are, you know, saying it’s 700 pages. I mean, it seemed like an attractive strategy at the time, because all we can, we can target all these long tail keyword phrases, you know, and just spin these pages out and not have to write them individually. Uh, in general, my recommendation would be if you’re going to leverage AI, uh, have it write an outline for you.

You know, you can have it set the bones for you, but you do need a heavily human edit. Um, there are obviously softwares galore that are going to tell you whether it’s AI, whether it’s not AI. It’s a guess for a lot of those. We know certain words, um, transform, elevate. We all know kind of what AI writing looks like at this point, but there’s a lot deeper, um, deeper stuff that Google is looking into that, that is not necessarily easy for us to know. So my strong recommendation would be to just not have AI, just write your stuff.

You can have it. Part part of that concern for us is that the damage was sort of done. And it was funny because our website Organic Search was not affected, but our Google Maps listing went from Map MapPack top 3 for 8 years straight to like 27, and uh we had our revenue drop off the map. We, we lost like a million dollars in revenue and we’ve been struggling ever since to get it back where it needs to go. Yeah, um, yeah, send me, send me an email because I, I can’t, I can’t fully answer it for you with, with this amount, but send me an email.

I’d love to take a look at that. Brandon at paintermarketingpro.com. Will do. Thanks. Yeah, thanks, Bill. uh Amir. You are up My guy, so Brandon? What’s up man? Uh, OK, my brain is hurting already. This is pretty normal for these things, right? If it’s going well, then it’s normal, yes. All right, cool.

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Hey there, painting company owners. If you enjoyed today’s episode, make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button. Give us your feedback. Let us know how we did. And also if you’re interested in taking your painting business to the next level, make sure you visit the Painter Marketing Pros website at PainterMarketingPros.com to learn more about our services. You can also reach out to me directly by emailing me at Brandon@PainterMarketingPros.com and I can give you personalized advice on growing your painting business. Until next time, keep growing.