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 delivers high-energy insights from the PCA conference on scaling commercial painting businesses. In this episode, he discussed insights from industry experts’ actionable strategies—from leveraging digital channels and consistent branding to mastering sales systems and effective follow-up—to navigate market volatility and drive growth. Packed with real-world stories, practical tips, and lessons learned, this episode is your blueprint for transforming challenges into opportunities and propelling your painting business to new heights.

If you want to ask him 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 him with your question, so you can see how anything discussed here applies to your particular painting company.

All right. So, very, very excited to present to you. Who’s having a good time at this conference? Yeah, heck yeah. So I’m, uh, I’m super excited that that the PCA is leaning into these, uh, more niche events. I think it’s fantastic. I love Expo. I actually like these more, so I think this is my 4th 1 in 2 months or 3 months or something. I’m kind of doing the circuit. I love them. So I love the PCA, love these events. Super excited you guys made it out. A lot of very successful, uh, painting company owners in here.

 

I hope you guys are networking, learning from each other because there’s a ton of, of knowledge and value in this room. So today I’m gonna be covering some growth strategies for commercial painting contractors. I’m also gonna be covering some stuff that I’ve learned from interviews through the podcast. So people like Maggie and Matt of Harpeth Painting, uh, Matt Carlson, uh, Chris Elliott on it painting. We got Dave Scaturro, did, uh, I think a 5 episode series with him, so a lot of knowledge that I’m gonna be sharing from, from people much smarter than me at the end.

 

So hopefully you guys take away some value from that. Alright, who am I? So I am a brand and founder of painter marketing Pros, written two books, one of which is a number one Amazon bestseller. Very excited about that. I didn’t really write it. It was a syndication of the podcast, so a lot of, you know, there were 35 painters that basically wrote that book for me, uh, PA ambassador serving a lot of different committees and a proud, uh, veteran of the Florida Army National Guard. So I did this yesterday.

 

It has absolutely nothing to do with this presentation. Absolutely nothing. I thought about how can I tie this in? There’s nothing I can do to tie this in. I just wanted to put it up. I’m alive. I’m here. I, I feel really excited to be here and, uh, I rode a bull. So Jesse and I rode a bull last night, um, 7.76 seconds. I was 9003rd out of like 20. Yeah, it was legitimate. Yeah, can I, please? Can I? Yeah, thank you. I called my wife. I called her like 6 times.

 

She wasn’t answering, uh, and Jessie’s like, You ready, bro? You ready? I was like, I really want my wife to answer. And then I, and the reason I wanted her to answer was because I wanted to tell her to pull the feeding tube. I don’t want it, pull it. So, fortunately, I didn’t need that. And then when I called her afterwards, she was really excited to hear from me that I was still alive. Uh, this was a legit, this shouldn’t be legal. I’m gonna tell you guys right now.

 

The, the, it’s like a novice category. I don’t know what was novice about this. There were like 200 people. That doesn’t, that, that like shows nobody. There were 6 different stands. There was a multi-level stands, there’s like a VIP area. Everybody paid to get in. There’s like 200 people. It’s a colosseum. This is like gladiators. And I was like, the only reason that 200 people would pay money to come in on a Wednesday night is somebody’s going to die. That’s it. Somebody’s gonna die. And they had us go out there.

 

They had us pray, and the guy’s like, Lord Jesus, please protect all these athletes that are risking their lives tonight. I didn’t think I was, and I don’t wanna do this anymore. This is a bad idea. I asked the bouncer, I was like, Hey, do you have advice? He’s like, don’t do it. And then I asked the lady who’s running the rodeo. I was like, do you have advice? She’s like, I don’t do this. Everybody’s like, don’t do it. The, the guy, the Uber ride over, he’s like, oh yeah, 33 boys from Jersey did this.

 

The guy like broke his ribs, a guy broke his. I was like, Oh my God. Everybody broke up I was like, this, I’m not gonna present tomorrow. So I told Andrew Dwyer, I was like, dude, it’s you. Like you’re gonna present. I’m probably not gonna make it. So I’m just pumped to be here, honestly. I’m just pumped to be here. That was, uh, that was insane. So, um, also don’t listen to Jesse. Like just when he says stuff, just don’t listen to that guy. Uh, painter marketing pros, so, uh, we contribute to Impact magazine.

 

We’re actually gonna have a, a column in APC magazine, so I’m super, super excited about that. Make sure you guys are reading those articles, got a lot of good stuff coming next year. Uh, we, so we won the, the 2024 PCA Industry Partner of the Year award. That, that to me, I told Nick that to me was the, the highlight of painter marketing pros to date for me, was winning that award. That, that I, I don’t think I cried, but I, I got very close. That was a big, big deal to me.

 

Uh, so we’re Facebook partners, Google partners, uh, we, we are corporate partners with Fresh Coat Painters, so we’ve been doing this a while, have a pretty good reputation. All right, so overview, what I’m gonna cover, we’re gonna go through some marketing channels. I think there’s, there’s a little bit of a misconception. It’s largely true, but a little bit of a misconception that the only way to grow commercial is through networking. You actually can grow it through marketing as well. Uh, gonna cover paid ads, database reactivation so that that gold mine that you’re sitting on, Brandon Lewis is very big into that.

 

Uh, it’s super, super important, very, very much neglected. Uh, networking, and then learning from the podcast, learning from people much smarter than me, some stuff that I’ve collected. Uh, so, paid ads, marketing channel. Pay that, so focusing on. Pay out. You want them to be personalized, speed delete. A lot of this stuff is very similar to residential pay dads. The the concept of, of advertising doesn’t really change based on who you’re advertising to. There are certain core tenants that say the same. So personalized speed delete, paired with organic posts, paired with just what your presence looks like online.

 

It should be consistent. Uh, make it easy for the people that you are, your avatar for who you’re speaking to. Instant proposal that would be more for residential, obviously not as much for commercial, uh, follow up and then further monetization. So that part’s really important. I was talking to to Juan uh Vasquez. He runs a super successful, obviously residential painting business, the super high profile work. He’s branching into the commercial and we were talking last night about, you know, what should you spend on. On leads like how do you, how should you think about that?

 

And I think one of the things that people really underestimate is the value of, of the, the network that you form when you create a lead like a lead, it’s very often viewed as transaction like I paid this amount. I went and I got this project and this is my ROI but for me the project that you do. It’s just the first step, right? The project that you do, it’s like now you should do every project for that property manager or whoever you’re serving. Now you should do every project for that person’s network.

 

It’s just your foot in the door and I’m a guy who sells new leads. So if I say that I don’t really sell the repeat, but that’s where the money is made. I think that’s where the money is made. Your most expensive lead, your hardest lead is your new lead, your cheapest lead, your best lead is your repeat and your referral lead. So super focused on that. Dave Scaturro, I like this guy. Where’s Dave? It’s over there somewhere. What’s up, man? Yeah, right? Yeah, I like this guy.

 

Dave’s all right. He’s all right, not that good, but he’s all right. All right. So we’re gonna have some, some quotes from the podcast sprinkled throughout here. Uh, he said, if you’re not growing year over year, you’re probably dying. I very much ascribe to that. I think you’re growing or you’re dying. Business especially is not static. It is not static at all. Uh, you’re probably going backwards, you have to be focused on growth to some degree. So meta ads, I’m basically gonna go through all the major digital marketing channels.

 

I’m gonna talk about how it works for residential and how you need to think about it for commercial, the changes. So meta ads is stronger in residential. This works really, really well for residential. It’s a little bit harder for commercial. It can work. Um, but you have to be super targeted in who you, who you approach and it’s gonna be a little bit of a widespread. So you’re gonna target a lot of people that, that are not really your key avatar, uh, but that being said, your key avatar is on Facebook because everybody basically uses Facebook.

 

So they are there. You can use targeting options to get them. You can. Target property managers and you need to call them out. So you need to say, you know, dear property managers, hey property managers, right? Make sure that people when they see your ad, they know that you’re talking to them. That will make them pay attention. It’s a big deal. It’s simple, it seems kind of overly simple, overly silly, but you have to call out that avatar in the beginning. Uh, you can target by interests, demographics, and behaviors, so Facebook has a lot of good targeting options.

 

And if you haven’t run ads on Facebook, make sure you look into that and make sure you do a little bit of homework on the targeting. So here are some examples. So for residential, we have that on the left. You can see you can target things like home repair, interior design, furniture, and these are obviously different locations, but those are the interests that you can target. Over on the right, we have things like facility maintenance manager, uh, on-site property manager, property manager, and then senior property manager.

 

So this would obviously be targeting property managers. Facebook has a ton of a ton of targeting options. The thing that people don’t, um, fully understand about meta is if you overdo this, so you put like, like, man, I’m, I’m only gonna target the people that are my ideal client. I’m gonna put like 100% interest. I’m gonna super narrow down your cost per lead is going to be very high. So a lot of the way that you actually target is through the way you craft the ad is through your callouts through you through who you gear the ad toward.

 

If you put too much targeting for whatever reason, meta will essentially penalize you. The more you narrow your audience, the higher your cost per lead is going to be. So you put a little bit of targeting, but a lot of it’s in how you create the copy, what your image or creative or video or whatever that is looks like, that’s how you actually do targeting effectively. Here are some examples of residential ads. Say on, on the left you say Hey Tri Tri-state homeowners, Hapace homeowners, Hey South Dayton homeowners, and can’t really read the last one, but you can see there’s call outs.

 

Like I want to talk to a homeowner. When somebody sees the ad, they’re gonna stop. Faces tend to resonate really well, especially with residential. People are used to seeing that on Meta. They see everyone post selfies and things like that. Uh, so they’re used to seeing that it blends, it looks a little bit more native to the platform, and then you call out who you’re actually speaking to at the front. Commercials a little bit different. So commercial is a little bit more focused on the actual project, uh, and, and what you’re doing, and then the before and afters video montages, things like that, it’s, it’s more business focused, so it is a little bit different.

 

Again, meta for me is not my favorite platform for commercial, but it can work. You just have to be pretty targeted and call out your avatar. So Google Pay per click, this is probably the biggest differentiator between residential and commercial. I do not like it for residential. Uh, we got Brad Ellison, he’s somewhere. So he’s, Brad, what are you spending this year in, in, uh, marketing? Uh, it’s about 1003 OK, so that’s a fair amount. So 350,000. You’re doing Google Pay click. OK, so if you spend $350,000 and you, you run a residential company, uh, painting company, then you can do Google Pay per click.

 

That’s fine. The vast majority of painting companies, especially that are focused on residential, are not spending $350,000 a year in marketing. Google Pay per click is expensive. It makes sense for. Commercial because your average ticket value is a lot higher so you can afford to spend a lot more for that lead, especially when you focus on the fact that that lead is just your foot in the door. It’s not the end all be all, it’s your foot in the door for that new opportunity that you’re now going to do the repeat business, you’re gonna do the referral business and it just gets you set up.

 

So there are we did some some research on this residential keywords that you’d wanna target for. Um, Google Pay per click, there’s like 3.2 million. There’s a lot. There’s a lot of keywords that you would want to target. You don’t actually list out obviously 3.2 million keywords, but that’s how many there are there. There, there’s targeting options that you could set up on Google Pay per click that would, that would target the majority of those. Commercial, there’s 300,5003, it’s, it’s fewer. Yeah, right. Jesse. Yeah, don’t listen, so don’t listen to him.

 

Bad, he’s bad. All right, so the, the, the, the pay, yeah, no, we had a good night. So the, the pay per click, uh, the cost per click is around $10 when you start adding up what it costs per lead, so what, what the, the cost per click is a, is a click, right? So somebody clicks, by the way, a lot of bots click. So I don’t know if you guys know that, but when you set up a Google ad, if you’re running Google Ads, you need to use a software like Clickies or some other software to actually protect your ad because bots troll the internet.

 

And they’ll click your ad and you pay money for that. It’s not even human. And then sometimes competitors will click your ad and if you don’t have some sort of rule set up, you’re not using some kind of software like click they can just click it indefinitely and just cost you a lot of money. They, you know, most companies don’t do that, but there are bad actors out there, so you have to, you have to know what you’re doing. You have to set up some kind of rules and protections on your ads.

 

Uh, that being said, you can residential, you’re typically gonna spend over $200 per lead. Through Google Ads, that’s, that’s a leak. You’re not gonna set all of those. You’re definitely not gonna close all those. So if your average ticket value is 4000 5000 $6000 it starts to be a little bit tough depending on how much you’re paying for that project. Commercial, I think we’re pretty modest here, $15,000 and up, it’s a pretty, pretty minor amount. If you’re spending 200 to $300 a lead, if you have any kind of reasonable close rate. It’s a pretty minor amount.

 

So Google Pay per click is a very viable strategy. You should be doing it if you want to expand your commercial business. A lot of you have networks. You’ve been doing it for a long time. You, you get kind of fed the work through reputation and word of mouth, but if you want to expand your business or you want to open another location or you want to move into a new vertical, Google Pay per click is something you should highly consider. This is, uh, just the math we did example of what your your return on ad spend would be uh residential, basically 10003 commercial 415 because of the higher ticket value.

 

The cost per lead is a little bit higher, but your ticket value is a lot higher. Uh, we assumed different close rates, a lower close rate for commercial, but rough, rough numbers. So here are some keywords you’d want to target for Google Ads. You can see a lot of these are pretty. These are the highest search volume keywords. So we got commercial painter, commercial painting, commercial painter contractors near me. Pretty high, high volume, pretty generic keywords, and you can see rough cost per click is probably around 10 or $11 per click.

 

Then it comes down to what is your landing page look like look like? Do you have a call extension set up with your ad, and then how are you actually converting those leads? Uh, these are the 8 to 8 to 14, again, a lot of comm commercial whatever, right? These are the highest volume keywords. This is what an ad looks like when you run a Google ad targeting this. I don’t love this. I don’t love these ads, but this is what you have to do when you’re targeting commercial. Because it’s a pretty generic keyword, there’s obviously a lot of different verticals that fall within that.

 

So you can see that one on the left, we paint retail, restaurants, hotels, chain store. To me that’s not super compelling because you’re not targeting a specific avatar, but you’re trading because you’re targeting the higher volume keyword. It’s a more generic keyword. It’s going to be searched a lot more frequently than, than what would be called a long tail keyword phrase or something more specific, but your conversion might not be as high, because if I’m looking for, you know, let’s say a restaurant painter. Well, you paint restaurants, but you, you kind of paint everything.

 

So you’re maybe not an expert, but you’re, you’re an option, right? So you’ll show up. So a lot of that’s pretty generic. This would be an example of a more targeted keyword. It’s a warehouse painting, factory painting, commercial building, office painting, church painting, for example, more targeted, you can see the cost per click is generally gonna be a lot less. The reason it’s a lot less is because the search volume is also a lot less. So you’re not gonna get as many leads this way, but your lead, your, your conversion rate is gonna be higher.

 

If you run an ad like this, let’s say you’re running church painting, we’re gonna actually use that with Dave, um, a little bit further on with SEO, but let’s say you’re running church painting. You would want to take, you would not want to take them to your home page. You would not be like, oh we, we’re the best church painters. And then you click on it and you go to your homepage like we’re, we’re a commercial painting company, we do this and that and that and that and that.

 

That’s not what you would want to do. You would want church painting and then it would go to a church painting page. It would just be photos of churches. It would just be talking about churches, what you do to paint churches. It would all be integrated to target. So my recommendation if you’re gonna run Google Ads would be run some generic. So run some more generic broader keyword phrases, commercial painting where you’re gonna target the keyword volume and then those can go to more of like a home page or more of a generic page, but then also set up more ads that are that are gonna be less volume, but they should convert at a much higher rate, targeting the individual verticals that you serve.

 

Uh, here are some examples of what those ads will look like. So we have like a warehouse painting contractor, uh, you can see in the bottom right exterior church painting. So specializing in painting and renovation of historic churches across New England. If you click on that, that ad, it’s probably gonna talk about churches, right? So they’re very, very focused on that. If I’m looking for a church painter, I’m going to feel better about that ad, that ad on the bottom right when it’s talking all about exterior church painting than I am.

 

That ad on the on the left when they paint anything and everything so they can probably paint the church they’re probably not experts at it though they just paint whatever. So do, do them both because you’re not gonna, with these, with these specific searches, you won’t get as much volume. Uh, local service ads, this is really better for residential. But you will show up for commercial. It is the future of Google, so those of you who are doing commercial and residential, Google’s moving toward LSA. A lot of their develop, they don’t specifically say that Google doesn’t tell you what they’re doing.

 

They’re, they’re notoriously difficult on that, on that front, but you can see what they’re doing in terms of where their development dollars are going, how their algorithm is shifting, and they’re pushing more and more resources toward LSA. It is the future. So if you’re doing. Any residential. Make sure you set this up. You can’t, you can see those are the, the 11 options under the painter category for what you can select. There’s not a commercial, but if you’re doing. You know, exterior painting and interior painting, you would want to set that up because you will still show up.

 

This is an example on the left of commercial painters. You can see a couple companies are showing up and then office painters near me again LSAs are showing up. It’s Google guaranteed. I wouldn’t leave that even if you’re only doing commercial. I would still set up LSAs. You will get residential leads. You’ll get the majority of your leads will be residential. So if I’m a 100% commercial painting company, I’m gonna set up LSA and then I’m gonna set up a referral network because I know that residential leads are gonna come to me.

 

I don’t want to waste them. I don’t want to just tell them, oh sorry, we don’t do that. I’m gonna refer them out and then maybe I’m gonna set up a referral program where I get paid for those leads. Uh, tips for success for LSA, Google LSAs appear at the top of search results. They’re Google guaranteed. It’s the same thing. Sometimes people don’t, uh, you know, know what, well, what’s the Google guarantee? It’s Google local service ads. Uh, you wanna maximize your budget. You’re never gonna spend your whole budget, so just we have one of our partners.

 

I mean, it’s they set up like $10,10003 a week, spend like $200 a week. You’re not gonna use your budget. Uh, pay, it’s pay per lead now, so you only pay when you get a lead when they message you or call you. That is. This is my prediction. They didn’t say this, but I, I am almost certain it will switch to pay per click because it’s gonna be worse for you and it’s gonna be better for Google. They’re gonna make a lot more money. Uh, use the LSA app for quick responses and then generate reviews uh through the LSA app.

 

All right, Dave, my guy, again. So the priest doesn’t care that you paint water towers, doesn’t care. So this is all about targeting the specific ver vertical again, general advertising principles, speaking to your avatar and having your whole funnel, so your ad, your landing page, all your copy everything you’re writing, your pictures, your portfolio targeting who you’re actually servicing there so specific landing pages per market. Targeted portfolios, uh, custom messaging, and then market specific case studies. How many of you guys have, have looked at the Alpine Painting and sandblasting website?

 

They have a, a, an absurd number of pages, like absurd. It’s one of their biggest strategies is SEO. Again, if you haven’t listened, who here has listened to the series that I did with Dave? Uh, who, who has listened to the podcast series that I did with Dave? Not enough people, a few people, so Matt, Jesse, a couple of others, listen to it. So, you know, 20 million, 30, whatever they’re doing in revenue, it’s high. Uh, he has a lot of good stuff there, a lot of stuff that’s counterintuitive to how a lot of commercial painters think.

 

So I would definitely check out that series. But one of the things he really focuses on is SEO. So commercial painting keywords bucket. Here’s an example over 300,000 of these keywords, you know, any of these kinds of keywords are searched in the US. You can see there, there’s generic keywords, there’s kind of broader keywords. It’s called short, short tail keywords. It’s like warehouse painting, commercial painting, industrial painting, and then you have just tons and tons and tons of keywords that fall under it. And what you’re doing with the different landing pages, so a landing page would just be a page on your website where you’re targeting one main search search phrase.

 

So for example, if you have a, if you have a page on your website and you paint churches, you would want a church painting page. All the photos are there, the, the messaging is there and that would essentially be called a landing page. your, your website, and there’s a big misconception on SEO. not everyone who goes to your website or finds it on Google goes to the homepage, quite the contrary, so they, they end up on all different kinds of pages. So you wanna have each one of your pages essentially targeting what would be classified as a different keyword phrase.

 

So church painting, for example, and then church church painting contractors, uh, places of worship painting, church painting contractor near me, there would be a ton of long tail keyword phrases that would wrap under that. That’s how, that’s how you do it effective SEO. Here’s an example of warehouse painting. So there are 8002 keywords in that bucket there’s basically 4500 searches a month on Google for warehouse painting. Obviously those searches are throughout the US. They’re not gonna be 4500 right where you serve, but there will be some volume. And so SEO is a game of, of dominating a lot of search phrases.

 

It’s not you, you don’t have one search phrase and you get a million searches for that phrase. You dominate a bunch of different search phrases. That’s how you get a bunch of leads from SEO. And you can only do that through having a whole lot of dedicated pages. So here is, I don’t know if the last one. Yeah, so this is the Alpine painting and sandblasting, so that you can see they have a warehouse, um, painting page. This is, it’s the same page. It’s, it’s just a long page, so we cut two different parts of it.

 

But all the photos are gonna be about painting warehouses. All the messaging is gonna be about that. It’s, it’s all gonna be tailored to the pain points to what they would actually care about. This would be again a church painting page. It’s all going to be. You’re not gonna see a photo of a warehouse on this page. You’re not gonna see a photo of an office building on this page. They’re not gonna be talking about things that office painters would care about. They’re only gonna be talking about stuff of of churches, and this might seem simple to you guys might seem kind of basic, but very few companies are doing this, usually just setting up generic pages and you think, well, we, we cover this and this and this and and that’s fine.

 

You have to break it out and you have to build a more detailed and extensive website to play this game right, uh, a hospital painting. Again, same concept applies. It’s all going to be focused on what does somebody care about who wants hospital painting, and then what what’s our portfolio, make sure we’re showing that correctly. Here’s an example of a site we built that’s gonna target the different services and the different service areas. The same concept applies for residential as it does for commercial. All right, where’s Maggie?

 

There she is. So you’re not Maggie, you’re Matt. He gets confused sometimes. OK, one and the same, one and the same. All right, so I’ll be calling you guys out some as well. So who here has listened to that series, the Maggie and Matt series I did, I think it was 6 episodes, little, little more. OK, sorry, Dave, the one by like 13 or 2. All right. A lot of you guys aren’t listening though. I’m not gonna say I’m not hurt. I’m like a little bit hurt, but if you guys wanna listen, that would be all right.

 

Um, so website contentskiso and commercial work, they’re not looking at Google reviews. I wanna push back a little bit on that. If your Google review is is crap, they’re probably gonna look at that, right? If it’s like a one star and they’re like this company is terrible, um, that’s probably gonna be problematic for you, but it’s not gonna be their main focus. They’re looking at the concierge website. They’re looking at your professionalism. So again, building out that site, showing the different portfolios, showing the messaging, showing that you’re experts in each individual vertical that you actually want to target, not being generic, not being that this is we’re commercial and we do everything and just hire us.

 

Because then why are you different? Why should they pay you more money? Uh, so build pages for each service and service area. Again, this is, so as we have. This, so we have different services in different service areas. This would be how Alpine painting and stand by, and this is like a, a 10th of it. They, it keeps going. The different landing pages that they have for all the different verticals. Uh, use the software. So if you guys aren’t tracking your SEO, if you’re, if you’re doing SEO, if you’re doing anything, if you’re doing Google Ads, SEO, meta ads, whatever you’re doing, make sure you’re actually tracking your results.

 

This is a software called Bright Local. You can, you can set up, it’s pretty cheap. You can put in all the different keywords that you’re trying to target and you can actually see how you’re ranking for them. So make sure you set up softwares like this. This is another software called Hrefs. It’s, uh, there, there are two main SEO tracking softwares. There’s Hrefs and there’s Semrush. So if you guys are, again, if you’re doing, if you’re doing SEO or you’re hiring someone to do SEO, make sure you’re actually tracking your results.

 

If you’re not tracking your marketing, then there’s no way to actually know how it’s doing. Uh, LinkedIn ads, not big for residential, super big for commercial. So LinkedIn is not just for job hunting anymore. You can use it for general contractor research. You can use it to track people down and build relationships, and it’s much more suitable than Facebook for commercial work, in my opinion. Uh, here’s an example of what you can target with Facebook or LinkedIn ads. So we have job title. This is just for Scottsdale, Arizona as an example, job title property manager.

 

You can see that that we target that down. We can expect, I mean, it’s a generic 0 to 30 leads, right? It, it’s pretty broad. They don’t really know how many you’re gonna get, but you’re gonna get probably between 60 and 24,000 impressions and impression is just someone seeing your ad. That’s actually what you care about how many people are actually seeing the ad based on who you’re targeting, and then it comes down to how compelling is your ad. Cause that’s gonna be what’s called your conversion rate from impressions to how many leads you actually get.

 

Here are some examples I told Chris, Chris Elliott, are you in the room? No, he’s not in the room. Well, I hate him. So we’ll look at the, we’ll look at the left too. We’re not gonna worry about that one. So here, here are some examples of some, some ads on LinkedIn. You can do your own homework. If you have competitors that are like a maybe doing better than you, companies that you know that are killing it in your market, do homework on them. Go to their website, figure out how, how they’re ranking, are they running ads, do competitor research, do your diligence, and then copy them.

 

None of this stuff is new, so copy what’s working. Right now, if they’ve been around for like 100 years, they might just be doing well just because they’ve been around for 100 years. So a lot of times the older companies are actually not the best at marketing, but if you’ve seen a company grow, you should probably copy what they’re doing because it’s probably working. Social media organic. So a lot of times social media organic people you hear like, hey, you need to post on Facebook. You need to have an active presence.

 

People think they got, they gotta be posting all the time. That stuff is less to generate leads. It’s more so that when a lead comes in, they’re gonna do homework on you, they’re gonna go to your website, they’re gonna look at your social media, they’re gonna start doing their due diligence. You want to have a consistent presence. You don’t want to pull up your Facebook and you just don’t do anything. Your last post was like 9003 months ago. You, you don’t, that’s not a compelling sales pitch. So when you’re getting a new lead, you want to look, it’s the best foot forward.

 

You want to have the best digital presence that you can possibly have. So the way we break this down is you can have core pillar content. This is an example if you’re gonna do 4 posts a week, you’d have core pillar content would be 1 post per week, engagement content 2 posts per week, and then thought leadership. So this here’s an example of, of, um. Residential, right, so you can have videos, you can have, you, you can take customer testimonials, you can create a graphic around those, put the, put those up, you can do before afters, you can do, uh, words of wisdom or or thought leadership stuff, um, but for commercial you wanna target specific personas again based on who you focus on.

 

So property managers, what would their pain point be maintaining property value, minimizing disruption, obviously finding reliable contractors that are not a pain in the butt, they’re managing a ton of stuff. So make sure your messaging is geared toward them. Interest property management, tenant, tenant satisfaction, etc. So based on whoever you’re targeting, make sure your messaging resonates with that. Again, it seems simple, but very few companies actually do it. Very few companies are thinking from the perspective of who they’re talking to, which is insane. But that’s, that’s how advertising and messaging works.

 

You need to think about who you’re targeting and how do they think and make sure you’re messaging your resonating with them. So an example of core pillar content would be before and after project showcases, technical expertise posts, industry specific solution. This is gonna be your more in depth kind of demonstration of your knowledge, demonstration of what your company can do. This is what most people think of as as what all your posts should be. All the posts don’t need to be like this, but this would be a core pillar content.

 

Engagement contents kind of behind the scenes. Engage people want to do business with people, even commercial people want to do business with people. They don’t want to do business with companies. They don’t wanna do business with corporations. We, we like doing business with human beings. so employee spotlights, behind the scenes, client success get let them know your company, let them know who you are, spotlight the employees make yourself relatable. That’s huge. So 2 of these per week. And then thought leadership, where are we going? What’s going to happen in the industry in the future?

 

You kind of showing you’re at the forefront of the industry is big. They, they place much more trust in that. So here are some examples of some, some ads again we have Alpine painting, uh, a couple other ones of what that would actually or uh social media organic of what this would look like again it’s less focused at this point on the people, although crews, things like that, professionalism is good, uh, but a lot of times you’re gonna wanna show project photos for this. Who’s doing direct mail for commercial?

 

Couple, 11 person, man, this, who’s marketing? Who, who in here markets? like a 5th, OK, all right, now, so hopefully a couple more people after this, um. You like, dude, I don’t care. Like, you, you end at 9. All right, cool. Sweet. So it’s going great. I rode a bull. I don’t care. I rode a freaking bull. So, all right. I’m a I’m having a good day. It doesn’t it doesn’t matter to me. All right, so, so direct mail, so you, you do something like that, you’re gonna appreciate things differently, I promise you.

 

So, all right, direct mail. So, so super specific. Advantage super specific customized with targeting you can craft personalized messaging. This is the advantage of direct mail. You can be so, so, so, so targeted. You can just target the people you want. You can, you can have multiple different direct mail campaigns targeting different people. You would obviously want to write those differently and take advantage of that. The, the disadvantage is obviously it’s a little bit more expensive, right? The, the digital is gonna be a little bit more of a spray and pray, but you went through the targeting and, and through the messaging, the direct mail is gonna be, it, it’s super targeted.

 

It’s going to cost you a little bit more money, but it’s still a win. Uh, data, who knows what this means, database reactivation. God, OK, um, I, I like, I don’t, I’m trying to come up with a bit so that that’s marketing speak and I keep trying to figure out how to say that better, but it’s just reaching out to your past leads. You guys have a database. You have past leads, you have past customers, you have their information, their name, their email, their phone number. What database reactivation means is just reaching out to them.

 

Uh, like a monthly newsletter sending out promotional offers to your email list. All that stuff would be considered database reactivation, sending out a text blast saying, hey, book, book your, book your work before December 31st, we’re running this promotion, that would be called database reactivation. So here you build reputation and authority, stay top of mind, you showcase big projects. So a big misconception, just business in general, is you go, you do a project, and then that, that, that um customer is so enamored with you that that they just think about you all the time, right?

 

3 months from now, 9003 months from now, 1 year from now, 2 years from now, they know your company name, they know you, they know who is on they know, they don’t know you like 3 days after. They have no idea who you are. So the, the keeping in touch with them is really big. This is where the money is. Again, I So we’re actually doing more of this now. So we got we got Michael Chaney in the room we’re we’re rolling out a reactivation campaign for her. We’re doing more of this now.

 

We’re doing quarterly reactivation, but that’s not my primary business. My primary business is new leads. So again, when I’m saying this is where the money is, you should probably listen to me because this isn’t really what I sell, but this is where the money is. The new lead is gonna be your most expensive, most difficult lead. You have to sell, they don’t know who you are. You have to sell them. It’s a hard sell. Once you’re there, all you gotta do is good work. Right, all you got to do is good work and then keep in touch with them, be professional, and then this is where the money is.

 

Uh, you can create new sales opportunity, boo boost engagement. We got Matt, so we don’t market to companies, we market to people. People want to do business with people. They do not want to do business with companies. Uh, industry leaders agree so regular client meetings, project updates, again, a long term relationship focus. This is, is an example. It’s uh a residential, but an example of what a database reactivation would look like. It’s a it’s commercial, uh, this is a primarily residential focused company, but they do commercial again, you’d want to show the work, you’d want to put this stuff out there.

 

All right, networking, who in here focuses on networking? I assume that’s probably more. OK, yeah, so a lot of people, right, build relationships for multiple again multiple project opportunities. Don’t like business is not transactional. Business is all about you’re creating an ecosystem. When you get a lead, when you do a project, it’s an ecosystem. So that project is your, I, what I say is, is like. The, the, the customer that you that you service that you do work for that customer is yours. The the people on their network are yours like everything’s yours that you, you’re building this ecosystem and that’s how you grow a big company and how you reduce your cost of marketing says what should, what should my cost of marketing be?

 

Should it be 2100%? Should it be 2500%? The bigger you grow, the smaller it should be because you get more repeat and referral. You’re building an ecosystem, it’s yours. People don’t want to, especially commercial. People don’t want to change. It’s a risk. There’s a, a saying, no one, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, IBM computer like nobody got fired for that because it’s a risk. There are, there are innovative tech companies, there are innovative solutions, there’s innovative healthcare, there’s, there’s all this stuff that comes out and big companies will be hesitant to buy it or move forward with it, even if it’s better because it’s a risk, because if it backfires like why’d you do that?

 

That was dumb. You should have just done the one that we trust. So if you’re doing a commercial painting project and you do, you don’t have to be even the best. If you do a good job. They’re just gonna keep using you because it’s a risk to switch. So all you gotta do is get in the door and be reliable. So build relationships for multiple project opportunities, leverage referrals, uh, joint associations again this is all about networking, attend industry events to build your credibility, uh, and visibility, and then Matt Kiper, we seek relationships not work.

 

Harpa painting, they’re doing quite well because they focus on the human element. Networking groups. Here’s, here’s a few networking groups you can join associated, uh, builders and contractors, the associated general contractors, uh, of America, BNI and US Chamber of Commerce. Like building walls come down when we’re humor to get Matt Maggie. Ah, I like this quote from Maggie. So I take freaking lasagna to the job trailers, not because I’m a girl bringing dinner, but because walls go down when we’re human. How many people think about that.

 

You don’t think about that. You don’t think like, oh man, they’re probably hungry. I wanna go take freaking lasagna to them, but that’s thinking about the human element, who you’re actually targeting, what they actually care about. They want lasagna, they’re hungry, but nobody’s thinking about that. Well, we do quality work, you’re, you’re, you’re targeting a human being. You’re not targeting a business, you’re selling to a human being. All right, so learnings from the podcast. This is where we get to people, people much smarter than me. Uh, we’ve summarized a few key learnings I think you guys will benefit from.

 

So cash is king, as we know, one of the downsides of commercial is cash flow management. Residential, it’s great. The cash flow, there, there’s no real working capital cycle there. Uh, you get the cash up front, basically. Uh, cash is king, so you have to assume you’re not gonna get paid for 21000 days and what you bill, so you have to have a for Maggie and 21000 day cash reserve minimum. Uh, 21 to 2900% of your re retainage held back, you need strong banking relationships, so focus on that and then a monthly draw cycle management.

 

There are a lot of companies throughout history that have gone bankrupt and gone out of business from growing too fast, and that can happen with commercial. Uh, business development. So Dave, we’re transitioning from painters to business professionals, having professional systems clear org charts through your growth productions and leadership development focus again, Alpine painting, sandblasting, they’ve been around for a very long time, very successful modeling yourself after successful businesses. A lot of you guys, um, are newer in the space or trying to grow the commercial piece of your business, look for the industry leaders and then just model.

 

It, it’s all copying, none of this stuff’s new. Uh, having a business development person changed everything. Uh, dedicated business development role, ideal customer targeting, uh, strategic door knocking, door knocking. Nobody really thinks about that. Again, people, you’re targeting human beings, uh, getting on bid list and then building relationships before need. Systems over sales. So this is from Matt Carlson. So the accountability advantage, uh, take ownership of your results, build trust through reliability, follow through on your promises, clear communication, brand reputation matters. So Matt says it’s my name on the door.

 

It’s my name on the shirt. We have to be accountable. Uh, systems drive million dollar growth. So Gary Martel, uh, I like him a lot. So solid sales system required quality control processes, detailed proposal writing, customer communication protocols, schedule management, and then process documentation essential. So having your systems in place, having your processes in place, if you’re gonna scale, it’s all gonna burn down if you don’t have it, so you need to have it anyways. Process over people quality, quality I like this from Chris. Is Chris still, is he in the room yet, Chris?

 

God, I hate that guy so much. All right. You know he didn’t watch me ride the bull either. Dude came and watched Jesse. He didn’t watch it. God, right, um, I should have, I should have taken him out of this whole thing. So quality is a permission to play. So this part I think is really, is really like how many websites, how many, how many painting company websites do we see that it’s like our, our quality is OK. You know, we use like kind of middle of the bucket materials.

 

We do an OK job. Everything’s like, oh we’re top quality, we use premium material. Nobody cares, right? That’s just a, that’s a permission to play. It’s not a selling point. If you said anything different, they’d be, what are you talking about? So that means it’s just noise to people. So quality is a permission to play, that’s an expectation. But what you’re selling is the experience. What you’re selling is the ease. What you’re selling is the reliability. You’re just going to get it done. It’s not gonna be a problem, right?

 

They can depend on you. If they assign it to you, it’s, it’s done. It’s, it’s out of their mind. Uh, so quality, quality paint jobs are just table stakes, the real differentiators, the customer experience, uh, on it achieves a 10003+% lead to estimate conversion. That’s a very, very high set rate. Uh, you can’t build your business around an exceptional person or exceptional people because those are hard to find. You want to build your business around exceptional processes. Again, building those processes, those systems in your business. Uh, niche focus, I really like this a lot, goes back to what Dave talked a lot about with the different, different pages and targeting your different avatars.

 

Don’t try to be everything to everyone. So whether you’re you’re doing new construction or commercial repaint, health care, industrial churches, whatever you’re doing, speak directly to that avatar and build that messaging around that specific avatar. People drive growth, we’re in the people business without the right people by your side, you’re not gonna grow because you cannot do it all yourself. Have to build the killer team, every entrepreneur, every business owner ever. Talks about their team, you know, they did it because of their team. So getting good at hiring, getting good at inspiring, developing those leadership skills, it’s all really important, uh, if you’re gonna grow a really big, a big and successful company.

 

And then think big picture. I like this a lot. I think people think way too smart. Growing a business is hard. It’s just hard no matter what. And it’s not really hard. It’s not harder to grow up bigger. It’s no matter what you do, it’s hard. So you might people generally think too small, they discount themselves, they think they can’t do X, Y, or Z. I think somebody else in this room. You know, who, who’s far beyond, well they, they have something I don’t have or they’re smarter than I am.

 

No, like you, you break that glass ceiling, think, think bigger. Uh, people think too small, they get stuck in the small things. Those things will work themselves out or become in uh consequential if you think about the big picture. So a recap what we covered, we talked about targeted marketing. I think that’s one of the biggest takeaways. I hope you guys take that away, speaking directly to your avatar, having a, a what’s called a funnel. It’s like an ad, a landing page, portfolio, messaging, everything for a specific avatar, not being generic.

 

You’re gonna convert, you’re gonna, you’re gonna have leads do business with you at a much higher rate. If you do that relationship building, a lot of you focus on that, but, but I think you still think about it from a B21000B. You don’t think about it from like a human to human perspective. Uh, continuous improvement, operational excellence, that that should be a given and it’s hard. Operational excellence is super hard, but you’re gonna face an uphill battle if you can’t get that right. Uh, sales, by the way, sales ends up becoming the easiest thing.

 

So as you start a business, sales is the struggle. How do I get leads? How do I sell? When you actually start scaling, sales is the easiest thing. What becomes hard is the operation. So try your best to put that in place right, uh, as soon as you can. People and culture and then financial stability, so managing your cash flow. I don’t know where I’m at time wise. I have no idea. I’m, I’m alive, so I’m, I’m just feeling good. Um, I rode a bull, yeah, I rode a freaking, that’s, yeah.

 

Oh yeah, so I, I went first, like 22000st, 23st, like the whole, I didn’t, I didn’t like 1st 1st, like there were like 20 people and there was a 7:30 and there was a 9 p.m. And we’re all there and, and then they’re like, Brandon, and I was like, nope. And I’m like, Brandon, you’re out. I was like, I am not. And I, and they’re like, get up here. And I was like, do I have to go first? Like, yes. And, and like I was asking questions and I, I couldn’t help but get the perception that they didn’t care.

 

They, they like put the vest on, they put the helmet. I didn’t even know the, I didn’t know what freaking gate this thing’s leaving from. It’s like facing this way, I’m like, well, it’s gonna go forward and then it’s gonna like hit the crowd. That’s weird. But then it like went out the side, like it makes more sense. But they just like stra I’m like, what happens? They’re like, oh well, you, you lost 20003 seconds. I was like, OK, what happens then? They’re like a, a horn goes off.

 

What do you do then? Like you just hop off the bull. You just hop off the hell kind of come, you just hop off the bull. The bull’s not gonna stop. Like you’re still gonna maybe die. Like there’s, there’s no like, hey hey bull, like we made it 8 seconds, calm down. The bull doesn’t care. The bull’s not listening to that. So you, so like, you know. I’m like, this is an insane sport. You know that things are going to go bad. It’s a 100% certainty things are going to go bad.

 

There’s no like, maybe it goes well. It’s just how many seconds do I, do I wait until things go really bad for me, until I’m launched off a bull or I, I just hop off the bull, and then the bull maybe tries to kill me. That’s a stupid sport. Don’t listen to Jesse. It’s like a, that’s like a, that’s a dumb, dumb, dumb sport. All right, who has questions? Yeah. I’m on a high, man. I’m having a good day. I think that’s a I think that’s a one and done for me.

 

Yeah, there, now there were, there were like some things that I saw afterwards. I, I give it to Jesse. There were some people I saw afterwards. I’m like, you know what, I’m glad that I went first because I, I probably would have pissed myself had I like seen this and know that I was up. Yeah. You weren’t able to drink beforehand. I didn’t drink before either. Probably should have. Yeah, Brandon with everything switching over to chat GPT as a search in the future, how’s that gonna impact SEO.

 

And and everything related to marketing. What an awesome question. So yeah, there, how many of you guys have seen like the Google search has changed, the search generative experience you search, and they, they kind of got the, I love it. I hated it in the beginning. I was like, this is so weird. Now, I absolutely love it because it just, it gives you usually sometimes it’s super off, but it usually gives you a pretty good answer at the top, you know, and then there are links that you can click into to learn more and that’s how it works.

 

The concepts are the same. They’re not changing, so the whole idea of putting out quality content, content is king, building the relevant pages. Google’s gonna gonna pull from that. It’s gonna create the summary at the top, but then there are all these links that people are gonna then click, which I click a lot because I wanna learn more because it’s usually just a quick synopsis of what I searched and then they’re gonna go to the website. So it’s basically the dashboard is changing, the underlying fundamentals are not.

 

Brandon, one of the things I think we’ve struggled with, I’ve struggled with a lot is losing culture because we’re trying to put a certain number of words on a page because of the algorithms. We’re trying to have enough blogging content so that we’re seen as, you know, proficient in our profession, um. It, it’s for me, it’s become sort of this balancing act between I’ve got all the right keywords, I’ve got enough content on the page and I’m like, who’s reading 900 words on my landing page? Because nobody is.

 

And, and so. I don’t wanna become no offense to anyone who, you know, sort of pro markets a certain way and they’re very good at it, but I feel like there’s a balance to be struck in keeping culture and keeping identity and I’m just curious to know as you know. You do this every day and you see a lot of companies and you help a lot of companies, by the way, it’s a great presentation. I’m glad you didn’t break any ribs, at least none that you know of right now.

 

Um, that’ll come later. Maybe you’ll find that out next week. Hey, I think I actually do have a broken rib from riding that bull. But seriously, in your experience, how, how do you find that balance so that you don’t lose culture in the process? You’re right in the blogs, like when there’s blogs, content on my pages. I mean, the, the algorithms are set up that you, you gotta have a certain number of words. So, OK, who’s reading all those words and you, you, it becomes very. It can become very sterile or very institutional and not who we are.

 

I love it. Yeah, so super good question. So you’re, you’re writing this content for basically two different different customers. You have the bot, which is what you’re talking about, right? You’re writing it for Google. It’s not a human being, and that’s why you have to have long form content. So you’re saying. 100 words you don’t want to write 500 words. That’s the traditional blog length. uh Google’s not gonna, not gonna reward you as much for that. You typically want to target 1000 words or more because Google loves content, very greedy for that.

 

And then you’re writing it for the human beings. The way that I would say that you don’t have it be sterile or lose your culture would be the focus on the human being. So building it specifically with our pain points in mind, building it specifically for. Like actually giving thought to it, right? Because right now you can just use AI and you can, I mean I could write 1000 blogs in the next 1 minute. I can just tell AI to, to write all these blogs for me. So the, the content itself doesn’t really you’re not rewarded for that.

 

What you’re rewarded for is the thought process and actually targeting the avatar because if you guys use chat GPT or use this stuff, it’s not that smart. It pulls from, it pulls from a bunch of sources, but it doesn’t have that human element down yet. Maybe it will when the robots attack us and then everyone dies. But right now it doesn’t. It’s not, it’s not that smart. It’s just like a data aggregator and it kind of puts it together. So it’s, it’s that human element. It’s, it’s thinking through, it’s sales, it’s sales psychology.

 

It’s thinking through who you’re actually, what’s the purpose of the blog? We’re, we’re putting the blog because Google needs it, but there should be a deeper purpose. Somebody should want to read those 900 words. If, if you say nobody’s gonna read, nobody cares, it’s probably not written the right way. And then uh with that being said, when you’re writing 900 words, 1000 words, 2000 words. Again, going into just marketing, have multiple calls to action. So like at the top, like, hey, request an estimate or move forward or contact us and then throughout always have that because a lot of times they won’t read the whole thing, but maybe they read some.

 

Don’t make them then hunt for how to contact your company. Have uh always as you’re scrolling down the page, there should be some clear call to action there there should be a bunch on the page. The longer it is, the more calls to action you should have. OK, I have 3 comments. Um, what was said Bull’s name? I don’t know. Do you plan on getting the bull tattoo? No. And is it more important to start with a website with marketing or start a marketing program and build your website to it?

 

I think the the website it’s it’s. Necessary but not sufficient. So a lot of times if there’s a smaller company, I’ll tell them just use, use Wix or you know just use some template you just need to have a professional presence, but it’s not gonna generate leads for you, not in the beginning. It will take a long time. So you have to have some professional presence, but if you’re debating between those two, the marketing programs a lot more important early on, but you can’t not have a professional looking website because then you people are gonna do their homework on you and they’re not gonna move forward with you.

 

So you have to build something. Sufficient and then you need to move forward with an actual marketing program. Thank you guys. I appreciate you.

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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.