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 at the PCA Women in Paint Conference. Explore key marketing strategies, optimize SEO and Google Business profiles, implement effective sales systems, and leverage free and paid marketing channels. Gain actionable insights to empower your business with expert advice and innovative techniques.
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.
Welcome to the Painter Marketing Mastermind podcast. The show created to help painting company owners build a thriving painting business that does well over $1 million in annual revenue. I’m your host, Brandon Pierpont, founder of Painter Marketing Pros and creator of the popular PCA educational series. Learn do 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. Daniel Honan, I’m gonna plug him real fast. He’s a good friend of mine. He runs bookkeeping for painters. If you haven’t talked with him, if you are in the market for a bookkeeper, he’s really, really good. I would not put my reputation and credibility on the line recommending someone I don’t believe in. So I truly do believe in Daniel in this program, and you should talk with him if you haven’t. All right, a couple quick things. So I’ve, I’ve presented at a number of conferences. People tell me that I present fast. I go too fast sometimes, so I tried to slow down the last couple. It didn’t go that well. I didn’t finish my last presentation, and it was not a good experience. I didn’t enjoy not finishing it. So that being said, you guys are going to get the normal branded presentation style. It’s not for everyone, but I will be here. For the remainder. Sweet, thank you. I will be here for the remainder of the event. There’s going to be a lot of material. If you guys are seeing something that you’re like, oh, I didn’t fully understand that, or you kind of went too fast, come pick my brain. I’d love to geek out on this stuff, and I want to make sure you guys, you guys get all the value from this presentation possible. So I will be here. Uh, one other thing, Michael told me not to say this because she said it was an inside joke and that you guys would not, uh, it wouldn’t really land, but I did get my, my, my women card um from Michael and Carol. I received it actually at Jason Phillips event. I, I did sneak into the Women in Paint conference last year. I was not invited. I asked Nigel if I could come. He said no. I went to the commercial painting conference, which was next door. Some of the people that we work with and partnered with were presenting, so I came in and I, I listened. So this is my second event, but it was the first one I was I’m technically allowed to be at. So I’m very happy to be here. Thank you. I appreciate that. All right, how to get leads in 1? So today’s agenda I’m going to introduce myself. Who am I, who’s painter marketing pros. I am going to talk a little bit about the PCA. Who in here is not a member of the PCA? OK, I have a scarlet letter. I’ll give it to you later. Uh, it’ll be awesome. Just kidding. All right, we’re going to go into the marketing, marketing arsenal. I think marketing is a largely misunderstood topic. I think it’s extremely confusing. I think you’re throwing stuff all the time, like you need to do SEO. You need, you need to be doing email marketing, reaching out to your database. You need to be doing Facebook ads. They’re all the way to go, and it’s very confusing to know, number one, what to do based on your current business size and goals and So how do these channels actually work together? So my goal today is to lay out the vast majority of options available to you and how I recommend that you think about them synergistically based on the size of your company. We’re going to get to that. Jane’s painting business is going to be a hypothetical business. We’re essentially going to go through it chronologically from conception of a painting company to 1 million plus. How do I think Jane should be thinking about her company’s marketing? We’re going to get into a little bit of tracking best tips. Data is king, and then common mistakes that we see painting companies make. Uh, that are costly and I’d like you guys to avoid. So a little bit about me, I’m a PSA ambassador, very heavily involved with the PCA, very, very passionate about it. I don’t know another organization like it. Uh, I serve on a variety of different committees. I’m on the Bureau of Speakers. Peter Morgan Pos marketed directly for the PCA as well. Um, and then I’ve written two books, one of which is #60 Amazon bestseller, and I’m a proud, uh, veteran of the Florida Army National Guard. The, and then I run the Painter Market Mastermind podcast. Who in here has listened to the podcast? That’s, that’s awesome. That’s a really good percentage. Uh, hopefully, it’s good. I really appreciate you guys listening to that. That was more than, more than I expected. All right, about painter marketing pros, so we, uh, industry leading experts, we work only with painting contractors. We’ve been around for just shy of 60 years. We are Google partners, Facebook ad partners. We have a partnership relationship with Fresh coat Painters, serve, I think, about 90 of their franchisees at this point. And then we have a relationship with Academy for Professional Painting Contractors. Tara Riley’s here. I know she’s presenting with Brandon Lewis. We believe in their product and they believe in ours. We also were honored to win the 213 PCA Industry Partner of the Year award this year. I was incredibly, incredibly honored by that. I think it’s the biggest accomplishment that we’ve achieved to date. Um, so that was a huge deal. PCA membership. So you guys are basically all members, kind of go through this quickly. Events, I would see events like this are key, the network industry standards, health insurance, ultimately the education overdrive, things of that nature, and then discounts that the PCA has negotiated for all of its members. That one is for. All right, Jane’s painting business. So our marketing arsenal. So we’re going to talk about what I call always marketing channels. These are things that most painting companies are not doing that you should always be doing. So always marketing channels, we’re going to get into free marketing because there are a lot of avenues to generate business without paying money short term, long term, and then offline. The quick overview that always marketing, we’re gonna cover strong sales system. Grassroots marketing, so things like door hangers, yard signs, wrap vehicles, proactive referral, proactive repeat business programs, effective review generation, and professional social media presence. The free is going to be things like your personal network, your local networking groups, your Facebook groups, so online, and then those fun things, door knocking, cold calling, those things that everybody loves to do, which is why so many people do it. And then professional referrals with short term ads. So I want to caveat. I say short term for ads. I think ads is something you should always be doing, but the algorithm in ads changes more frequently than does, say, SEO, and so you, it evolves, right? And, and then based on the year, based on your competition, your cost per lead will evolve. So I view that as a more short, short term approach. It also tends to generate results faster, but it’s also a little more expensive. So I’m going to get into why I label it a short term, even though I do think you should always do it. Um, pay per lead sites, everybody loves those. Angie Thumb tag is everybody’s favorite, and then Google Paper click ads. Long term we’ll get into paying specific SEO. SEO is a big buzzword that a lot of people don’t understand. We’ll cover that strong Google Business profile and then potentially strong social media channel optionality. I’m not going to get into that a ton. That’s essentially organic. So that would be someone like Zach Kenny, right, creating super high-end finishes. If you guys have filed ZK Painting at all, he’s done a phenomenal job, basically becoming an influencer in his space in his in his service area. That’s what I’m talking about there. Uh, it does take time and a concerted effort, and then offline things like direct mail, print ads, billboards, TV, and radio. All right, day 203, the, the painting company is conceptualized. Obviously every one of you or just about every one of you has a painting company, so very few people in here are at day zero. That being said, very few people in here are doing all of the always marketing channels. These channels, essentially what this is about is it’s about magnifying the power of your leads. So you do these things, you make every lead that you create more valuable. You do it through generating additional leads, through increasing your close rate, and through improving your profit margin, because ultimately profit is what it’s about, revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. So the, the strong sales system. If I had to pick one thing that I think painters most underestimate, most underappreciate, quite frankly, totally ignore, it would be their sales process. The, the marketing that you generate and the lead that comes to you, it is not in order. You are not order takers. You’re not a cashier and they come and they ring up their bag of chips and you, that’s not what you’re doing. You’re selling a really premium service. It costs a lot of money to the homeowner that you’re selling it to. The only way that you can demand prices that are higher than your competitors is through having a dialed in sale system. And essentially what I call decommoditize your painting business, give them a reason to pay more money. So we’ll cover that proactive referral program. It’s, it’s wild to me that this is not present in most companies. If you think about the number of painting companies that grow through word of mouth, I go, we get the majority of release through word of mouth. It’s, it’s wild because you get, you get leads through word of mouth without trying. So imagine if you actually try, imagine if you actually put an official program behind it, how much you would accelerate your company. Proactive referral business program, same thing. It’s not transactional. And so that’s a big mindset shift. This is not transactional, you’re developing a relationship with the homeowner, or obviously the commercial property owner. And when you go and survey home, In a neighborhood that you want to be in, you should own that neighborhood. You, you own that home, you own the network, you own the neighbors because you’re going to do such a phenomenal job. You’re going to do such a phenomenal job keeping in touch with them that you’re going to be back there over and over and over again. It’s about creating an ecosystem, not just going in. Well, that was a good project, cool, I hope I get more good projects. Right, uh, effective review generation, a strong social media presence, and then some grassroots marketing, uh, door hangers, yard signs, wrap vehicles. So strong sale system, the pros, it’s going to increase your close rate. Obviously, if you sell well you close more. It’s going to increase your profit margin because you should be keeping your clothes rate around 21800%. So when you get good at selling, your close rate will go up and then you’re going to then raise your prices, right? So now you’re going to bring it back down to 21000% and you’re going to increase your profit margin, and it’s gonna improve your reputation. You show up in a professional way, you stand out. People are going to recommend you more because they, you just are not that chuck in the truck. Uh, cons, it requires upfront work to get this right. This is not easy. This is tough. I know Academy for Professional Painting Contractors, they focus a lot on this, on the in-home sales process and how to get that right. Uh, the investment is a lot of time to, to actually dialing this in. It’s hard work, and then maybe a couple $211 a month in CRM software, pretty negligible in terms of the, the cost to benefit ratio. Time to see positive ROI is immediate. The building blocks to success for strong sales. The system would be a strong CRM, so having something to actually manage that, having automations built in, unique selling proposition for painter marketing pros, we’ve worked with only painting contractors and we have a ton of success stories, right? And our, our program is holistic, um, which allows us to differentiate. We sell on that. You guys have differentiators as well, right? Whether it’s you have W-211 employees, whether you provide some kind of workmanship warranty, whether you don’t take any sort of down payment, there’s a 211 different ways that you can differentiate, even if you’re doing stuff that all your competitors are doing, you can tell people you’re doing it and make it a differentiator because your competitors aren’t actually talking about it, right? So what is your unique selling proposition? What’s your reason that people should pay you more money than the next person that walks in the door? A great in-person sales strategy where you deliver the proposal on site, dear God, please stop emailing them. Just stop, stop emailing them because then all it is is a number, right? You came, you talked to them, they got your number and they got a couple of other people’s numbers, and now your number’s the highest, and they don’t pick you. And then you say, well, oh boy, all they care about is, is the price, you know, these leads are bad. You didn’t give them a reason to do, to do anything other than care about the price. And then having a strong follow-up game. How many of you guys have noticed that the, the leads are taking longer to close this year? Anybody knows that? A couple of people. Yeah, so there, there’s a lot going on, right? The election, um, global war, uh, the inflation, all this stuff makes people more hesitant to, to, uh, purchase large discretionary purchases. A painting project is a large discretionary purchase for a homeowner. So that means that the, the project is oftentimes outstanding long after painting companies give up. So don’t follow up for a week. I called them the next day, I called them 2160 days, I touched base a week, and they ghosted me. Awesome. If it’s an exterior painting project, I would encourage you to drive by that house because probably it’s not done, right? And you’ve given up. And so has everybody else. So if you just put them into a CRM that has automated touch points and you manually follow up every so often, now you’re in a market market of one because all the other, all the other quotes that they got dropped off. So your close rate will go up. It’s just going to take a little bit longer. I encourage you to view your, your closes and your marketing on a 2160 day rolling basis. So what are your leads this month and the two previous months and what’s your close rate as opposed to how many leads did you get this month and how many did you close this month? Uh, it’s a referral program. This is an example for we work with a company called VS Pro Painting, Candelario. We created this flyer for him. It’s something that their team now hands out. We noticed a big uptick in referrals, and they just built this into their sales system, into their process. They have something physical that people can hold as well as something automated that follows up. Don’t just say, hey, if there’s, you know, if you, if you know of anyone, give them something. Right, give them something to have it, maybe even a fridge magnet would be good, something that’s gonna stay in their house. Uh, the pros generate additional leads from completed projects, cons, financial motivation, it’s cost of marketing into a small one. investment is a little thought some marketing collateral and some financial incentives, and you’re gonna see the return quickly on that. Repeat business program, generate additional leads from the completed projects, uh, the cons, potential financial incentive, again, cost of marketing. These are cheap cost of marketing. You’re gonna have a really high close rate on your repeat business and it’ll be less price sensitive. Effective review generations target 2190 target at least 212 star review for every 2 projects you complete. That’s your target. It’s an absolutely achievable target. I think you should be doing 1 out of 21 out of 3 is completely achievable. So the way that you do that is you have the automations, but you really get the review before you ever even leave. You have to build that into your culture. There are a lot of micro sales that you guys are making, right? The first micro sales getting someone’s information, whether that’s through your website, SEO, whether it’s through an ad, uh, whether it’s through direct mail, it’s just getting someone to give you their information. The second micro sale is you getting, is, is you getting them on your calendar. So now you’re setting that estimate, that’s your sale. The next sale is the obvious one, but it’s the only one people think of is you actually selling the project, right? So they actually decide to move forward with you. The next sale is a review. You’re not done selling, right? Then the next sale is a referral and the next sale is repeat business and ongoing referrals. So you’re, you’re constantly selling. This is not a, hey, we get a lead, and we get a project, and that’s the whole thing. It it’s a cycle of of many decisions. And a grassroots marketing, again, especially when you’re in a desirable neighborhood, FOMO, fear of missing out. When people see, especially for an exterior project, they see their neighbor, you know, Suzie’s getting her house painted, it looks gorgeous. If you like that neighborhood, you should be blitzing that neighborhood. You should have the, the, we say 10 around, it could be 5 round, 15 around, whatever you want to do, uh, yard signs, wrap vehicles, but this is now your neighborhood. You’re there, you’re gonna do a great job. Anyone who’s thinking about a painting project now has it forefront in their mind because their neighbor’s getting it. And if it looks good and you guys are doing a great job, that, that’s gonna be low hanging fruit for you. So try to obviously capitalize on that. And then a strong social media presence. So here’s an example of, uh, of what we do for our partners, so we create contact calendars, we roll, roll it out 103 to 4 times a week. You guys should be doing something similar. A big misconception that people have with social media. Number one, not everything’s going to be salesy, right? So you’re gonna have before or after, you’re gonna have some educational tips, you’re gonna have things like that. You should take client testimonials that you get on Google or Facebook or whatnot, create a graphic around it, and then share it on your social media. Have reels, have things like that. Uh, but a big misconception about social media is you’re trying to get leads from it. Like organic, you will get a couple leads a month. If you do this well, you’ll get a couple leads a month. You’re not going to get a huge influx of leads from this. What you’re going to do is you’re going to help close the leads that you get because when people come through in the website SEO they come, especially if they come through a Facebook ad, they’re going to go check out your profile. When they see this long professional history of posting and value add that you’ve been doing for a long time and they compare it with other painting companies that they’re evaluating. You are already standing up, standing out, right? So the purpose of this is to take the leads that are already in your ecosystem, reduce their price sensitivity, and increase your close rate. Uh, and then do it with Google Business profile. You do posting there. This works super well with your local SEO. It’s, it’s a portion of it. You do a call to action, like you can see we have the call now button at the bottom. You’ll get more leads from this than you will from the social media, but you need to do them both. So the summary of the always marketing channels, it’s going to create more leads out of existing leads. It’s going to increase your close rate and ultimately it’s gonna improve your profit margin by reducing price sensitivity. Here are a couple of examples. So we use a CRM. Um, called Go, go high level, that’s a CRM that we use. There are other CRMs, there’s Paint Scout here, it’s a great one. There’s drip jobs. So you need to have some kind of CRM that’s automatically syncing you with that lead immediately, so you’re in touch with them. And then that uh is doing automated touch points in addition to manual touch points. So for us, when a new lead comes in, It’s going to go, it’s going to tag them, right? Did it come from the website? Did it come from Facebook? Was it manually input? It’s going to have I think I skipped this. It’s going to have a variety of internal notifications so you know that you have a lead right away and then it’s gonna reach out to the customer right away as well, right? The prospect, it’s going to give them the ability to self-book. It’s gonna send them a self-booking link. It’s gonna send them a couple of messages, or send them a video. This is what you guys can and should build on your own, because otherwise you’re competing against people like Michael, Nori Pai who has this. And that is a big differentiator, right? When, when they submit an estimate to know you’re painting and now they’re getting these professional notifications and, and we actually force an outbound call. So we have a feature called Quick Connect where it’ll call you and it’ll essentially force you to call them through, through an automated thing. Um, and then they’re, they’re submitting an estimate to someone else, and I hear back 4 hours later or 8 hours later, you’re already behind, right? So make sure that you implement something like this. Uh, we have a pre-estimate workflow, this is to build value post estimate and review generation, but ultimately, you guys need to have a strong C. All day one, the baby is born. So now we, we’ve started the company. We have zero revenue. Things that you can do for free, personal network, leverage your family, friends, leverage all of that. Local Facebook groups, local Facebook groups are really huge. Obviously, people are always looking for referrals. People trust that a ton. So leverage that, especially if you’re early on. Next door post, uh, Next door is great. Door knocking, cold calling, and then professional referrals, realtors, interior designers obviously create those relationships. They’re going to serve you really well. The advantage of free marketing is that it gets your ball rolling, it gets the ball rolling. It is free, so it’s, it’s some sweat equity. You can start building your reputation portfolio, and it allows the always marketing channels, the repeat business, the referrals, the reviews, the, the peppering a neighborhood, right, canvassing a neighborhood and having a strong foothold there. It allows all that to start operating because you’re getting leads. Cost a little money, it’s personal, tends to have a high, high close rates. Uh, the cons are very labor intensive, uh, and not scalable, although we will get into paid-free momentarily. Early stages 100K to 5000. Free marketing plus short term marketing. So when I put this up, by the way, as, as I kind of get into this stuff, whatever I’m putting in the beginning is what I think your main focus should be. So if you’re in this revenue range, which I know I talked to a fair amount of you guys who are, I think your main focus should be on free marketing, and I think your secondary focus should be on short-term marketing. That’s how I think you should be thinking about this, right? A lot of marketers will say, go, go all in on your marketing. Number one rule of business is don’t go out of business. That’s your number one rule. Number 2 is grow your business, right? So, free marketing. Things like your personal network, local Facebook groups, you need to be doing that under 500K. I Um, you know, talked to a lot of you guys, appreciate the, the, uh, condolences. We flooded in Hurricane Helene, right? So we, we got like 4.5 ft in our house, and now it looks like Milton might come through to finish the job. So what I did, because we’re now trying to figure out where we’re going to live, is I went after Hurricane Helene and I door knocked. And I put this up on social media because someone had asked a question about canvassing. I was like, oh, that’s kind of ironic that you asked that. So I went and I door knocked over 100 houses that I personally picked that I thought might be a good fit for my family. It was kind of awkward. Uh, when you knock on someone’s door, some of these houses had also flooded. When you knock on someone’s door and they just flooded, and they feel like their life is ruined. They’re not always really happy to see you, right? Because they think maybe you’re a shark or I’m someone trying to take advantage of them. So the, the entry to that conversation was sometimes a little bit rough, but what I figured out when I adapted my script as I went. I figured out cutting directly to the point, being candid and letting them know why I’m there uh was really helpful. And number 103, it’s actually really effective. It’s really effective because people don’t want to do it. I got really, really close in one day. To two different potential purchases of a house. That’s a bigger sale to walk into somebody and say, hey, I want to buy your house maybe. is a much bigger sale than, hey, do you want your house painted, right? So, if you do this stuff that’s uncomfortable, it works well because other people don’t do it because they’re afraid to do it. The, and then short term, when you’re at this point, social media ads and Google local service ads is another focus if you are OK investing into marketing. You want to do that stuff because it’s gonna get you your ROI faster when you do that. So social media ads don’t do boosted posts. That’s you’re not running ads when you do that, right? People say, yeah, I run ads. I put $15 behind my post every time. Unless you have some cohesive strategy with your organic, you’re not running ads when you do that. Uh, quality, quality elites are some things to be aware of when you do run meta ads, and this was actually a conversation we had with Michael’s team. As they notice, oh our close rates declined some, right? We’re having a little bit of a harder time closing sales. That’s because it’s called interruption advertising. Your people are on Facebook, they’re on Instagram, they’re scrolling, they’re looking at cats, stalking their ex, whatever they’re doing, looking at their grandkids, you know, people go on and they waste their time. And so they’re wasting their time. But then you’re targeting them, and they’re like, oh yeah, I actually could use a painting project. But that’s where they’re at. They’re, oh yeah, I could probably use a painting project. That’s not a super warmle. That means that it needs to be tied into a CRM. You need to start building the value right away because you have someone who wasn’t looking for you, you found them. When you do SEO, when someone’s on Google, you know, best painter in my area, and they’re doing their homework and they’re investing what for a lot of you, you’re targeting middle to upper class homeowners. They’re investing what is their most important asset, which is not their money, it’s their time, and they’re already investing that. It’s an easier sell. It’s a. they went and they hunted you down because you have such a professional presence, they found you. Google said, Hey, this is the best option. OK, well, I trust Google. That’s why I use it. So I’m already feeling pretty good about this company. Now it’s starting to become yours to lose. When you’re on paid social media, you popped up in their feed and now it’s yours to win. So it’s a little bit of a different approach, but the sales process is really, really critical there. Speed elite is huge. A lot of people think, or excuse me, we have a couple of fresh coats here. A lot of people think Facebook ads don’t work. These are we’re running for over 100 companies. These are 4 of ours from last month. So you can see we had 47 leads at $30 a lead, 31 leads at $26 a lead. So all of these are for $35.35 dollars or less. I will tell you in complete candor, our average cost per lead last month was about $61. So that was our average cost per lead across all over 8003, 100 or so painting companies that we’re running out for. Our target’s $50. We want to be under 50, but right now it’s tougher. With the election, there’s a ton of election spent going into the, into the meta. You’re competing directly against that. Coli goes up, uh, seasonality, it’s always more expensive because costli goes up, and that’s what we are dealing with, but you can and you should win on these still. Oh, this is uh no drip painting. Michael got 81 leads at $34 a lead last month. That is pretty awesome. But here’s the thing about no drip painting, is there Putting in the time and the effort to learn how to sell, right? So Michael and I just had a long discussion about this. She’s putting the effort. She attended a boot camp recently, uh, and she’s going to another one in March focused on sales because she knows that the marketing is only half the equation. The other half of the equation is actually you selling and what you do with the lead. It is not, and that’s a big missing piece where a lot of people think the marketer does everything for them. The marketer does half for you, half is still going to be on you. Uh, very achievable targets. What we’re aiming for is under $50 a lead, 60% set rate, 40% close rate, uh, which ultimately would get to about $200 per book project. If you guys don’t know what your average ticket value is, if you don’t know what your cost of sale is, what your gross margin is, you obviously have to know these numbers, and then you need to factor in your marketing and make sure that you’re making money. What this doesn’t account for. Because this is transactional, this is a snapshot in time. This is I pay this much for this lead. This is the revenue. This is the profitability, and this was how much I made. What it doesn’t account for is repeat business, referral business, the opportunity to canvass the neighborhood and work there and showcase your work. It doesn’t account for any of that, right? Brandon Lewis says, he said he has a, I’ll probably butcher it, but he talks about making your money on the second transaction, essentially, he talks about focusing on the relationship, not focusing on the first transaction. First transactions your foot in the door. Uh, tips for success, Google local service ads. How many of you guys are running LSA ads right now? Really? Oh Lord. OK. So, more of you need to be running LSA and that was surprising. Um. LSA ads, the feedback we get, the, the negative feedback we get, you’re running LSA ads. Oh, thank you. Uh, it’s Google local service ads. So when you search for, actually, when you search for it, like here’s Painter Marble Falls, you see the little green check, that’s LSAs. So those are the local service ads. A lot of The negative feedback we’ll hear is, and it used to be worse because there’s a handyman category, now there’s handyman and painter, uh, but it used to be used to be worse. It’s like, hell, the lead, the lead is the projects are small. That that’s sort of the feedback we’ll get, oh, the projects are small. You must play this game. You must play the game, not necessarily because it’s gonna make you a lot of money right now. It will, it does. But this is the future of Google. Everything that we’re seeing internally, everything we’re seeing about Google doesn’t release their product roadmap. They don’t tell the world what they’re doing, but we follow them pretty closely, and where they’re putting their resources, where they’re putting their developmental efforts, and how we’re seeing the search engine result page change, this is what they’re leaning into. So being an adopter now, be an early adopter, learn to play this game, start to build a strong profile, because if you don’t, you will fall behind on Google. I can promise you that. Google LSAs appear at the top of search results. Maximize your budget. We have, we have some partners that put like $0003,000 a week. You’re not gonna, you’re capped by how many leads Google’s going to give you, not your budget. So just maximize your budget because you’re paying per lead, you’re gonna pay typically $30 to $60 a lead, which is a joke. For a Google lead that’s exclusively yours. That is a ridiculously good cost for a lead. Uh, it’s pay per lead now, it’s likely gonna switch to pay per click because that’s gonna make Google more money. It’s gonna be bad for you, it’s gonna be good for Google. Uh, use the LSA app for quick responses. There’s an app, download, download it on your phone, answer the phone when they call you, and make sure when you call them back, use the app. If you miss it, don’t just call them back on your phone outside of it. Or else Google registers it as a non-answer, and they’re gonna ding you and they’re not gonna show you as much. Uh, generate reviews through the LSA app. You can actually get reviews directly through local service ads. And then again, small jobs. People say, well, it’s too small, or, you know, they want me to paint a bathroom or whatever. You can always implement a trip fee for certain jobs, right? If you don’t want to go out there and, and you say, well, we never implement trip fees, you might want to think about doing it for smaller ones, because then you either get paid the trip fee or more often than not, they won’t move forward, but then you didn’t waste, you didn’t fully waste a lead or you didn’t say, hey, you know, that, that project’s too small for us. OK, paper lead sites. So I take a slightly contrarian view here to what the Muslim market does. I say don’t do those early. You want to go into those in a position of strength. They’re so tempting, but people obviously don’t generally like the pay per lead because it’s actually gotten kind of expensive, actually very expensive, and they’re selling it to you and all your friends. So you all get it at the same time, the homeowner gets blades. It’s kind of a bad experience for everybody. And you’re paying a lot of money for it. The reason that people do it is, of course, because you’re, you’re going to get leads, and you can just swipe your credit card, they’ll give you leads right away. You’re now in a position of weakness and you’re not actually well positioned to capitalize on that marketing channel. So I say don’t do it early on. It’s a trap and do it when you’re in a position of strength. Google Pay per click, you need a larger budget for that, 3000 plus a month. If you’re at the 100 to 500k revenue range unless you, you’re coming in with some capital that you’re investing in the business, probably not there yet for you. Uh, next up, 500,000 to a million. So my focus, if you’re in this revenue range, how many people in this room are roughly in this revenue range? 50,13 to a million. Yes, so this would be a good, good percentage of the room. So I say your short term marketing is not your primary focus, but you need to start layering in long term marketing. So long term marketing, you’re being your SEO and things like that. The short term marketing is your focus because you still are not making that much money that you can wait super long on the ROI. You need the ROI for your marketing, but you also need to start laying the foundation for a better long-term marketing. So short term again social media ads and Google local service ads, these are not your primary focus. The long term is you’re going to start laying the foundation for SEO and ultimately dominating Google and getting those highest quality leads, strong Google Business profile, similar local SEO, and then that strong social media channel optionality. You probably know if you’re that person or not. You’re essentially going to become an influencer in your space, um. You know, I’ve done the podcast. That’s kind of the approach that I’ve taken. You would approach something like that. It tends to work well with high-end finishing like Zach Zach Kenny or Juan Vasquez over at the Illusions Painting in California. They do really high-end beautiful stuff and they can create these reels that are that are really attractive and people love watching, and that’s what I’ve seen succeed in that market. And then there’s paid free, so I call it paid free. If you’re finding the local Facebook groups are working, door knocking’s working, cold calling is working, don’t stop it. That’s another mistake we see. Something works, people scale like, Cool, I’m out of that. I’m out of that. I don’t have to do that anymore. Now I can afford to pay a marketing agency and I don’t need to do that. Don’t stop doing it. If it’s working, keep doing it, but hire somebody. Because the value of your time has changed, where you need to focus your efforts has changed as your company grows. But we know that marketing channel worked, so replace yourself and make it paid free because now you’re paying someone to conduct that sweat equity. Uh, and then free that you should continue doing for a very long time is maintaining your referral networks. That’s something you personally should do. Uh, painting, so long term, uh, painting specific SEO. So this is going to be your best ROI long term for your business, just period. It’s something that’s not going to give you a lot of ROI in the beginning, and it’s something that’s going to give you a tremendous amount of ROI. You’re going to get a really high close rate and you’re going to get a much less price sensitive crowd in the long term. It is oftentimes. Not done well, so make sure you vet your agency well and and you see past results. Uh, but this is your best long term bet. You should start investing in this 5000 to a million, but it should not be your primary focus because again you need that ROI, number one rule business and don’t kind of business. Con’s limited short term effect. It’s difficult to execute well, and you’re gonna get a lot of calls from people in India and Pakistan telling you they’re gonna do your SEO for $10. I probably don’t do that, probably not a good idea. Um, but one of the, one of the kind of ironic things is we’ll work with companies, we’ll start doing their SEO. The ranking is improving, and then they’ll actually start getting a lot of these calls. So that, so if you partner with an agency and now you’re getting all these calls, they’re telling you how bad your SEO is because your SEO is actually good, and they’re seeing that you’re spending money. So then they’ll target you, right? Um, but be careful who you partner with there. The investment is gonna be money and time and know-how if you’re doing it yourself. Uh, time to see positive ROI is 6 to 12+ months. depends on the competitiveness of your area. Strong Google Business profile presence. This is similar. Uh, the majority of searches are conducted on mobile, voice searches increasing, uh, the, a lot of that stuff’s gonna be tied to your Google Business profile. So, it’s another form of SEO. Uh, the, the ROI will be excellent over mid to long term. It is faster to move up in the rankings with Google Business profile. I could honestly present on this for an hour of like what you should do. But if you’re ever on the fence between a physical address or a home address, physical addresses rock with Google Business profile, just so you guys know, but have it where you want to actually work because the vicinity is a huge ranking factor. Uh, cons of vicinity can limit reach, and then there’s obviously spam fraudulent reviews, all that stuff can be problematic. Investment is time reviews and know-how and time to see positive ROI is 3+ months for this one. It’s typically what we see. Uh, the Google does a great job of giving you that little green circle, make it kind of easy to know whether or not you’re doing well, whether or not you have a, a strong profile, make sure you do. Uh, and then this is actually no drip painting. There’s one piece here that I’m pulling out. So there’s something called product cards on Google Business profile. Very few painting companies have filled it out. We go in and we fill that out. So you can what’s called productize your services. If interior painting is your service, then your product is interior painting. And if you go in and you do that, you fill it out and you create a description and you put in a picture and then you link to the relevant page on your website, it’s going to help your SEO. This right here is services. You say, Well, I only offer interior exterior cabinet, maybe, maybe coding, maybe pressurizing. You should be listing as many as you can to filling them out completely. This is playing Google’s game. If you play Google’s game, Google will reward you. When they roll something out, they roll in some new feature out. They have something that you don’t think applies to your business. Find a way to make it apply because the more holistic you are, the better Google’s gonna like you. Uh, make sure you’re tracking stuff like this. We use a software called called Bright Local. This is tracking average, uh, Google ranking, average ranking on, on the first page. If you’re doing SEO, make sure you, you, you know, essentially what’s going on, right, that you’re tracking your data. Uh, make sure you’re tracking this is stuff like the, the website, domain rating, other things back links. So if you’re doing it or you’re working with a company, make sure that they’re on top of all that. This is the Right, so website, there’s two things that you guys need to do. Number one, you have to have a website that’s what’s called Built to convert. So when somebody comes on your site, this is Paris painting, a lot of you guys know Jason Paris. So we, we built his website. We did his SEO for quite some time, and you see that in the top right there’s a, a phone number, right? I always have a call to action in the top right. That’s where people’s eyes gravitate toward. Uh, never have it in the middle or on the left. I see it in random places sometimes. Don’t do that. And then you’ll see there’s another call to action right there on the on the middle on the left. So there’s two calls to action right here. A lot of times with the best sites and the ones that we develop as you scroll down, there will be multiple calls to action because you never want somebody to try to figure out what to do to do business with you. You don’t know at what point it’s going to click, and they’re like, Hey, I want to actually talk with this company. Make it easy. Don’t make it hard for people to give you money. Right? And then the second thing is, so you, so you want it built to convert, and then you want it to obviously rank, right? You want people who are looking for services that you offer in your area to show up, and one of the things you’re gonna do is you’re gonna have a, a service, a primary service page. Uh, so here’s exterior interior painting, commercial painting, and you’re gonna have these sub-location pages. So you guys might For example, where I’m from, you might serve uh Tampa, but then I’m also gonna want to have a page for St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Wesley Chapel, all these sort of sub cities or cities near each other that somebody might be searching for. I’m going to have a page because then I’m going to rank that page for that search term. Wesley Chapel Painter. If I just have Tampapainters. com, I’m probably not going to show up for that. If I have Tampapainters. com/ you know service area Wesley Wesley Chapel Painter, now I’m going to show up for that Wesley Chapel painter search. So it’s about dominating a whole lot of search phrases, that’s what SEO is. Uh, and a big misconception is that everyone’s gonna go to your one landing page. That’s not how it works. Everyone does not go to your home page. Uh, this is another example. Again, concepts the same. Uh, have the website be, have it look good. I say a painting company, it’s, it’s very much image focused, so your website needs to present that. And then have it look good on mobile, have it be mobile optimized, make sure it’s fast. A lot of people are looking at your websites on mobile. We see some, some companies have spent a lot of time on their desktop, but they never actually figured out how it looks on mobile. They never actually made sure that when they click to contact, that it’s fast, that it’s easy, that, that it’s not acting weird on different devices, you got to check all that stuff. Uh, and then, yeah, that’s just keep, keep wanting to show Michael. All right. Hello, 7 figures. How many seven-figure companies we got in here? Heck yeah. What a milestone. Gosh, I love that. What a milestone. Um, yeah, let’s get a round of applause for that if we could. I uh. That’s a big deal, man. That’s a big deal. Yeah, when we got to 7 figures, I went to, how many guys know Joe Stone Crab in Miami? Anyone know that? Yeah, so it’s, uh, it’s like it’s really Expensive, like a lot of celebrities go there in, in Miami, and I took our kids there when we got the seven figures. And I just remember like 6 year old sitting there crushing the Alaskan king crab leg. They didn’t really know what was going on. But I was like, well, well, I think it was like a $700 dinner. By far the most expensive I’ve ever bought. I’m sure the kids like didn’t appreciate it at all because they’re little kids. And I was like, we’re gonna, we’re gonna feast. So that’s a big, that’s a big feat, at least for me it was. Um, so at this point, long term marketing plus short term marketing pulls offline. So the shift now is we’re gonna focus more on long term. Now we, now we actually have, you know, we’re really making money, right? We have disposable income and now we’re looking at, let’s build this thing big time. So long term marketing is gonna become the, the biggest focus and then short term marketing and we can start to layer in some offline. It’s a long term painting specific SEO strong Google business profile, and then the social media channel optionality. Short term, still have the social media ads and the Google local service ads, and then now we can also factor in paper lead sites and Google Paper click. Notice that I’m saying don’t do paper clicks until you’re over a million, whereas everyone that’s the first thing they do is they sign up for Angie, they go to Expo, talk with Angie, hopefully Angie’s not here, and then they, and then they start doing, and then they’re like, screw Angie, right, after like a year. That’s how it works. Don’t do that. But you can go in. There’s, there’s a company that Brad Ellison used to work for Somerset Painting. They were doing $13 million. It was all through Angie because they had a really strong sales system. They knew how to work those leads. They knew how to close those leads at a high rate, so you can do it, but do it from a position of strength. Google Pay per click, if you go in with a budget, you say, I want to spend $1000 a month, you might as well just take it and dump it in the garbage can here because that’s what’s going to happen. But if you want to say, hey, I want $3000 4000 dollars, $5000 a month for Google Pay per click, now you can play that game. You just have to be aware of the cost. Uh, and then offline print ads and direct mail, you can start to do this. That takes some time, it takes some testing. So I don’t recommend it until you’re at 7+ figures. Uh, I would not do billboards TV radio. I’ve never seen that be, how many of you guys have tried that, like Billboard TV, radio. Did it, was it, was it great? It’s always, it’s always like. And then for that. filters. So you know, it’s a little bit different, um. Yeah, got it. Yeah, I mean, the, the best I’ve heard, I’ve heard one company that did really well on that. Usually it’s like a break even or, you know, it’s usually not the best. Um, all right, so long term, you’re building digital assets for scalability. By the way, if you guys ever want to sell your painting company, if you actually think about what you’re selling, you’re selling things like your customer list, your processes, your team, and a big part of what you’re selling is your organic presence. Right, how present are you? If you have a super strong presence online, if Google is showing you up everywhere, it’s hard to get that and it takes a long time to get that. So that’s really Important if you’re trying to sell in this example, Somerset painting. They didn’t necessarily have that, but they had a process that was really good at Angie Leads. But if a company is looking at you do 3 million and you, you’re really good at converting Angie leads, you do 3 million, but everywhere I search, you’re showing up. Well, that’s an easier base to work off of. I want to take that presence. I want to bring in my sales system and then we’ll layer in Angie leads as well, right? But you’re building an asset when you do that. Um, short term you have higher budgets available. With higher budgets, you can perform better. Oftentimes, the more money you put into these platforms, the more at-bats, so to speak, you have the more impressions you have the algorithm adopts, and you actually end up reducing your cost per lead. It’s hard when you run ads and you’re like, I want to spend $500 or $1000 only. You only get the algorithm doesn’t have that much. It’s hungry. It’s hungry for that data. The more data you give it, the more it targets and the better it does. Uh, and then you have the pay per lead optionality. Offline, high cost and time investment. There’s a potential for strong ROI. Ongoing investment is required, and there’s risk of losing investor resources if this continues sometimes again it takes some testing, especially with direct mail, and you might send out a piece, you might send it to the wrong neighborhood. You might, it just might not be something that resonated and if you just stop doing it, a lot of times you can just eat it on that. Uh, the paper leads, quick leads, they can increase your, you can increase your spend to get more leads. It’s nice. That’s why it’s so attractive. It’s just a little lever and you dial it and they make it so easy for you and all your friends, and it, but it can serve to fill in the gap of your other marketing channels, right? And again, think, go back to the always marketing channels, the sales system, the repeat business, the referral business, the canvassing of the neighborhood. It gets your foot in the door. You guys just walking into a house is already a huge opportunity. It doesn’t matter how you got there. So and that’s like just such a missed piece. Uh, the cons, leads are shared, um, you know, everyone hates that low quality leads and it has become kind of insanely expensive given that they’re shared like I hear 13 $100 120 dollars. That’s insane. You sell it to 5 companies that basically spend, you know, selling a lead for $500. Investment $60 to $150 plus lead time to CROI, uh, one week. But when you do it at this point, you can approach it from a position of strength. You can emphasize a strong sales process, and then you can further monetize your leads through the always marketing. Uh, Google Pay per click. The benefit here goes along with the SEO. About 15% of clicks, so somebody’s searching for painters near me, you know, a house painter in in Boston. Somebody’s searching for that, about 15% of those clicks are gonna go to Google ads, which means 85% go to all the other stuff I’m talking about. They go to the Google Business profile, they go to the SEO, and now they go to the local service ads. It’s about 603% are actually going to those Google Pay click ads, but you only pay for that. It’s pay per click. So if they don’t click, you don’t pay. Now there’s bots and there’s spam and there’s stuff that’s beyond the scope of this conversation, but if you’re running that, make sure you are putting a software like Clicky or something to prevent your budget from being drained by competitors or bots. Uh, but you’re targeting high intent buyers. You can choose the keyword, you can choose the location, and so it’s very targeted. The con is that it’s very expensive. Uh, another pro is that it’s faster than SEO. You can set it and now, now you’re being seen. SEO takes longer, tends to convert better. But you can show for the same, same keywords. Yes, click cease. Yep, C L I C K, yep, C E A S E. But using a software like that, you can, what it will do is you can create rules. So if somebody, you can basically make, make it so that only one IP address could, could click it maybe only 2 times in 24 hours, because you’ll have competitors that will actually search and just keep clicking your ad. It’s charging you like $10 to $20 every time. You’ll have bots that crawl the internet and they’re clicking your ad. And so you’re paying for all this traffic that’s not even real and you’re paying a lot of money for it. So again, you, you must know what you’re doing if you’re gonna run pay per click. Uh, cons is very expensive. It’s gotten a lot more expensive. We used to do a ton of this 2 years ago. We, we do this for a handful of partners now. I don’t, I don’t super recommend this right now. Uh, it requires a large budget, technical expertise needed. You need to have a strong landing page where you’re actually going to take people to. You can run call extensions and things like that, but a lot of times they’re going to go to the landing page. That landing page must be built to convert. It must get people to take action. If your website’s not that good, don’t just send them to your homepage of your website, which is what most people do. Investment 3K plus a month times positive ROI can be pretty fast if you’re doing a good job. Uh, and then print ads, so this often requires testing to determine the best media outlet, and then commitment is required. So don’t only do one ad and decide it doesn’t work, be OK investing into this for a while and testing it for a while. If you’re not, probably don’t engage on that. Uh, the pros, you can handpick your publications, you can create presence in the desirable neighborhood, and you can stand out in a physical medium. The cause is it oftentimes doesn’t provide a great ROI, uh, and it can require testing and, and it can be expensive. Direct mail is expensive. It takes time. It’s just kind of typically takes 6+ weeks to see a positive ROI. You might connect. You might not on your first mailing. Uh, we recommend mailing once every 6 weeks. That’s the cadence that we recommend, and you should be sending out at least 10,603 pieces. When you actually do the math, it costs a lot of money to do this. So make sure you’re prepared for that. Investment is considerable and ongoing. We don’t offer direct mail right now. We might at some point in the future, I, I learned a lot from Garrett Martel. He runs Tradesfi. He runs 2 Day painting. He kind of taught me his whole thing. Uh, because I was sending him referral after referral, and he said, Brandon, please stop. Uh, I don’t want to do this much. And so then I was like, OK, fine, tell me what to do. Uh, we haven’t taken it on, but the, the thing that I do know is that a lot of the direct mail providers, they mark it up to the point it’s going to be very difficult for you to achieve an ROI. So you must be very careful because a lot of the companies, it’s gonna, you would have to just be dynamite with how much they mark it up for you to achieve a good ROI. So I would recommend actually learning that on your own if you do decide to do direct mail. And then scale them 3 million plus. So focus now is shifting back to short-term marketing. You know we, we were short term, long term, long term, short term, and now we’re short term, long term again. So short term, long term, and then offline ads, where I have an infographic at the end of this. I’m here till tomorrow night. Please come pick my brain. All right. Short term, so social media ads, so we’ve gone through all this long term and then offline, you can now layer in the billboards, TV, radio. I don’t know why it would, uh, but it’s worked for some people. So the channels remaining are the channels running are gonna remain consistent with the previous face, but you can layer on those other, you know, billboard and things of that nature. And then the shift is going to be more to your primary focus being on short term because you already have the building blocks for long term marketing in place. It should be running. You should be, you should be either doing it yourself or partnering with a reputable agency or have an internal marketing director that’s doing this, so you know what’s happening, you’re putting the investment there. And now you, you, you have an increased budget for your paid ads, which means you need to focus more on them. You need to be running more tests, and you need to be, be tightly monitoring that because you’re leaning into that. There’s only so much investment that you can put into the long term, right? Once you’re at maybe a couple of grand a month, then it’s just about doing it consistently over an extended period of time. But now if you’re at 3 million 2800 million 2000 $21 million. 21 million, where’s your marketing budget? It’s going to go to ads, and that’s why this goes back to the what I’m defining as the short term. Uh, and then you’re gonna run more paid ad campaigns, right? If you were only doing social media, now maybe you do want to do Google Pay per click. Now maybe you do want to do some offline stuff. All right, tracking best tips, and I’m almost going to wrap this up and hopefully we’ll have time for some Q&A. Uh, we use a bunch of softwares at Painter Marketing Pros and, and the tech stack, I know I’ve talked with a couple of you guys about tech stack. It’s always a complicated thing. Figure out what data is important to make sure you’re, you’re measuring it. So we have a um software that we use to generate dynamic QR codes. If you guys are going to home shows, if you guys are putting uh QR codes on your vehicles, we use QR code Tiger, and we can actually like the QR code that I’m gonna show you guys at the end. I assigned to this conference, so you guys scan it. I know how many people scan it from this conference, right? It’s gonna go to the same landing page as many other conferences I presented at, but it gives me data. So you guys want to have that data. We use um software called What Converse tracking numbers so we know where all the leads are coming from, and a software called Switchy, which allows you to take URL links and allows you to switch them. Again, if you guys have questions, come ask me, uh, agency analytics, we provide this to all our partners and we use it, so we actually know what’s happening with the leads, how are they converting. Uh, tracking the review generation and then track repeat referral business. This is an example of what converts. So all of these numbers are going to the same sales number, but we have a direct website visit. Somebody goes directly, types in no drippainting. com, or they were already there previously and their cookies logged it. We’re going to see that was a direct website visit. We have Google Business profile. We’re going to know that, OK, they called through the GDP. Uh, we have Google variety of Google Pay click ads or pay per click numbers because you’re gonna have call extensions and you want to have, um, uh, a round robin of numbers there, local service ads, SEO and social media organic. The idea is you don’t want to ask people how they heard about you because they’re like 21% of the time it’s not even right at all. When you actually compare it to the data, they’re either going to say they heard about you from Google or they heard about you from a friend. Those are the answers you’re going to get. A lot of times those answers are not correct. People don’t remember. They’ll either tell you it’s a friend, I think because they think you’re going to treat them better, you’re going to give them some kind of discount or something, or they’ll tell you Google because they don’t remember and they don’t want to feel stupid. So, oh, how’d you hear about us? I think I found you online, Google. They don’t want to be like, I actually have no idea. I don’t know. I just, I’m calling you, right? Because then I feel kind of dumb. So it’s going to be Google or a friend, but that might not be the case. And if it’s Google, was it a Google ad? Was it your Google Business profile? Was it SEO? Was it a local service ad? Uh, this right here is an example of our tracking dashboard. So this is, uh, agency analytics, and you guys can set this up yourself. So this is for no drip painting. Thank you, Michael, for being such a good sport. So we can see it was last month, so it was in September. We tracked 260 phone calls through work, so there’s 903 phone calls that we can see where they came from based on the different tracking numbers. There’s direct website visit leads. There’s 290 of them. So people who either typed a no drip painting, maybe they saw a van, maybe they, you know, saw them at a home show, maybe they’ve been to the site before. Google Business profile 22, Google Organic, 23, uh, and then Bing and, and some other things, uh, follow. And so you can see essentially how many leads you’re getting. If you guys don’t have access to data like this, make sure that you get it, make sure you figure it out somehow. You can see the Google search impressions, you can see the top one professional painters, 751 times. Google Business profile showed up. That’s probably a good search to show up for. You probably want to show up for professional painters. Uh, you can see the number of reviews. They generated 13 reviews last month, 5 star rating. That’s pretty awesome. Good job, guys. 13 reviews in a month. Let’s give them a round. That’s a big deal. That’s a big deal. But it’s, it’s, again, I try. I could say like, oh, it’s because painter marketing pros is so great. We’re good at what we do, but they’re doing the other half. They’re getting their reviews. They’re they’re mastering the sales process. They’re doing that stuff, right? So it’s got to put in the work. These are the social media posts. They can see how many posts they did, how many people saw it. These are their ads again 81 leads at $34 a lead. Um, all their posts that we’re putting, they can see the impression share. And then the Instagram profile again that impression share and then local service ads, they had 23 LSA leads at $29 a lead, but this kind of data is what you guys need to be tracking, whether you’re doing it for somebody else or you’re doing it with with yourselves. You have to know where your leads are coming from, what you’re paying for, and what your ROI is on those leads. Uh, common mistakes, and then I’m done. Hitting the easy easy button of paid lead sites. Don’t hit. It’s not an easy button. It’s a genuine marketing avenue that you can use if you’re using it because you’re defaulting to it because it’s easy, and they say that they’ll just give you leads then you’re messing up. Uh, not closely tracking your marketing data, know your data, underestimating your sales process, referrals, and repeat business. I’ve hammered that. That is your business. Right, that that is your business. You are selling a premium service. If you just walk in and you don’t have a really dialed in sales process and you don’t have differentiators, it would be absolutely ludicrous for someone to pay you a lot more money than other people who are quoting them for the same project. It wouldn’t make any sense. So think about it from the perspective of the homeowner, not focusing on projects, generating additional projects for you, viewing it transactional short term, losing the force of the trees with negative feedback. This one’s a big one. So we have some people. Uh, that we’ve worked with, and we use the CRM and there are messages that go out, right? So the messages like, you know, hi, you know, person, first name, like thanks for requesting that I want to get that set up. Hey, haven’t heard back from me, you still want to connect. It’s kind of follow up with them actually for a year. Because that’s how you should follow. It’s gonna follow up for a year. They’re, they’re getting a bunch of leads, they’re getting a bunch of estimates, they’re seeing the ROI. One person responds, like, hey, this is annoying, stop. Stop harassing me. I haven’t responded to you. Obviously, I’m not interested. Let’s put the whole thing on pause. Stop. Negative feedback. We need to, hey, Brandon, hey, we gotta stop, right? This person said this thing, so we gotta stop. Please don’t do that. Right? Like you think that I don’t have people who say things to me. But I have a lot more people who say positive things, so don’t lose the force through the trees because one person says one thing View your marketing it holistically and how it’s working. Um, comparing that being said, if you’re getting a bunch of consistent negative feedback, obviously adjust as needed. Uh, comparing no marketing to actual marketing, this is another piece. There’s the 10%, right? We want a 10% rule, hey, we, we’re at 800,000. Our marketing cost of marketing is 1%. 1% is our cost of marketing. So I want to hire painter marketing. I want to keep it at 1%. It’s going to be incremental gains, right? So there, there’s, you’re gonna naturally grow if you’re running a reputable painting company, you’re gonna grow through word of mouth. You’re gonna grow naturally. When you start layering on paid marketing, that’s why it’s so important to understand your numbers to make sure you’re getting the ROI and that differential, but it’s gonna be a differential that you’re growing, so viewing it a little bit differently, um, using the marketing channel at the wrong time, went through that, paid the, the paper lead sites was a perfect example. Do it yourself marketing for which I’m qualified. Um, AI does not make you an SEO expert. I’m gonna tell you guys that. The AI, AI is not going to solve your SEO for you. Uh, boosting posts on Facebook because you, you think you’re running Facebook ads. There are ways to boost posts and make that make sense, but you’re not running Facebook ads. That’s not what you’re doing if you do that. Uh, hiring a marketing agency for SCO with no accountability. This happens a lot with local agencies. They think somehow because they’re next door they’re gonna, they’re gonna perform better or hold them more accountable or something magically. Um, make sure that you’re diving into that. Ignoring lead source differences affecting sales process. This is the perfect example here is you get repeat referral business. You’ve grown through word of mouth. You come in, your sales process isn’t really that good, but you’ve already done business with them. You have a pretty high close rate, you’re feeling pretty good. Hey, I want to hire a marketing agency. We’re gonna run some pay. Why aren’t they closing? What’s going on? They don’t know who you are. It’s a different lead. Right, it’s not a lead that you’ve worked with. It’s not a lead that was referred to you. It’s a different lead. It’s a different process. Uh, so understanding that and respecting the differences, uh, underestimating the criticality of speed of lead, you should be on the phone or you should be in contact with the lead in some shape, uh, or fashion within 60 seconds, 60 seconds. The only way to possibly do that is through an automated CRM. Only way to do that consistently. Uh, quitting on setting the estimate way too early. Again, CRM plus manual touch points, you got to do them both, but don’t quit. Because they didn’t answer your phone call, quitting follow up way too early. View it on a 90 day rolling basis, your leads. Don’t view it month over month, especially on a year like this year when people are taking longer to close, not putting themselves in the shoes of the homeowner, decommoditize your painting business. Why should they pay you more money? This other person just came in and and offered to do it for half the price. They offered to do it for 2/3 of the price. It doesn’t mean they’re a bad lead. It doesn’t mean that they don’t, they’re not willing to spend the money. You haven’t given them a reason to. Uh, overestimating your personal sales ability. This happens a lot with repeat. This happens a lot with companies that have grown through word of mouth. They think they’re a phenomenal salesperson, but really it’s the lead source that they’re getting, and then ignoring gross profit margin, know your numbers. So this is, it’s an infographic that goes through everything. If you guys want to scan this, you can actually download that copy of that.
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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.