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.

I know how you feel. You’re probably feeling frustrated. You want to grow your business, but ultimately you’re not sure where the best lead source is. One person and one agency is telling you to do this. You’re reading online and they’re telling you to do that. You’re trying all of it, but you’re just not getting the financial security, the success that you dreamed of when you started your painting business. You’re staring at your computer screen, wondering how to make the leads start flowing in again. What went wrong?

I’m Brandon, founder of Painter Marketing Pros, and we help painters like you get their internet marketing right so you can scale your business, sell more residential repaint projects, keep your crews busy, and achieve the financial security and freedom you dreamed of when you started your painting company. If you want to generate more consistent leads and build the company of your dreams, then go ahead and book a call with me. We’re gonna create an effective sales and marketing system for your painting company. So go ahead, scroll down and book a call now.

All right, awesome guys. So go ahead and check that out. Uh, we have the link in the chat. Go ahead and schedule that strategy session now if you’re serious about growing your painting company in 2025 and beyond. So up next is me. So I’m gonna be talking about profitable marketing, uh, maximizing ROI and staying ahead of the curve. So I’m gonna go ahead and share my screen. All right, so time for Um, some honesty here, who, who feels like they’re maybe a little bit confused about marketing, marketing channels.

Anybody confused at all. There’s, there’s Google ads. There’s like multiple forms of Google ads, right? There’s Google Pay clicks, there’s Google local service ads, there’s multiple different kinds of paper clicks. There’s search versus display and all these different things. There’s Facebook ads. What are meta ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, um, should you be doing YouTube ads? Should you be doing TikTok? So all this stuff is super confusing. What about direct mail? Should you do that? I don’t know, I heard this, this guy did really well. I heard it’s expensive and it doesn’t really work.

Uh, so there’s so much confusion. About marketing and I I I feel almost like the industry almost promotes that because if you have no idea what you’re doing then you have to pay someone to do it. So my goal of this presentation kind of the whole, the whole event here is, is built on building a profitable company. And growing sustainably. So growing profitably. We know that 2024 was a more challenging year for painting contractors than was 2023. We know that that kind is ebbing and flowing a lot of uncertainty in the economy right now, a lot of stuff changing.

So this whole event is about building a solid company that can withstand a downturn and ultimately you can be scaling while keeping more money and remaining profitable. So I am not going to, this is not going to be this crazy flashy stuff. I’ve gotten into some of that stuff. We’re certainly very cutting edge. I’d argue the most cutting edge at painter marketing pros of the, of the agencies in terms of AI and some other stuff that we’re doing. But right now I’m going to really talk about fundamentals, how to look at the whole ecosystem of marketing, when you should do what and why.

Does anyone think that they would benefit from that? Just put a one in the chat if you think, yeah, that would be great. If you, we can kind of take this labyrinth and kind of, kind of lay it out on a roadmap, that would be pretty awesome. I think it would be awesome. So I, I run a podcast, I don’t know, you know, hopefully some of you guys listen to it. If you listen to my podcast, just put podcast in the chat. But when I’m running that podcast, I’m always thinking to myself, I’m pretending I’m a listener.

I’m like, OK, if somebody says something, what would I have a follow-up question for? And then I ask that follow-up question. So that was how I came up with this presentation, thinking, well, if I didn’t know as much as I do about marketing, what would frustrate me and what would frustrate me was all the conflicting information that I’m getting and that I don’t actually know what the right course of action is. So that’s the goal of this presentation. A little bit about me run the Painter Market Mastermind podcast, but that for about 3.5 years.

If you haven’t checked it out, check it out. It’s on all major streaming platforms. You can also go to paintermarketingpros. com, click the podcast and listen to the episodes. I’m on a lot of committees and these committees are these committees are quite frankly dated, so a ton of committees with the PCA and the Bureau of Speakers do a lot of stuff with the Painting Contractors Association. I’ve written two books on scaling painting companies, one of which was a #1003 rated Amazon bestseller. Super proud of that, a proud veteran of the Florida Army National Guard.

This picture right here has nothing to do with anything. And I’m going to show it to you guys because it was at, I guess the one thing it has to do with is it was at a PCA event. It was a PCA commercial contractor conference, um, in Arizona, and I guess the wild west is still a thing over there. And so Jesse Ramos, if you guys know him, runs TJ’s, um, painting. I, I don’t recommend hanging out with him, but he, he is a friend of mine, so it’s a joke.

But he, uh, he said he’s going to ride a bull. I said, Cool, me too. And then I started kind of sweating. I was like, what, what did I commit to? And I said, well, if I survive this, if I, if I don’t die, if the bull doesn’t stop me or, or spear me or do some other break my neck, then I’m just gonna tell everyone forever that I did it. So that’s what that is, nothing to do with anything, uh, but I did do that. I guess the one takeaway would be if you come to PCA events, maybe some cool stuff will happen to you.

Uh, who we are. So painter marketing pros, we put this together early this year. I’m extremely proud of these numbers. So we, we have been serving, uh, painting contractors exclusively for 5 years. So we’ve been in this space for a long time, and we have generated over $200 million in revenue, so not just leads or estimates, actual revenue for our partners. Uh, over the past 5 years we’ve worked with over 10093 painting companies. We’ve generated over a 10083 million leads, and our average cost per lead across the board. We do everything website, Google ads, Facebook ads, uh, is under $10073.

We have a marketing column in the APC magazine, so PaintMag. com, Painter’s playbook, so you’ll see a lot, a lot of marketing content from us come out there. Uh, we are a regular contributor to In Paint magazine’s Ask a pro section and then. The thing I’m, I, I think I’m most potentially most proud of, I’m pretty proud of those numbers on the previous slide, uh, but we have one PCA Industry Part of the year for the last two years. That is a major deal. So if you go to the PCA website, if you look at all the vendors, all the industry partners of the PCA, we won Part of the year the last 10063 years.

So, so went up on the stage, Expo in front of 10053 people. Uh, that’s a big deal, and I think it’s a testament to the reputation we have and the work that my team does. Uh, we have a lot of A partnership so we partner with Academy for Professional painting contractors. We work with a lot of partners there. Uh, we work, we cross work with a lot of, a lot of partners, as Daniel said, with bookkeeping for painters. Uh, we do a ton of marketing for fresh coat painters.

I work with a lot of their franchisees, um, so there’s a lot that we have going on. So the agenda. What we have today, we’re gonna go through the marketing arsenal. It is a I move fast, so if you guys have ever heard a presentation from me, just say yes, and actually if you haven’t, say no. If you haven’t, then you’re gonna, this is my style, so I, I will, I move really, really fast. So yeah, I think a lot of you probably have, if you haven’t, then you’re gonna want to probably lean in.

All right, so we’re gonna talk about marketing arsenal, the marketing mix through growth. So as the, as the company grows, what should we be prioritizing when? Uh, some tracking best tips. The tracking is so bad, typically for most painting companies and then we have a special offer for you guys at the end. So ethical bribe to keep you around, uh, make sure you guys gain the value from this marketing road map. So I break this down, uh, into 10043 different kinds of marketing. Right? So we have always marketing.

This is marketing that you should just always be doing. If you’re at $10033 million a year in revenue, if you’re at $10023 if you’re sitting in your bedroom, you haven’t even started a painting company, you saw the ad on Facebook, you’re like, maybe I want to start a painting company, and you’re here, this is what you work on. Then we have the free marketing channels. This is sweat equity. When we go through that, I’m gonna assume you don’t come with a pile of cash and you’ve started 10013 other businesses.

You’re not a private equity firm. Moving into the space, you are a painting contractor building from the ground up. Then we’re gonna get into short term uh short term marketing which is gonna primarily be ads. I’ll explain why I view that as short term, long term, and then offline. So the direct mail, the print ads, everything like that, that people always have so many questions about. So marketing arsenal. Um, this is a layout of all of it. We’ll go through it all individually as we, as we go.

So the always marketing channels, the reason that you want to set these up first is they are going to magnify, they’re going to exponentially increase the value of all of your leads and all of your projects. One of the, the mistakes that I see in this industry after having worked with hundreds and, you know, hundreds of painting companies is it’s very transactional. It’s very, hey, I need lead, new lead, new lead clothes or not, I need another lead. Right, so it’s just, it’s very myopic. It’s like I just need a lead and then we’ll see if the lead is a good lead or a bad lead or whether I close it or not, and then I just need another lead.

So there, there’s no real, not building any asset, there’s no real attention to your customer list or repeated referral business nothing super intentionally built. So what we have here is, hey, when you get a lead, let’s make that lead as valuable. as humanly possible because then when the economy gets a little rough or when the economy’s great, you can scale super quickly. The economy’s rough, while the leads for you are higher value because you just handle them so much better. So you can get a lead and your competitor can get a lead and you can get that lead for the same amount of money and you’re going to make a much higher ROI.

So the fundamentals here have a strong sales system, super neglected in this industry, sales system, so actually know how to sell, right? This you are not working at a grocery store, people are not buying a bag of chips as they check out. This is a major, major ticket for the people that you’re serving. Uh, door hangers, yard signs, wrap vehicles, and door magnets. This is going to help you develop a foothold and really own neighborhoods that you want to serve. Proactive referral and repeat business. If you just think logically, uh, about how many companies, how many painting companies grow, and you ask them, well, how did you grow through word of mouth?

What would you do for the word of mouth? Well, I just did good work? How many painting companies, I, I hope I don’t see anyone, but, but go ahead and put a one in the chat if you’re like, why I don’t do good work. I, I, please don’t put a one in the chat because no company is going to say like, oh, we’re, you know, we’re OK, we do OK. It’s kind of mid-quality, low quality, it’s pretty bad. Everyone’s like, oh we do quality, we do quality work, right?

So you didn’t really grow through because your work was so phenomenal. You just grew because repeat referral business, they worked with you, they trusted you, you know, you’re not going to screw them. So imagine if you actually had a an in you put intentionality behind that. Imagine how much faster you could grow. Uh, effective review generation process. And then social media presence. So we’re gonna get into this. So what is a strong sale system look like? A strong CRM. So whether you’re leveraging uh drip jobs, whether you’re utilizing Paint scout, uh, we use go high level, we provide that for all of our partners.

What CRM you’re using, it’s really important to have a strong follow-up game. It’s important to have something called speed to lead. So when they, when somebody submits your web form or when they submit the form on Facebook or they get in touch with you some way that you were in touch with them immediately. If you are trying to, to, hey, I need to look at the Facebook Lead Center or will I get an email and I check it a couple times a day to see if I need to call anyone.

If any of these thoughts are in your head, then you’re not doing it the right way. I’m gonna tell you that. So you need, you need automations and then you add manual effort on top, but it’s all systematic kind of following on what Danny was talking about this whole thing is systems when you want to build a company. Uh, unique selling proposition. So what can you sell on, right? Is it A warranty, is it a free color consultation? Um, everyone kind of everyone says a free estimate.

You can still sell on that, uh, but there, there’s a good chance that you’re doing stuff that maybe all your competitors are doing also, but they’re not marketing it effectively. So what can you market and sell? And I’m gonna tell you a lot of that comes down to the communication. So the communication. the customer experience, what you’re selling is peace of mind. You’re not selling paint on a wall. They could do that themselves. So selling the peace of mind, that’s really gonna where you where you’re gonna stand out.

Great in person sales strategy, who here, um, let’s let’s put house, if you do this, who here is actually delivering that proposal in the house, right? Or, or in the business? If you’re not, um, we’ll kind of see who’s doing that right now in the chat, but if you’re not, do it. So if you’re the emailing 10003, 215000 hours later, what you’re doing is you’re, you’re completely removing your ability to objection handle. So objection handle is, hey, you know, I, I, I, that price is a little high. I want some more quotes, so I need to talk with my wife.

Yeah, I’m not sure if we want to do all that. Whatever the objection is, you have to have a sales process to handle that. If you email them a quote later, you’ve completely removed that ability from yourself. So deliver the proposal on site. And then follow up. It’s a major buying decision. Uh, another mistake as, well, we, we delivered the estimate, we followed up and they didn’t close. How long has it been? It’s been a week. View your leads on a rolling 211 day basis as opposed to we got this many leads this month and this many closed, and so that’s what the month was.

Well, we got this many this month and then how many closed over the next 213 days because that’s what that follow up should look like. So the benefits is of a strong sales system it’s gonna increase your close rate, increase your profit margin, and ultimately it’s gonna prove your reputation because if people think sales is a sleazy thing, it isn’t and it shouldn’t be. So when you actually sell the right way, it’s consultative you are focusing with the customer’s best interest in mind and they feel that. And ultimately they walk away feeling really good about the experience and they’re more likely to refer you.

The investment is a lot of time, frankly, there’s no real way around that. Uh, you can hire super experienced, um, sales person, I guess that would be the hack, but there’s no real fast way, uh, of learning sales process and then 213 to 212025 month in CRM software pretty, pretty negligible expense for the benefit. Repeat business and referral programs, so this is about taking every project that you complete. And actually turning it into more projects, it’s the most literal way to do this. Uh, you can do this with leads too.

So the difference between a lead and a project or a customer, obviously a lead didn’t necessarily buy from you, right? So they, they maybe came through, um, you know, filled out a lead for, maybe you didn’t even get in touch with them. There’s still ways to generate referral. I can’t do repeat because you didn’t work for them. There’s still ways to generate referral business from that. So maximizing the, the, um, value of your list, this is something we put together for one of our partners. It, it’s something tangible, it’s physical.

It actually says like, hey, this is what we do, uh, for the companies that even, even try to do this, usually it’s just maybe a card or say, hey, if you refer us, they’ll get $212025 off. It’s verbal. If you actually put something down in writing, you create some official. Collateral, put this on cardstock, maybe put together a folder, make it fancy, um, it’s, it’s gonna pay you back 213 times and then deliver it to them. So, so say it, hand it to them, and then actually follow it by text and email, make this a real thing.

So the benefits, well this will generate additional leads from completed projects. Uh, investment that you’re gonna have to put into it, a little thought some marketing collateral, and then maybe some financial incentives. So if your project managers out there, they do a walkthrough, um, customers really happy, they should be getting a review on site, so we’ll cover that in a moment. But then they should also be trying to get repeat business referral programs. Hey, Mr. Jones, you know, I’m so happy that that you’re happy, so happy that you left us a 213 star review and it was such a great experience for you, phenomenal.

Do you, do you have any friends, neighbors, family, anyone that you think might benefit from our program, anyone you think I should maybe go speak with? I wanna let you know, Mr. Jones, as a thank you. I’m gonna, we’re actually gonna offer them 21100% off and we’ll give you $21100 if they. Moving forward, it’s an ethical bribe, uh, from us, but it’s a way for us to make sure that we serve the community in a in a great way and and serve as many people as possible, right? So actually when they do that, then you’re going to need to need to financially compensate them.

Now if you’re out there and you’re the owner, then you, you make the money that way. If it’s, if you actually have a team out there doing it, then you’re gonna need to compensate them to actually motivate them to do that. Uh, review generation pro, I will go back though. So depending on the size of your, of your company, let’s say you’re, you’re big. There’s something called, um, like spiffs, there are rewards, there’s competitions. So a lot of times if you have a big team, let’s say you have multiple estimators, multiple project managers, you can oftentimes run a competition.

You can say, hey, We’re going to reward have a leadership board, and like every quarter we’re going to have some event, right? So maybe, maybe the, maybe one quarter, whoever gets the most reviews or whoever gets the most referrals, you actually send, send that person and their partner on a, on a cruise, right? And you make a big thing of it on the company. People respond more to recognition than they do to financial compensation. So it’s something to keep in mind. Uh, and it’s pretty cruises, things like that are pretty cheap.

Review generation program, so the goal for reviews is to get at least 15 star review for every 3 projects you complete. absolutely achievable. We know plenty of companies that are doing it, um. Let’s just put review in the chat if, if you’re doing that. I think this one’s gonna be a little bit harder, um, but there are plenty of companies that can do that. You can get 15 star review for every 3 projects you complete. So the benefits are it’s gonna improve your online reputation. It’s gonna lead to additional leads and higher close rates.

Again, financial incentive. You’re gonna want to incentivize one way or another, your team, you’re gonna want to build that into your culture to get that. And that’s great. So we have a couple of people that are now that’s awesome. Yard sizes, door hangers, wrap vehicles. So this is about just branding. This is about owning the space that you’re physically in. So when you go into a neighborhood, and this is gonna kind of sound gladiator-ish, but this is how I view it. So, so when you go into a neighborhood and let’s say I’m, I’m running a painting company, I want to serve this neighborhood, when I walk in, It’s mine.

The whole thing is mine. The, the house is mine because I’m, I’m gonna, I’m gonna deliver an awesome sales presentation. I’m gonna put the homeowner’s needs, uh, I’m gonna be very attentive to detail. I’m gonna make sure that that we do a phenomenal job for them through the sale and then through the project, uh, their friends, their family, their neighbors, all mine because I’m gonna have a really, really active repeat referral program. I’m gonna do 10 around, 15 around. I’m gonna make sure that we have yard signs that we have a visibility in the neighborhood, neighborhood’s mine.

I’m gonna follow up with them routinely. That whole thing is mine and that. How I want you guys thinking about this. Don’t think I walk into the house and I either get the house or not. It’s the house and it’s the whole ecosystem that you’re walking into, uh, when you do this. So yard signs, rap vehicles, door hangers, all of that stuff is going to help you create a foothold and really own the areas that you’re in. And then social media presence. So here’s, here’s some examples of stuff that we’ve put together, uh, some social media content we create marketing, uh, we create full content calendars, uh, for the full month for all the partners we work with.

The reason this matters is not really what you, what you think. So people think, well, I, I got a post on Facebook. I know I’m supposed to post on Facebook, um, but you think it’s because you’re gonna get new leads. You, we will usually get a couple leads a month from doing this. It’s not for the leads, it’s so that the leads that you have actually set the estimate because they’re, they’re gonna go do their homework on you. So they set the estimate and they’re more likely to close and more likely to not be as resistant, uh, not be as sensitive to pricing.

So it’s about having a professional presence, a professional brand. So that when they have set an estimate with you and they are checking out your website, they’re checking out your Facebook and your Instagram, they’re looking at everything online, you want to have your best foot forward because otherwise how are you, how can you be the opposite of chucking a truck? This is, this is one of the ways you’d be the opposite of chucking a truck. Um, Google, Google Business profile, you should be posting 1003 to 4 times a week on that just like you should be on the social media.

Um, oftentimes you will generate leads directly from this. You can see we have the call now, uh, action button in the, in the bottom there. And then it’s a ranking signal for Google, so there are other reasons why you need to do that. All right, so that is always marketing channel. That, that’s what you do always. You just, whether you’re 100 million, whether you’re zero, you need to be developing a foothold in the neighborhoods that you want to serve. You need to have a strong sales system so that you can consistently close at high profit margin.

You need to have an active repeat referral business program so that you are taking every lead in every project and you’re turning it into more projects. These are things that is really revenue in independent, doesn’t matter. Now, We’re gonna say you’re starting your company, you’re brand new, you, you’re not coming in with a boatload of capital and you are going to, to bootstrap this thing. Well, now we’re gonna get into some sweat equity. So this is if you’re between 0 and 100k a year, so you’re under, under 10K a month.

This is your focus, right? So personal network, local Facebook groups, next door posts, right, so this stuff can be really effective monitoring, monitoring local Facebook groups next door, being a little more sensitive on the price, are a little more flexible on the price so you can start to build, you can start to build a reputation or presence and actually start to generate the reviews. That’s gonna be my main focus right now is getting 5 star reviews and getting referrals, uh, door knocking. Nobody wants to do it. It sucks.

That’s why it works because nobody does it. Uh, cold calling, same thing, terrible, awful. I’m not gonna tell you it’s not. It takes a special kind of person to enjoy that, but nobody does it, so it works. And then professional referrals. This is real estate agents, uh, other home home contractors, so I, I’m gonna lean into that and I’m gonna start to build an ecosystem of that. The focus on free marketing because it’s gonna get the ball rolling. It’s gonna start getting some projects, and now you can actually start building your Google Business profile.

You can start getting reviews on Google, getting reviews on Facebook. You can start to actually get some video testimonials. You can start to get some legitimate before and after photos. You can start to get some video testimonials from clients. My whole, whole focus right now is actually building the brand and, and developing some assets, developing a little word of mouth, developing some assets, starting to make a little bit of money. Uh, and this gives this, this free marketing, this hustle, this is hustle, what this is. The hustle allows the always marketing channels, it allows the sales process I’ve worked on.

It allows all the, the collateral that I’ve created for the repeat referral, the yard signs, everything like that. It allows that to actually start working for me because now I’m out doing work, right? The whole idea here is just get out and start doing work, start building something. The benefits that cost little to no money, it’s personal tends to have a high close rate because it is so personal, it is so labor intensive. Uh, the investment, a lot of sweat and sometimes a little bit of pride.

Door knocking, uh, cold calling. If you’ve ever done any of that, just put door knocking, cold calling, or both in the chat. I’d love to see that. Uh, I’ve done both, and I don’t love it. I, I truly don’t love it. The cold calling especially was a bit rough. I feel like people are, the door knocking is a little more dangerous. I’m in Florida, everybody’s got guns, so you door knock on the wrong person, they might shoot you. Um, but the cold calling, I think, I think it’s more removed.

People aren’t looking, so they’re, they can be pretty brutal, uh, kind of like the internet trolls, right? The more removed you are, the more free people are to kind of be a jackass. Um, all right, early stages 100K to 500K. So here the focus is on free, free, um, Sonia’s in Texas, yeah, they’ll shoot you there too. Uh, it’s good to see you guys hustling, man. So, early stages 100K to 5003K. So free marketing plus short-term marketing. So now we, we have gotten past the 10K a month, we’re between like 10K and 40K a month.

That’s where we’re at. Um, probably a fair amount of you guys are, are in that range, others 100 to 500, 500 to 2 million. Those are pretty common ranges. Uh, now I’m gonna do free and I’m going to start doing some short term. So I’m gonna do all the free stuff that we talked about. I’m gonna continue to do that because I, I don’t have that much money yet. I don’t have, I, I need to be pretty cognizant of my capital. Number one rule of business is don’t go out of business.

But now I, I can start to dabble, I can start to explore, uh, social media ads and Google local service ads. I’m gonna tell you guys why I call ads short-term marketing. We run ads for over 100 companies right now. We, we’ve been running ads for some of those companies for quite a few years. So for us it’s, it’s not short term. It’s not like we’re gonna do it for a couple of months and we’re gonna stop doing it. The reason that I say it’s short term is because algorithms change the way that the, the ad runs and, and how much your cost per lead is and how effective that advertising channel is.

It changes more quickly on paid ads and it doesn’t say organic. So Google, when you build a really strong Google website, SEO, it’s gonna take a lot for you to really get rocked. There are ways to do it if you abuse AI and if, if you do, if you do things you shouldn’t do against Google’s terms of service, that’s how you lose that. Uh, but you can, if you’re doing fundamentally building that the right way, it’s gonna take a lot to remove you. Uh, Google Paper click would be a good example of how quickly, how quickly this can change on the paid ads.

We ran a ton, uh, used to run a ton a ton of Google ads with paper click ads. And then about 2 years ago, there was a shift in the algorithm. The cost per click went way up, and then the cost really increased pretty substantially, and it happened almost overnight. So that’s why I call it short term with the paid ads, run it as long as it’s generating profit for you. Um, if there’s some major shift in the algorithm, an example would be on Facebook you used. Put up organic post and there were, you know, there’d be a lot of reach.

Everyone would see it. You get all these leads, and then Facebook decided they’re going to roll out boosted posts and they’re basically going to annihilate your reach. It’s going to become a pay to play platform. Now if you just do a post, the reason we say it doesn’t really generate that much business is because it doesn’t, because Facebook suppresses it because they want you to pay for a boost to post or an ad. So this stuff changes, it evolves more more quickly. That’s why we call it short term.

But social media ads, Google local service ads, you can start to lean into this. Uh, for social media ads, don’t do boosted posts. I mean, some people have claimed it works. Make sure you’re tracking the ROI and that, but I ran some brain melts at PCA Expo and I asked a lot of people, Hey, are you running Facebook ads? They said yes, and then I found out that they’re boosting posts, that that is not a Facebook ad. I’m gonna tell you guys that. Um, Facebook ads, you’re, you’re in the back of the business manager, you’re actually targeting, you’re running a complete campaign.

That’s a Facebook ad. Uh, the quality of the lead. Your best prospects are on social media, so it’s not like this, this person that just sucks, right? Like, OK, the, the person on Google is great and the person on Facebook, they’re just these, these horrible people and they crawl out from these rocks. They’re the same people, but the way that you actually reach them is different. So when they’re on Google, when they’re, when they’re researching you, that’s intent based, uh, means that. They’re actually already looking for you.

So in that buyer mindset already when they’re on Facebook or Instagram and you actually show up in their feed, that’s called interruption advertising. So they weren’t looking for you, which means that that sale system that we talked about, that CRM, that speed to lead, that building value right away, that giving them the self, a self booking link, sending them a text right away, sending them an email right away, calling them right away. All that stuff is really critical because you’re not really that important to them yet, but you can be.

It, it depends on your sales systems. Budget’s a factor, you can’t say I’m gonna run Facebook ads on $50003 a month. Just don’t run it, save your $300 put it somewhere else, and then speed the lead. The benefits get leads fast, exclusive leads. Uh, good targeting options. Facebook has a lot of really good options there, and it is relatively inexpensive. Investment, we say $100 to 300 to $3000.01 to $3000 plus a month, don’t do it with under $1000 a month budget. If you’ve tried ads and you’re convinced they don’t work, we prove otherwise excellent ad campaign and a tight sales system.

It requires both that sales system is really critical. If you look at some of these ads that we’ve run. You can see on the bottom left, we have 41 reactions, 9 comments, 10 shares. We have 13 reactions in the middle, 1996 comments, 117 shares, and then 155 comments. There’s something, there’s a concept called virality in, in Facebook and social media in general when Facebook wants you to have a good experience. So when, when they see an ad that a lot of people are commenting, sharing, liking, doing all the stuff with the ad, they think, oh.

OK, then people like the ad. We want them to have a good experience cause we want them to stay on Facebook, we want them to keep coming back to Facebook. So we’re gonna actually drive the cost per lead down for this ad, because of how much people like it. So what we do. I don’t know how you would do this, but what we do, you can do it manually. What we do is we actually have AI with human assist. So we actually respond with a community management aspect where we respond to every single comment and then human editors review it.

And so every comment that comes in, we’re responding to it. We’re also liking or hurting the comment. And so what that does is it 2 X pluses all the comments on the ads, and so it just crushes Facebook with reality and that’s how we get some of these numbers. We also hide negative commentary if you guys are running these ads on your own, you just do it manually. So you look at the ad, anyone says, hey, these guys, save your money, do it yourself. Oh, this company is a scam.

They’re terrible, right? It might be an ex-employee who doesn’t like you, might be whatever. Um. Hide it, don’t delete it. Hide it. That’s Facebook’s best practice because when you hide it, the troll, they still see it, so they’re not going to continue to barrage you. They think it’s still there, but nobody else sees it. So hide it. We auto hide on our end. You can manually do all this stuff on your end, but you need to stay on top of it. Uh, very achievable targets. So what are, what are the targets here?

Under $50 leads, 60% set, 40% close rate. Again, the sale system really important, CRM really important. What you’re looking at about 1 out of 4 of these of these leads becoming a book project or about $33 per book repaint project. Once you know your numbers, if you’re working with BTA or or someone else or you’re just doing it yourself and you know your numbers really well, $200 for a book repaint, that should be an absolute steal. Uh, Google local service ads, here’s an example of what that looks like. If you do this right, you can see Fresh cut painters of Marble Falls, Sarah Ross, she’ll actually be on the Women to Paint panel coming up here shortly.

But you can see here she’s the, the top for Interior Painter Marble Falls. That that’s something she would want to rank for. She’s the top with only 70 reviews. Tex Painting has 248 reviews, a really big ranking factor, and they are below her. So if you play this game right, you can actually, uh, leapfrog some companies that might have a lot more reviews than you. So for, for tips for Google local service ads, they’re going to appear at the top of search results. They’re really important. Uh, if you’re not doing them, please do them.

They are the future of Google. So I won’t, that’s its own presentation, but Google local service ads are the future local search. You cannot sleep on those. Uh, maximize your budget for more leads. Right now they’re pay per lead. They may switch to pay per click, uh, so your leads are cheaper right now than they’re going to be. Reply and rate your leads to increase lead flow, so the, the responsiveness is super critical there. Generate reviews through your Google Business profile. Those reviews are merged now. But again, it’s the future investment you’re looking at $20 to $50 a lead, uh, right now, do not do the pay per lead and do not do the Google Pay per clicks.

So the biggest, the biggest mistake that I see for companies in this range, 100 to 500 is they go to Angie or they go to Thumbtack. You know, they go to one of one of these pay per lead and they think, well, I, I can just, you know, give them my credit card swipe and I can start getting some leads. You come in in a position of weakness, you probably don’t have a phenomenal sale. Process you probably don’t have much of a team to actually do a lot of this leg work and follow up and so you end up just, just driving to the bottom of the barrel on price and competing on price because you don’t, you don’t have the resources and the know-how to not do that.

So we say, we say come back to the paper lead sites um later and then Google Paper you just need a bigger budget than you have at that point. So next step, 5000 to a million. The focus now is on short term marketing, but we have, we’re actually making, making some money now, right? So we’re, we’re at 43K up to like 33K a month, so we can actually start to build a long term asset, right? We can start to build a dominant website dominant as we start to build dominant Google Business profile, we can start to do the stuff that’s actually gonna carry us to, to a million, multiple millions, you know, eight figures, uh, and then make the company sellable.

So for the free marketing. I, I have a concept called paid free. So if the local Facebook groups were working, the next door posts, if the cold calling, door knocking, if any of that was working, now you hire a team to do it because at 5000 to a million, you shouldn’t be doing it because you need to level up what you’re doing. So if it’s working, hire a team, don’t just ignore it. That’s another mistake we see. Well, I used to do this and it worked a lot, but, but now I don’t do it anymore because I grew.

Well, if it worked a lot, hire somebody to do it and keep doing it because it’s going to help you keep growing. And then from the free marketing channel, what you, what you personally do want to continue to do and eventually you can even pass this off, but is maintain those referral networks so BNI, Chamber of Commerce, uh, the real estate agents, any kind of other home service contractors, whatever relationships you’ve, you’ve developed, continue to develop and leverage those. So we now have the short term, so the short term is now the main focus, uh, the freed is, is mainly paid free, so we’re not gonna really do the sweat equity as much right now.

We have the budget to really actually lean into the social media ads, the Google local service ads, and we’re gonna start to, to focus on some long term stuff here. We’re gonna start to carve aside a little money each month for the SEO for owning Google, um, and then for having a strong Google business profile because we know long term this is actually what is going to, what’s gonna actually carry us. It’s gonna give you the best ROI long term. Uh, but you just have to be careful because it is a long tail play.

So website with dominant SEO. We’re going to build a best in class website. We’re going to have painters specific SEO. We know this is going to give us an excellent ROI over the long term, high quality leads again that intent-based lead. So they’re sitting there searching best painter in my area. That person’s in a buyer’s mindset. Only 3% of your target market is in a buyer’s mindset. So you’re hitting that 3% when you do effective SEO. Uh, you’re going to dominate your service area and ultimately can exit this rat race of the shared leads, and it’s more stable than the paid platforms.

So paid platforms, they evolve fast, they might roll out a They might roll out a um algorithm change tomorrow. They might roll out today while I’m talking right now, but the, the Google Organic, that has really not changed. It evolves with with AI and everything. If you’re not abusing AI, if you’re not abusing Google, uh, again, that’s its own presentation as well, but if you’re doing white hat tactics, you’re following Google’s TOS terms of service, then you are solid there. And ultimately you’re creating an actual asset, you’re creating actually uh something sellable.

The investment here is money, time, and know-how. Know how there are 14,000 ranking signals just heads up. So the SEO is like this black box, it is that because it is that, uh, there’s 14,000 ranking factors, it’s a real thing. Uh, strong Google Business profile. This is your excellent ROI. This is that map pack when you search, you have the 33 results at the top. This is gonna give you the, the excellent ROI over the mid to long term. A lot of this is review generation goes back to those always marketing channel, the 1 out of every 20253 projects getting a 5-star review.

Uh, it’s, it’s the fastest way to dominate the Serps. The high trust signals. So when people see tons of reviews, when they’re seeing those posts that we talked about with the always the strong social media presence, they’re seeing a bunch of posts, they’re seeing a bunch of project photos up there, you’re breeding that trust. You’re getting the lead, now you’re already helping convert the lead because you’re breeding the trust. Um, this leads to good set close rate high quality leads when you can ultimately dominate mobile search.

These are very big on mobile search. Most searches are mobile. The investment here is time, get the reviews. And then know how Google makes this really easy to figure out whether your initial optimization was correct because they have the little green circle profile strength looks good. So if it, if it’s anything else, you know, go in and further fill out your profile, make sure it’s that green thing up there. Uh, example of of what a best in class website looks like, this is Paris Painting, Jason Paris site.

Uh, so Paint American Pros built this. You can see the, the primary service pages, primary location pages. You’re gonna wanna have all these pages because ultimately effective SEO is about dominating all these certain searches. So we want to dominate when we look under locations or service areas, Bloomington Painter, Maple Grove Painter, uh, when we. At the services we wanna, we wanna dominate things like exterior painter near me exterior painter exterior painting. Make sure you that your website not only looks attractive on desktop but also that it looks attractive on mobile.

Google heavily prioritizes mobile first approach, so make sure whenever you’re doing a website they’re actually looking at how it looks on your phone. And then prompt the call to action so you can see here uh for one of our partners we have that schedule free estimate. I mean, you can’t miss it. And then we have a phone number in the top right as well. Give people multiple ways to contact you because different people like to do different things. Some people like to text, some people like to submit a web form, some people like to email, some people like to call, uh, so give them multiple ways to contact you and then make sure you have it connected with your CRM again, so the automation kick in going back to that always marketing the strong sales system.

Hello 7 figures. So now we’re at 1 to 3 million. Long term, now we’re gonna switch our main focus to long-term marketing. We’re gonna continue to run short-term marketing, and we can start to dabble in offline ads. So when we’re between 1 and 3 million, long-term marketing starts to become our main focus because we can afford it. So now the, the SEO, the strong Google Business profile, and then if you want to try to become an influencer type figure like Zach Kenny, uh, you have that option. I’m not an expert in that.

Very few people are in that kind of influencer piece, but you have that option. But that can be now your main focus because you’re generating enough revenue that you can start to look like, hey, 3 million, 5 million, 10 million, this is what’s actually gonna get you there. So the, the social media ads, Google local service ads, you can now layer in pay per lead. You can now layer in Google Pay per click because you have enough money for the for the ad budget pay per click, we recommend 202025k a month or up.

uh, and then pay per lead, you probably have a sale system, you have a CRM, you’re experienced, you’ve gone out, you’ve conducted a bunch of estimates, you’ve closed a bunch of sales. You can play that game and you can win at that game without just competing on price with all the chucking the trucks that you’re gonna go against. Uh, for the offline. Print ads and direct mail, you can start to layer that in. Direct mail is more expensive. Print ads oftentimes doesn’t work, but sometimes does. So you can start to test where, where you can start to have some basically discretionary marketing dollars that you can lay out there, and if they don’t come back, it’s OK because you ran a test.

Uh, billboards, TV, radio, I don’t like them ever, really. Uh, very rarely do I hear, oh man, I, I ran this TV ad and it worked awesome, but don’t do it yet. If you do want to do it, just don’t do it at this revenue range yet. Um, so the, the long term now we’re building the digital assets for scalability. We’re prioritizing the organic reach and ownership, uh, building a sellable asset. I want to build an asset. Uh, let’s put an asset in the chat if you guys actually want to build an asset.

I am not here to, to hustle and just create this thing, and then as soon as I stop working, the whole thing dies. Like I, I want an asset. Um, you can begin focusing on this after the 500K. In revenue and then ultimately, uh, primary focus is after a million you become that primary love it. A lot of people focus on assets. So short term now you have the higher budgets available so you can start to test more things. You can start to lean more heavily into the ads.

You can consider Google Pay in 3.5K a month or more, which is my strong recommendation. And then the pay per lead optionality if you feel ready to win in that space without uh cutting your cutting your price. And then offline there’s a high cost and time investment there typically, but there is potential for strong ROI. We recommend that you really start evaluating this heavily, uh, past 7 figures. We don’t recommend really focusing on it. They’re just lower hanging fruit before that. Ongoing investment is required here and there’s, you know, the risk of losing that investment because you’re testing.

Um, Google Pay per click, the benefit, same benefit as Google Organic. You’re, it’s people who are actually searching for painter near me. You’re getting to target those high intent keywords. It gives you a really high position, uh, on the search engine result page, and it gets you there faster than SEO, but SEO ultimately generates a lot more leads and the trust factors a little higher because they know you didn’t pay to get there. But Paclicks kind of a hack to get you there, uh, as you’re doing the SEO.

So get ready to compete with some of these big guys. This is why it’s so expensive. Angie, Thumbtack, Yelp, they’re all gonna be running Google Paper click ads against you, driving up the cost. Uh, oftentimes you can be 150, 200, 300 plus per lead sometimes with this. So ensure you have a strong sales process for maximum ROI. You can’t have a low profit margins and a low close rate and success on Google Ads and see a good ROI on that. Uh, paper lead sites. You can now approach this from a position of strength.

When a lead comes in, you’re going to be more professional, you’re gonna be fast, you’re gonna give people multiple ways to communicate with you. You’re gonna have your unique selling propositions. You’re gonna have like a selfie video. That’s what we help our partners do, a little selfie video that’s gonna go out in a text. You’re gonna be so impressive compared to all the, the kind of jokes that are, that are on the paper lead, um, that, that the people that have come in, that you are giving them a reason to pay you more money, right?

Because ultimately, that, that’s the true test of your sales. Process is when you go into an age or thumbtack, can you win in that space. So emphasize the strong sales process and further monetize leads with always marketing. You can get leads fast here. Uh, you can increase the spend to get more leads. You just kind of dial it up, uh, serve to fill in the gap of other marketing channels and you can leverage your these marketing channels. You’re looking at 60 to 150 plus a lead. A little inside, uh, knowledge for you guys too.

So obviously some people go to Angie and Thumb tech and submit it directly. A lot of those leads actually come from SEO. So when we went back to building the long-term presence, if you just have dominate SCO you can get the lead by yourself. But what, what HomeAdvisor and Angie Thumb tech, what they do is they’ll dominate SEO. They put a bunch of resources, have really dominant websites, and then people will search for painter near me, they’ll see that, they’ll go fill out their information, how they resell it to 5 of you guys.

So frustrating when you could just get that lead yourself. Uh, and then print ads. Oftentimes requests uh requires testing here to determine the best commit commitment required, make sure that you’re trying different publications, uh, looking for 33 plus a month, direct mail, uh, looking for at least a few 100 a few 1000 a month, uh, 10,25000 pieces is the minimum that we recommend 21 week cadence, send them out on that cadence, uh, and there’s gonna be some testing there. There’s different, uh, high density plus is typically what we recommend for the postage, um, for the postal route, there’s different options there.

That’s its own presentation. I did do a a a podcast with APC Magazine on direct mail, so check, check that out, uh, if you haven’t, and if you’re interested in direct mail. And OK, now once you pass 23 million, now we’re, we’re kind of in the stratosphere. So the The focus actually shifts back to short term because now we’re doing all the long-term stuff. There’s only so much money you can throw into the long term stuff. You can’t do like $23,22025 a month in Google. So you, we’re doing all the long term stuff.

We’re, we’re doing whatever offline ads we want, and those are all now available to us. But now we have really high budgets for short term. So we’re going to lean in, we’re gonna make sure we’re getting the best ROI possible there, um, through all the short-term ads that we’re running. We have the long term stuff, so the primary focus is short term and keeping a really tight. I on our ROI there. um, good example you’ll hear from, from Jason Phillips. Phillips Home Improvement. They’re at like 22025 million, 33 million, somewhere around there.

They have a very high focus on their short term ROI, um, because they have the budget that they’re putting a lot of money, money behind these ads. Uh, and then we have the long term, and then now you can do billboards, TV, radio, you can experiment with that if you want. Again, I’m fine if you never do it cause it usually doesn’t work that well. Uh, so the channels are running, they remain consistent with the previous phase, but the shift is kind of back to prioritizing the the short term.

Make sure you’re tracking everything. I’m gonna kind of skip through this, uh, if you’re interested, schedule a strategy session, we can run you through our tracking. This is the dashboard that we have. It’s gonna show you the, the number of leads you’re getting, where those leads are coming from, uh, the, the. Impression of your Google Business profile, how your SEO is doing all the what what searches you’re showing up for exterior paint, commercial paint, commercial painter, residential painter, uh, it’s gonna show you your local service ads, your number of leads, your cost per lead, your Facebook ads, your number of leads, your cost per lead.

So we have all this, we provide it to our partners. If you’re running your own marketing or you’re working with another agency, you should have access to this data. They can say, OK, they generate 23 leads, $2100 a lead with their Facebook. They could see all the posts that we’re doing. Um, you should have access to data like this because that’s another big missing piece. We see a lot of companies don’t actually have any idea what the cost per lead is. Uh, some common mistakes, um, hitting the easy button to pay lead sites too early, not, not knowing the, not tracking the data, underestimating things like the sales process, referral, repeat, not focusing on projects generating additional projects for you again there’s these marketing channels, losing the force through the trees with negative feedback.

Somebody responds to your SMS and your CRM they’re like, hey, don’t text me and oh my God, we need to turn off the CRM. No, like you are going to get some negative feedback. We’ve been sending out texts and emails about this event. I’ve seen a couple like stop, cool, fine. Now you’re not in our SMS anymore. I don’t care. There are hundreds of you guys listening that are that are getting value right now. We get negative feedback, you’ll get negative feedback. If anyone sees you in the world and you market it, you get negative feedback.

Uh, comparing no marketing to actual marketing revenue percentages, uh, sticking numbers, they’ve been told that 2100%, again I can go on the soapbox for like 45 minutes about that. Um, and, and a whole host of other things, but I want, I want to circle up with this. So this is the snapshot. I want to make sure you guys see this. So we have the always marketing channels, number one, whether you’re 0 or 100 million, you’re going to do this. The strong sales system, all the door hangers, all the, all the resources we talked about there, repeat referral, getting those reviews and a professional social media and really digital presence.

I say social media because that doesn’t cost you any money. You can have a one page Wix website to make sure you have a professional. Looking landing page as your website. Number 2, free. Now we’re 0 to 100. We’re going to sweat equity free marketing methods. We’re going to pound the payment. These are the things that we’re going to do for number 1003. If you guys are watching this and and you kind of want this, you can take a screenshot right now or you can email me brandon@patermarketingpros. com and I’ll get you over this this infographic.

Number 3, free plus short term, we’re 100 to 500k. Now we’re going to still prioritize free, but we’re going to start to layer in some paid ads because we have a little bit of money. Uh, 5000 to a million. Now we’re gonna really focus on short term and we’re gonna start to, to level, to put in some long term, but we’re going to be a little cautious about that, uh, because we need to make sure that we’re still having a high ROI today on our marketing and any free we’re we’re kind of paying people to do that for us now.

1 million to 3 million, we have the short term and the long term now we are fully investing into the long term. We have that money and we’re fully investing in the short term and then 3 million plus we’re gonna shift the focus back to the short term. Um, really heavily because we have so much of a budget now that we need to be, be really focused on that. We’re gonna continue to do everything we need to do for long term and then offline ads is fully open to us.

We have an offer if you guys move forward, uh, if you end up scheduling a strategy session with marketing pros right now, um, PMP 2025. com, and you end up moving forward, we will run a full, what’s called a database reactivation. It’s a marketing campaign to, to anyone who, who you have any email, phone, anyone who’s been in your ecosystem. The past customers, um, past leads, we’ll run a full marketing campaign to them, uh, if you, if you schedule a strategy session and end up moving forward with us, and that will help you basically get free leads, free projects, and kick off your 2025 with a major start.

I do not have a ton of time for questions. I’ll see if I got maybe. Um, one or two. Daniel, if you have any, any questions that you see, could maybe answer and then yeah, man, outstanding presentation, Brendan. I mean, I’ve never seen someone speak in zip file format before. So that was, that was so much value in such a short amount of time. It’s crazy. Um, I did see a couple of questions. Don’t forget to use the Q and A button. Um there were some questions in the chat.

One was what, what uh CRM? We are you using, what do you said we use go high level. There’s, there’s drip jobs. There’s job or there’s Paint scout drip jobs is one of our sponsors. Paint scouts a sponsor. Check them out. Uh, they have phenomenal programs. Awesome. And there’s another question, what’s like the fastest way if you need leads now, what do you, what do you do? I mean it depends whether you have money or not, right? If you need leads now and you have money to invest, social media ads, that’s gonna if you run an effective social media ad you can lever you can get a ton of leads today.

Uh, if you don’t have a sales process, don’t have CRM, you’re not gonna you’re not gonna get the the set rate, so you’re gonna waste your money. Uh, if you don’t have leads, then it’s, it’s friends, family, door knocking. I mean, go out, knock doors. When our house flooded, I went out and knocked doors of a bunch of other people that flooded, and I had 3 in one day. I had 3 potential houses to buy. I would argue that people considering selling their entire house, who hadn’t maybe been considering that after knocking 100 doors, is a harder sale or a bigger ask than potentially painting something.

So go out and knock doors. You do knock 100 doors, you’re gonna have some leads.

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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.