Will Pay-Per-Click Boost Your Painting Business Online?

To be successful in the painting industry, your company must employ quality painters, use trusted equipment, and implement effective marketing strategies. Without the perfect combination of these three factors, you’ll probably find it difficult to close sales and cultivate a sustainable business model.

The Painting Contractor Sales Process

At its core, the painting sales process resembles that of other industries. In the painting business, the sales funnel consists of three primary components: marketing, leads, and closing sales. It’s no secret that getting painting leads can be tough. In a DIY age, many people are choosing to paint their homes and businesses themselves.

Despite deliberate messaging from painting companies that high-quality paint jobs are a lot of work, require special equipment, and are difficult to do well without experience, homeowners are excited to get on YouTube to save money by doing things themselves.

The transition to DIY paint projects does provide advantages in the lead portion of the sales process; people who go searching for painting contractors are usually serious about hiring one, and therefore, many leads obtained by painting companies hold a lot of potential value.

The Lead Component of the Sales Funnel

In an increasingly digital age, people are searching for painters online. However, simply having a website, posting on social media platforms, and managing a LinkedIn profile is not enough to generate online leads.

Traditionally, many painters have used pay-per-click (PPC) ads as their primary marketing strategy. The PPC marketing approach comes with advantages and disadvantages.

What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC)?

Pay-per-click is a great way to get noticed in the search engines as quickly as possible. If you think of it in racing terms, PPC is the sprint in the digital marketing race.

Simply put, you pay a search engine such as Google for “ad space.” You select a “bid” that you are willing to pay for a higher position on the results page. Each time someone clicks on your ad, you pay the search engine hosting the ad a certain amount. Higher positions in the search results require higher bids and usually cost more money per click.

An example of this is as follows. If you go to Google and type in “restaurants near me,” the first few results on the top of the page usually display “ad” next to the links. These restaurants can potentially get higher visibility and traffic and therefore, more leads. Additionally, a high ranking on the first search engine results page (SERP) can make a company seem more legitimate to Internet searchers.

While PPC marketing is a great strategy for certain industries, it usually isn’t the best marketing tactic for painting companies. Outlined below are some of the pitfalls of PPC for painting contractors.

PPC Campaigns Are Pricey and Don’t Produce Quality Leads

PPC campaigns are expensive. If you’re the top result on a Google SERP and you’re paying anywhere between $5 to $20 per click, it can quickly become financially challenging to keep up.  It is important to keep in mind that clicks do not equal sales. In fact, the majority of your clicks can be tire-kickers, spambots, and even your competition. Most of the time, painting companies pour most of their marketing budgets into PPC campaigns that do not provide quality leads.

If your conversion rate for sales is 30 percent, and you’re paying $20 per click, you’ve got to bring in some pretty high numbers for your PPC campaign to make sense. While there are companies out there that can afford this, they usually aren’t your local neighborhood painting contractors.

It’s Hard to Compete With the Big Players in the Industry

A little competition is healthy, right? That’s what they always say in little league. However, when using a PPC, you’re automatically inserting yourself straight into the majors. Could your local minor league baseball team go up against the Yankees and expect to win? No offense to your team, but there’s just one fact we can’t ignore: larger players have money, power, and resources that you don’t.

Similarly, your local painting outfit can’t compete with the national giants: CertaPro, Fresh Coat, and others. They have the money, power, and resources that make PPC campaigns financially feasible. If you choose to run a PPC campaign, giant companies can and will gladly outbid you.

PPC is a Complete Process

Running a PPC campaign takes constant monitoring and updates. Additionally, to be successful, ads must be run at optimal times to targeted audiences. In short, a PPC campaign requires a lot of data analysis. Unless you know how to optimize a PPC campaign, you’ll have to hire someone who knows what they’re doing, which only adds to your cost and to your list of managerial duties.

Effective Marketing Alternative to Pay-Per-Click

Ultimately, PPC marketing is usually not the best strategy for growing and expanding a painting business. To grow your painting business’s online presence, you must use a marketing technique referred to as search engine optimization (SEO). By creating relevant, trustworthy, and consistent websites, webpages, Google My Business listings, and social media posts, you can bolster a search engine’s reading of your quality and trustworthiness. Best of all, you’re gaining rankings, traffic, and leads organically instead of paying for it.

Contact Painters Academy to Grow Your Painting Business

As a painter, taking the time to invest in your business—specifically in effective marketing strategies—is the best way to increase your profits. With hard work and dedication, you can watch your business grow, expand, and excel.

Often, painters outsource their marketing campaigns to professionals who are not familiar with the industry. As a result, their websites aren’t optimized to rank for the searches that generate leads and, ultimately, conversions. At Painter’s Academy, our team intimately understands the painting industry and the best marketing strategies for quality lead generation. Our services have a proven track record of helping painters develop websites that provide profitable returns. If you want to grow your painting business, call today at (423) 800-0520 or fill out our online contact form.