A few of the best places to advertise a painting business

Sometimes the best places to advertise a painting business are obvious, and sometimes you just have to think outside the box a little bit. In this article, I am not going to talk about newspapers or magazines.  While there are exceptions, I really don’t think Print is the best place to advertise for any niche.  With that said, we can’t rely 100% on online advertising, either, so I will touch on both.

I am a big fan of letting your work sell itself, so let’s start with a couple of ways you can leverage your past work to connect with new potential customers:

Offline Advertising: Yard Signs

If you’re doing exterior painting, consider making the placement of a yard sign in the front lawn of your client’s home part of your agreement. Use a service like Speedy Signs or find a local sign company to have some 12×16 bandit signs made up that say something to the effect of “Another Quality Painting Job By XYZ Painters” along with your phone number and website. Ask to keep it in their yard for 3 weeks following the paint job. Don’t forget to go back and get it when you are done.

It can be as simple or as fancy as you want it to be. If you go with multiple colors, expect it to cost a little more. The most important thing is that it reflects your professionalism. I would stay away from “Basic” signs with just text. Think about putting a border on it that is the ad

Online Advertising

I’m not going to spend the rest of this article pimping our own AreaEcho for Painters service, but I do think you should check it out. Being able to reach potential customers in your local area on sites they use every day is very powerful.

Angie’s List ($)

One place painting contractors seem to have mostly good results is through advertising on Angie’s List. When we polled some of our clients about their results, we learned that, from their standpoint there were a number of pro’s and cons. While it is possible to get a free listing on the service, many times you will find yourself buried in the results until you sponsor your listing. Is advertising on Angie’s list worth the money? That’s a question you will need to determine for yourself as every market is going to be different.

Craigslist + IFTTT (free)

If you’re trying to advertise on the cheap, here are a couple of ways you can utilize some fun Internet sites and set up a semi-automated lead generation system using Craigslist and IFTTT.

Here is how you will set this up:

Part 1: Getting the Craislist results

1. First, go to your local Craigslist site.
2. Click on the main heading of the “gigs” section.
3. In the search box, enter “painter” and click search
4. Click search.  Even if there are no results to display, proceed to next step
5. Scroll down to the very botton right hand of the page.  You will see a little orange RSS button.  Right click and select “Copy Link” or whatever your browser’s equivalent is.

Make sure to paste that link somewhere or open another tab, as we will need it in a few minutes.  That’s all there is to the Craigslist part.  Next, follow the next steps to get on to IFTTT and create an applet to email you every time a new result comes in:

Part 2: Setting up an IFTTT applet

1. Go to ifttt.com and sign in (or sign up for a free account if you don’t have one)
2. Click the “New Applet” button from your home screen.
3. The first step is to create the “this”, so click on that part of the sentence
4. In the next screen, choose “Feed”, then select “New Feed Item” – this will trigger any time a new result is added to the craigslist search you saved earlier.
5. On the next screen, paste the URL from step 5 above.
6. Now you will be at the applet screen again, and the “this” will have an orange rss icon next to it.  This time, you want to click “that”
7. From the next screen, search for and select “Email”, then click “Send Me An Email”
8. The default subject and body are fine.  Just click “Create Action”
9. The next screen just confirms the recipe for the applet.  Click Finish.

That is it.  Now every time someone makes a post on Craigslist looking for painters, IFTTT will detect it and send it to you in email.  You can then click to read each post and respond directly on Craigslist.

More to come..

This is just a few of many ideas that I plan to blog about.  Be sure to come back often to discover more content.  What do you think a list of the best places to advertise a painting business should include? Leave your reply below.  Can’t wait to hear from you!