Marketing ideas for a small painting business

Contractors like painters and decorators offer a very useful service, but they’ll still need to promote that service to find clients. Without a decent marketing strategy, even a competent painter with a great business plan will struggle to keep their business operating.

This article will look at a few helpful marketing ideas for a painting business. The topic we’ll cover include:

• Identify your target market
• Social media 
• Freelancing sites

A target market is the group of people you’ve found to be most interested in paying for your services. If you don’t identify this group, you might struggle to market your business effectively. So before you invest in a specific marketing strategy, consider performing some research to identify your target market.

You can identify your target market by creating a customer profile. This is a document that lists all of the characteristics you expect to find in your company’s potential customers, like their location, job, interests, and shopping habits. Once you create the profile, you can research the characteristics of your actual customers to see how the profile matches up. 

By combining the theoretical characteristics of the profile with the actual characteristics of your past customers, you can identify your company’s target market. This knowledge allows you to adjust your marketing to promote your business directly to the people most interested in it. 

A painting business may want to specialise in a particular area, which will affect your target market. For example, if you only paint interiors, you might target homeowners making improvements to their houses. If you provide an even more specialised service, such as painting murals, you might want to target local councils or public organisations as potential customers.

Using social media is a common marketing tactic because it’s free and reasonably easy to use. Although making quality social media content – photos, blog posts, videos – can be a little trickier, simply having a social media presence means a great variety of potential customers can find you.

When marketing yourself on social media, remember to be consistent. If you struggle to find the time to post to social media, try setting yourself alarms and reminders, or create a content calendar that tells you what to post and when. 

While you should post content to your social media pages frequently, try to make sure it’s all relevant to the services you offer. Avoid posting about personal events on your business page unless the personal event relates to your business somehow.

Painting business will benefit significantly from the visual focus of most social media platforms. For instance, posting pictures that show examples of your work is a great idea. Of course, you may have to ask for permission from a homeowner if you did the job on private property, but photographs like this are a great way of demonstrating your skill. 

If you want to get even better results from social media, you can also pay for additional services. These include things like paid advertising or boosting the range of your posts beyond your followers. 

These are handy services to pay for if you think social media will be an effective way to market your company, but don’t want to put a lot of effort into attracting followers to make sure your posts reach many potential customers. This means it’s a particularly good idea if you run a business that centres around time-consuming tasks like painting.

These services are also very cheap: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offer very affordable advertising rates. Facebook and Instagram also provide the ability to boost posts from only £1-£5 per day, and you can customise your budget for this service by setting a maximum you’d like to spend. 

Although you may not consider yourself a freelancer, most painting businesses operate much like freelancers. They are client-based and provide a service to their clients instead of selling a product. Because of this, you might consider using a freelancing website to market your services. 

These sites work similarly to an online noticeboard: first, individuals and organisations post jobs that they need doing on the website. Then, users will send applications to the individual or organisation explaining why they’re the best person for the job. The original poster can then pick who they want to work for them at their leisure.

Freelancing sites are good for finding work quickly, as the larger ones usually have tons of jobs available. Some freelancing sites allow users to create profiles, so potential clients can seek out specific individuals and send them job offers. It’s these sites that are best for marketing your company, as you can fill your profile with lists of your services or previous work that shows off your skills.

If you’re looking for a specialised freelancing site (as opposed to the larger generic ones), Houzz is an excellent place for painters to market themselves. It exists specifically to assist people with home improvement projects — the site allows you to market yourself as a painter, decorator, or designer.