4 Ways the Internet Keeps Painting Businesses Working in Winter

We all know the hardest time of year to be a Painting Contractor: Winter.

Chances are, just reading that word made you shudder, and not because you’re thinking about how cold it gets in December.

Right now, it’s summer! Leads are coming in, your closing rates are up, and customers are looking at their new homes with awe and approval, and your bookkeeper is doing the same. Summer makes people pay for paint jobs, and that’s good.

However, this reminds us of an old fable about some ants and a grasshopper. The Grasshopper spends his summertime enjoying all the immediately-available fruits of the season while his neighbors, the Ants, spent their entire summer busy, hard at work, gathering food to stockpile for the winter.

How does this affect you as a Painter? Let’s break it down into the 4 Ways to Keep Painting Business in Winter.

1. Visibility

It’s 2019, and
the absolute truth of running a Painting Business–or any business, really–is
that online presence is a must. Sure, people still read the newspaper
and local magazines, but when you can look up, navigate, or order just about
anything from a brick that fits in your pocket, you can bet that that’s the
number one way people will be finding their next painter.

Have you ever
Googled your own name? If you have, you may be relieved if no results about
your personal life show up.

But if you search for your
Painting Business online and find no results…well, that’s a major problem. 85%
of users do not go past Page 1 of Google, Bing, etc. to find what they’re
looking for.

So, what does that mean for us in the Painting world? It means we’re required to excel at things most people in our profession aren’t familiar with.

• Have you fully optimized your Google My Business?
• Is your website built around keyword relevancy and accordingly structured?
• What are you posting on your social media?
• Are you using your social media frequently, if at all?

There are good practices and terrible practices in making sure your painting company is found online.

It’s important to realize, too, that “having a website” does NOT mean you will be found online. If your optimization is poor (i.e. keyword density, an abundance of service pages, etc.) you will not get found.

And sure, the bank account is fat right now when it’s warm…but remember last winter when everything got lean from November to March?

Getting found online takes time. If you’re going to paint in Winter, your best option is to start storing now.

2. Don’t Neglect Your Customer List

You get a phone
call. It’s a potential client. Great! Leads are coming in. You go size up their
house, get them a quote, draw up some paperwork, and close the sale. Great.

You schedule a
date, get the project done, and BOOM: you’ve got that big cash stimulus in your
account.

Great work! On to
the next one, right?

Hold your horses.
One thing Painters always neglect is their past customers. This
is a HUGE opportunity that painters lose 1,000’s of dollars a year on.

If you’re not
staying visible in front of your past customers, you’re losing precious
real estate: their brain space.

Customer
Repaints should be the easiest job to acquire. If you painted Bob’s living
room 8 months ago and now, he’s ready to have the kitchen painted, he won’t
remember you from Adam if you don’t stay in touch.

Monthly newsletters (both email and snail mail), relevant posts on social media, offers/deals, REGULAR POSTING…all critical actions for you to take to keep your customers thinking about you.

Don’t lose your
foothold in their brains just because you’ve already completed a job for them.
Loyalty is important to customers if you do a good job, and, of course, it
should be important to you, too.

3. Get Creative in the Winter

Picture this: It’s
January. It’s cold out, the leads are slow, your bookkeeper is warding off
panic attacks, and your painters are bored.

Chances are…this
sounds all too familiar to you.

We see it all the
time: if there’s no painting to be done, we layoff our painters.

While most of us
hate to do it, our budget just won’t let us hang onto our painters while
there’s no paint work to be done.

It is imperative
to remember, however, that your painters can do more than just paint. Keeping a
loyal, quality painter at your company is one of the smartest moves you can
make as a Painting Business owner.

But how? There are
no jobs. No jobs=no money…no money=no payroll.

This is where you,
as the business owner, can get creative. Examine ALL the ways your business
brings in revenue and beef up your personnel on some of those tasks. It may be
administrative tasks, sales, outreach, building repair…you name it.

If it brings money
into your business, assign your painters to it if they have nothing else to do.
Not only will this help you keep your best painters, it will also save you
expenses of contracting out for other personnel and will help you better
prepare for your busy season.

4. START NOW

“What!”
cried the Ants in surprise, “haven’t you stored anything away for the
winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?”

“I didn’t
have time to store up any food,” whined the Grasshopper; “I was so
busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone.”

The Grasshopper is
introduced in Aesop’s classic fable begging the Ants for food. While he spent
the summer doing what he felt was important, he missed golden
opportunities to make his life better in the future.

We all know the
wisdom from this fable implies that you must take advantage and prepare for
harsh times while resources are plentiful.

Are you starving
for leads in the Winter? Then the SUMMER IS THE TIME TO PREPARE.

And, as we
established, you’re going to have a pretty hard time continuing to get leads
and close sales if you’re not getting found online. Not only in the
Winter, but for the life of your business.

Web presence
takes time to develop. If you want to be found online by November, the time to
start preparing is TODAY.

APPC’s Web
Services covers several offerings from SEO to Monthly Newsletters to
building Painting Websites for Painting Contractors.

Click here to find out more about digital services for painting contractors, or get in touch with us directly:

John Schofield
(423) 541-2323
onlineleads@paintersacademy.com