Marketing for interior and exterior painting contractors
Painting is a visual, high-ticket, seasonally swinging trade where the difference between a good year and a bad one is usually whether the schedule was booked before the season started.
What goes wrong when painting contractors advertise
Exterior work has a hard season and interior work does not, and most painting companies advertise as if they are one business, so winter is a cliff every single year.
Free estimate ads produce enormous volume and a calendar full of unpaid driving, because nothing in the offer filters for scope or budget.
Painting is bought with the eyes, and most painting ads show a roller and a tin instead of the finished room the customer is imagining.
What To The Max builds for painting contractors
Interior and exterior as separate campaigns on opposite seasonal schedules, so the business never has an empty quarter.
Estimates qualified in the form: room count or square footage, interior or exterior, and timeline, so the site visit is worth the drive.
Finished-room and finished-house photography as the entire creative direction, shot in homes that look like the target customer's home.
Cabinet refinishing and specialty work run as their own campaign, since the margin is better and the buyer is different.
Commercial and property management campaigns for repaint cycles, which are steady, repeatable, and barely advertised to.
The math to run before you spend
Every number below is a planning range or a target, not a claimed result. The only claimed results on this website are dated in the Ledger.
- Interior whole-house repaint
- $3,000 to $9,000
- Exterior repaint
- $4,000 to $12,000
- Cabinet refinishing
- $2,500 to $6,000
- What a qualified lead can cost
- $50 to $180
- What breaks most painters
- Unqualified free estimates
The real cost of a bad lead in this trade is the half day you spend driving to it. Qualify in the form, even at the cost of volume.
Questions painting contractors ask
Do Facebook ads work for painting contractors?
Yes, because painting is visual and the ticket is high enough to carry a real lead cost. The mistake is running a generic free estimate offer, which fills the calendar with unpaid site visits instead of jobs. Qualify scope and timeline in the form and the same budget performs completely differently.
How much does a painting lead cost?
Fifty to one hundred and eighty dollars for a qualified lead. On a five thousand dollar interior repaint closing at one in three, that is very comfortable. The expensive lead is the cheap one that turns into a half day of driving for a job that was never real.
How do painters stay busy in winter?
By running interior work as its own campaign on its own schedule. Interior repaints, cabinet refinishing, and trim work are indoor jobs with no weather constraint, and homeowners want them done before the holidays and in the slow months after. The companies that switch ads off in November create their own cliff.
What should a painting ad show?
The finished room or the finished house, in a property that resembles the customer's. Rollers, tins, and crews in white overalls sell nothing, because the customer is not buying the process. They are buying an image of their own house that they already have in their head.
The receipts behind this
To The Max is a one-operator agency run by Maximus Fayrweather in Huntsville, Alabama. The founder owns Supreme Clean, a pressure washing company doing five thousand dollars a month, and every strategy is funded with his own money on that business before it is sold to anyone. Wins and failures are both recorded with dates in the Ledger.
If you want to see what the leads actually look like when they arrive, there is a walkthrough of the lead feed. If your trade is not this one, the full list of industries has the plan for it.