Marketing a painting business is every bit as important to the painter as actually applying the paint. After all if you have no leads, where will you put the paint? Now there are many ways to advertise. And of course, some are more effective than others and some are more expensive than others, and cost is no indication of how effective you are at marketing your painting business will be.

I have tried just about everything. When I first got started in this business, I started mailing 8.5×11 inch flyers folded three ways and stapled, this was far too labor intensive. So after doing it this way for about three years, I switched to a 5.5×8.5 inch postcard. Both of these were printed by the local printer with the exception of the addressee which I printed on my printer. I purchased mailing lists and downloaded the lists to my Excel spreadsheet and then used the mail merge feature of Microsoft Word. At first I printed to pressure sensitive labels peeled them from their backing and stuck them to the mail piece, but again this was far too much work especially when mailing thousands. In the beginning when I started I would get 8 calls for every one thousand pieces mailed, lately the return has dropped to about 4 per thousand. I am still using the postcardsgo. I buy 10000 cards and mail 2000 pieces at a time. You will need a bulk rate permit and what is called a postal indicia. The post office will help you; you need to go to a special branch that specializes in bulk mail.

Then I went to my website. I hired a Get a Freelancer for under $100 to design and build my site. I thought that the process would be expensive; but I only pay $3.75 per month for a hosting company. The website, at first, produced few leads but these have grown in quantity each year. So between the card mailing and the website I have a consistent source of leads I can imagine someday doing away with the postcard mailing, when the website provides enough leads.

I tried newspaper ads, which gave poor results. I tried the crawl at the bottom of the weather channel and got no leads at all. Yellow pages were had good returns; but very expensive. When I first advertised in the yellow pages there were 3 pages of painters; when I finally cancelled my ad there were 9 pages of painters ads, too much competition.