Transforming a paint contracting company into an evangelist for loving your home.
All painting companies promise the same things: Free Consultations! Cheap paint jobs! Quality results! To succeed in this tight industry, SPECTRUM Painting had to stand out from the crowd.
We had to promise something better. So we did.
PPC Landing Page
We use Google Search Ads to capture people who are in the immediate market for a paint contractor.
The copy was written using the StoryBrand principles that focus on the philosophical desires of visitors, we’ll go over that in a bit. The results were astounding.
For those not in the know, lets define some terms:
PPC
Pay-per-click advertising with Google
Ad Spend
Monthly budget spent on ads. More money = more views = more clicks = more conversions.
Conversion
A visitor calling or emailing SPECTRUM Painting
Lead
A visitor who is interested in converting. Hot leads are ready to hire someone yesterday and warm leads are people researching and shopping around
Before (left) — PPC traffic linked directly to the website portfolio page.
Notice how the ad-spend (blue) was much higher, and there were very few conversions (red).
After (right) — PPC traffic is linked to a landing page that uses the StoryBrand method.
The strategy of our messaging resonated with people, and our design tactics followed up on that success.
Why do people paint their homes?
No, it’s not just “because they need to”. To be successful, we had to be thoughtful about what motivates their customers.
Why not simply let the paint degrade?
Embarrassment
Nobody wants their houseguests to see that their home has fallen into disarray, it tugs at our innate desire for status within our tribe. This, however, is not the angle that we wanted to take, it is never right to prey on peoples negative drivers or insecurities, it’s a cop out at best and manipulation at worst.
Pride
Pride — the positive complement of embarrassment. People want to be proud of themselves and what they have built or achieved, and some people surely paint their homes in order to keep up with the Jones’s or so that they can have the best looking home on the block. This drive was better than preying on embarrassment, but it was still superficial.
Satisfaction
Through our discussion, we discovered that satisfaction is the cornerstone reason. Painting your house is like deep cleaning it, your houseguests wont notice a difference, it’s time consuming, and worst of all — you’ve got to move all your furniture around.
But the feeling afterward is the reward.
Somehow the rooms feel larger, the air smells crisper, and your sofa feels plusher. This feeling of bliss is what we needed to tap into, and the philosophical statement that you should feel that feeling all the time: “Your House Should Feel Like Home”.
The Hero
😎 The Customer
Homeowners
Have tired, old, or peeling paint
Dislike the color of their paint
⛔ Who Has a Problem
External: They need their home painted
Internal: They don’t feel proud of their home’s paint
Philosophical: They should love the way their home looks
The Guide
🧙🏼♂️ SPECTRUM Painting
Highly trained, expert painters
20 Years of experience painting
4 Step plan to help hero achieve goals
📜 Who has a Plan
Identify Problems
Pick the Perfect Color
Implement Your Vision
Relax and Enjoy Your New Space
Your House Should Feel Like Home
The Promise
By focusing on the aspirational nature of why people feel the need to paint their homes and infusing that perspective throughout the website and on PPC landing pages, we’ve redefined how potential customers measure the competition. Price — which is typically the driving factor now has to compete with the nagging feeling “Does a cheap independent painter, or large paint contracting corporation really care about making my house feel like home?”
The Plan
New homeowners may not know what to expect when they get their home painted, and for those who have painted properties before, they definitely want to know what to expect if they are hiring a different company than they used previously. We distilled the process down to 4 easy to understand steps.
The Guarantee
Picking a painter is all about trust. You are inviting strangers into your home. It’s also a long-term investment that is expected to last 10+ years. Nothing is worse than buying an item and having it break right after the warranty expires. We highlighted SPECTRUM’s industry leading 4-year warranty on paint materials and labor, and backed it up with lots of testimonials from happy customers to build social credit.
Search Engine Optimization and PPC
Our big marketing initiative was to drive organic traffic through search results and optimize the existing PPC campaigns using our newly discovered StoryBrand strategy.
The Problem
The services and portfolio images were broken into service-level categories which contained descriptions of the type of work, but didn’t include common keywords like “house painter” or “paint contractor”.
Residential Painting
Commercial Painting
New Construction
Cabinetry
But that’s not how people search. They search using terms like “house painter san luis obispo” or “best house painters near me”.
The old website was not capitalizing on any geographic terms, and never mentioned any common keywords that people would be searching for.
The Solution
We categorized the portfolio images by region (city), as well as service
San Luis Obispo
Avila Beach
Pismo beach
Arroyo Grande
Nipomo
Santa Maria
This provided us the opportunity to naturally use the regional keywords that customers were already searching for.
It also provided more relevant search results to customers, since they would be more likely to recognize houses that are from their neighborhood.
Other SEO Optimizations
Social Credit
We peppered reviews throughout the site, and made sure to include the city in which the review was written. We grouped those testimonials on the relevant regional portfolio pages to demonstrate to search engines that the page had lots of content relevant to that region. And by showing testimonials from people who live within a visitors community, we build even more powerful social credit with our existing testimonials.
Resources Page
Providing quality non-biased informational content builds trust between customers and your business, we added a Resources page where SPECTRUM can add information about various industry related subjects, such as what size company is best for certain job types, the differences between paint or how to pick the right color.