5 Tips for Marketing Your Painting Franchise

Once you’ve chosen to invest in a painting franchise and put your creativity to work, you’ll need to tick several important boxes. One of the most important of all? Developing effective marketing strategies and plans. Here are Point Franchise’s five top tips for marketing your painting franchise effectively.

The UK painting industry is worth £4 billion [IBISWorld], and if you’re ready to get involved in it, you need to be aware of your competition. Painting and decorating services are in high demand, but as a result, there are plenty of companies offering these services. By learning how to effectively market a home painting franchise, you can stand out from the crowd and become one of the top painting franchises in the UK.

5 tips for marketing a painting franchise

There are many advantages to running a commercial painting franchise, not least the fact that you’ll be able to combine an exciting, creative role with profit and financial success. But even with the support of your franchisor and the franchise’s established brand name on your side, marketing matters. Developing a loyal and supportive local customer base within your franchise territory matters.

You’ll need to give your advertising plans adequate consideration, especially once you start building a business plan for your painting franchise. Who will you target? What mediums will you use to advertise? If you just don’t know where to start, keep reading. These five carefully chosen marketing tips will help you develop solid strategies for your painting business and produce positive results...

1. Make use of the franchisor support available to you

This is the first and most important tip, and though it might seem obvious, it’s easy enough to forget once you’re in the thick of running your own business and working hard each day. You’ve made a franchise investment, and with that investment, you’ve gained access to some brilliant expertise. Use it.

In some cases, your franchise package will come with marketing advice and support. In others, it won’t - but if you’re stumped, you can still check in and ask for help. Remember that the success of your franchise unit is the success of your franchisor - and if anyone is rooting for you, it’s them.

In 2018, business partners James and Wai [...] worked closely with Head Office to compile a comprehensive business plan to forecast their first five years of trading. Prokil Head Office set the new franchisees up with an online marketing package to cover pay per click, search engine optimisation and other mediums.
- Prokil 

2. Build your brand and credibility using digital marketing

When you start your own painting franchise, you’ll have many different things on your to-do list. It might be easy to focus on the tangible, offline tasks first, but a good website paired with a strong social media presence could be massively helpful to the growth of your business, increasing its visibility and credibility. You should ensure that you start working on your digital marketing right away, especially given that around 71% of small businesses have a website [Fit Small Business] and 4.2 billion people are on social media across the globe [Hootsuite].

In terms of your website, ensure that it’s easy to navigate, quick to load, and SEO friendly. Include as much useful information as you can on the site: Information about your business, information about your painting services, contact details, a gallery full of photos of your paintwork, testimonials from previous clients. The more value you can add, the better. In terms of your social media presence (on any combination of the big four - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram), you should be:

• Developing an understanding of your target audience
• Appealing directly to this target audience
• Networking with other local businesses
• Communicating directly and openly with customers
• Building a digital community
• Developing a consistent and strong brand voice
• Sharing quality content regularly and consistently
• Setting goals, measuring progress, and making regular adjustments

3. Network, network and network some more

Making connections and developing strong relationships with other local businesses doesn’t need to be limited to social media. It’s something you can do online and in real life, and it’s something that you really should be doing if you want to ensure the continued growth and success of your painting franchise. Mutual referrals are a powerful thing in the world of advertising, and though networking can be intimidating when you’re only just starting out, growing your franchise by building a professional network comes with all of the following advantages:

• It increases your visibility, helping you to get noticed by more customers
• It sees you being referred and recommended more often
• It allows you to make helpful referrals to your own customers
• It offers you a sense of community and a source of professional support and advice

You can network via social media, as mentioned in the previous tip. But you can also take the time to attend in-person events. Franchise events, for example, would help you to connect with other franchisees. Networking events would help you to meet with a broader range of local business owners. Utilise any networking opportunities offered to you by your franchisor, and if you feel it would benefit you, don’t be afraid to seek out even more on your own.

4. Stay up-to-date

In the painting industry, new and innovative trends are regularly being introduced and changing the way that work is conducted. For your franchise business to stay on top of its game, both operationally and in terms of your marketing strategies, you’ll need to stay up-to-date on these trends. Things like:

• Virtual reality service previews
• High-tech coatings
• Hygiene-focused solutions
• Eco-conscious, elegant solutions

What will the interior design industry look like in 2029? If the last 10 years are any indication, it will appear remarkably different than it does today. In 2009—when brass, barn-wood paneling, and exposed-filament Edison bulbs were still seen as stylish—most designer products were sold exclusively to the trade, pricing was often a closely guarded secret, and Instagram and Pinterest didn’t even exist.
- Tim McKeough, Architectural Digest

5. Advertise rewards for loyal customers

Customers love to be appreciated, and when you’re looking to build up your client roster and encourage people to pay for your painting and decorating services again in the future, a reward is a great way to go about it. Especially rewards that are contingent on referrals, like ‘50% off for you and a friend after you recommend our services’. A programme like this, combining reward and referral, will:

• Gain you more customers
• Make your existing customers loyal and appreciative
• Allow you to advertise your franchise in a cost-effective, low-effort manner
• Contribute to a positive perception of your franchise in the local community

A referral programme will help you to gain loyal customers who are 18% more likely to stick with your services [Referral Rock]. Let your customers do the heavy lifting where they can, spreading the word about your professional, high-quality services and receiving discounts and offers in return.

Start a commercial painting franchise today, and enjoy running your own business in a supportive, low-risk ownership model

If you’re more ready than ever to become a professional painter, you’ll now be armed with these helpful marketing tips. Deepen your research on Point Franchise and get even more prepared by researching a day in the life for a franchisee in the painting industry, or by discovering the full range of painting franchise opportunities on offer (and how to choose the one that’s right for you).