Businesses succeed or fail for a variety of reasons. However, most of those reasons come down to one thing and one thing only: is there enough revenue to allow the business to continue?  And since most businesses generate revenue from paying customers, it stands to reason that in most cases the math is easy to understand:

Enough customers = Success.

Not enough customers = Failure.

While there are outliers and exceptions in different industries, professional paintwork has a fairly standard success model. If you have enough paying clients and jobs then you can build a business. But if you go days or even weeks without work then you are well on your way to being out of business entirely.

What is your website saying about your business?
Image courtesy of Mad Town Agency

As a result, any advantage you can gain against the competition when it comes to securing clients is an advantage you must take seriously. While we’ve discussed the power and value of referrals on a number of occasions, there are other proactive things you must do if your paint business is to not just succeed, but thrive. One of those is making sure your online presence and reputation are constructed in a way that attracts new clients.  From your own website to your engagement with social media platforms, there have never before been so many ways to reach an audience and promote your business.  Over the next three days we’ll be discussing how to build and manage an online presence that allows you to promote your business in a way that distinguishes you from the competition. Let’s get started…

Before we go any further, let’s perform an experiment.  Open another internet browser window and go to a search engine such as Google or Bing. Once there, type the name of your company in to the text box and click the “search” button. What do you see?  Is your company website on the first page of results? What about your Yelp! profile or Yellow Pages (YP.com) listing?  Is there a link to your Angie’s List profile or Twitter feed? More importantly, do you know what each of those things is?

Whether you realize it or not, the first thing a potential client is likely to do upon considering your paint company for their upcoming job is look for your website. In most cases they will find your website by doing exactly what you did a moment ago: typing your company name into a search engine and scanning the results. If you are fortunate, everything else they find will be positive reviews or a link to a page on your company website, and not derogatory reviews or links to your competitors. Prior to the exercise above, did you have any idea what potential clients were finding when they searched for your company? It is imperative that when they look over that first page of links, they find your company and the good things people are saying about you. When prospective clients search for your company’s name with a search engine, you want to do everything you can to ensure that they are learning about your work, your values, your reputation, and how to easily contact you.

Your online presence is the gateway to clients not familiar with you. Image courtesy of Radest Jepanovic.

So what’s the best way to control the online conversation happening about company and the services you offer?  You have to stay on top of things by regularly searching for your company in search engines and keeping an eye on what you find. More importantly, the person talking the most about your company on the internet needs to be YOU. From a well-constructed website to social media profiles and fresh content, the best way to ensure that prospective clients are impressed with what they learn about you on the internet is to be the voice they hear when doing so.

In the next two days we will focus on how to build a successful paint business website and how to navigate the sometimes confusing and overwhelming world of social media. In the meantime, click here to see how paint companies like BYK use their online presence and website to communicate their expertise and offerings with potential customers and clients!