Facebook Ads for Painters: The Ultimate Lead Generation Guide

Building a consistent flow of pre-qualified residential repaint leads can be a challenging task, especially if your painting business relies on word-of-mouth advertising. But where do you start?

If you’re searching for the best source of quality painting leads at a reasonable price point, look no further than Meta Ads (Formally Instagram and Facebook Ads).

Yes, Social Media Ads have been drilled into our minds as a low-quality lead source, but this is a fallacy due to a lack of understanding of what ad types and demographics produce the best results on this medium.

So I’m giving away our secret sauce to building a high-volume residential repaint lead generation system using social media advertising.

Before we dive into the weeds, let’s start with a simple question…

Do Facebook Ads Work For Painters?

Yes! But it requires a little more effort and knowledge compared to running ads on Google. Ad types, content, and media will all determine how your ads will preform on social media.

Now let’s jump in!

According to Statista, Facebook is still the dominant social media network, with approximately 2.93 billion active users every month. Facebook is also the platform on which Americans spend the most time with an average of 33 minutes per day ????

While Facebook caters to all ages from 18-65+, Instagram is primarily the domain of ages 18-34. Both platforms will reach homeowners, but Instagram is more likely to target first-time home buyers.

As a residential painting contractor, you probably know what your ideal customer profile (ICP) looks like.

For instance: A dual-income household earning over $250k per year with a home valued over $500k.

If you haven’t developed an ICP yet, start here — Ask yourself what characteristics do the customers that are easiest to close all have in common? Build a persona around these demographics, and stick to them.

Now let’s review how do you use this information.

Since the majority of users on Facebook or Instagram are not actively looking for your painting services, you have to get creative to capture buyer intent.

Buyer Intent (or Purchase Intent): The probability of how close a consumer is to completing a purchase of a product or service.

While we don’t have a search query to target as we do on paid search (Google Ads/PPC) we do have user data.

Have you ever seen an ad and felt like your phone must be monitored by Facebook? Hint: It’s not, Meta’s algorithm is just REALLY good at leveraging your user data and social interactions. This is ultimately why Meta has run into so many privacy issues — your data is essentially sold to the highest bidder.

Consequently, Instagram and Facebook Ads for painters are actually among the most effective ways to generate new residential painting business on a budget.

Note that commercial painting leads are best acquired on Google.

The short answer: It depends, but $30-$60 per lead is a good target.

We recommend a daily budget between $50-65 (roughly $1500-$2000/month). The primary factor that determines your CPA (cost-per-acquisition, or cost-per-lead) is your CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions).

Don’t confuse CPM on Meta with CPC (cost-per-click) on Google.

Factors that can impact your CPM include:

Like most painting business owners, you’re probably wondering whether you should focus your ad spend on Facebook or Google.

While they both have their time and place, here are the pros and cons of each:

Meta (Facebook and Instagram) has the best platforms for generating residential repaint leads at a low price point throughout the year.

Given that advertising on social media is known as “Interest Marketing,” or selling to someone who isn’t actively looking for your services, this ad channel is less likely to be impacted by the seasonality of the industry.

Since you are primarily paying for CPM on Meta, compared to CPC on Google, it’s hard to beat the cost for an exclusive lead.

A downside of Meta Ads is the time involved to close a lead. Unlike Google Ads, which sends bottom-of-funnel (traffic this is already interested in your services) to a landing page to book an estimate, it’s best to keep users on the Meta platform to maintain a low CPL (cost-per-lead).

At the time of writing this article there is currently no way to book an estimate directly on the Meta platform. Therefore, outreach may be required to book an estimate from a new lead generated via Facebook ads.

Additionally, since we have no search queries to target on social media you will need to build a custom audience to target, and this can take time (generally around 30-90 days).

Given the lack of buyer intent on social media you can expect a healthy set rate between 50-70%.

Conversely, using a well-optimized landing page Google Ads offers the best quality leads, but at a higher price point.

You can expect to spend between $100-$150 per booked estimate using Google Ads, but since you’re able to skip the outreach step required by social ads the higher price point might be worth the cost — Ask yourself, what is the value of your time?

Google is also the best medium for commercial painting leads as B2B leads can be difficult to acquire on social media.

Since we have established buyer intent using targeted search queries on this medium you can expect a healthy set rate between 60-80%.

Now that we reviewed why and how social ads work, let’s discuss how to build a successful campaign to attract new painting leads by advertising your painting business on Facebook and Instagram.

First, if you don’t have Facebook and Instagram profiles created for your business yet, you will need to set those up.

Here are a few helpful tips to setup these profiles effectively:

To begin advertising, Meta requires that you have two additional accounts created within their platform:

Now that we have the framework for your advertising campaign created, let’s get on with the main event!

Meta has a number of various ad types you can select from. While you may think it’s best to send traffic from Facebook and Instagram directly to your website, like Google Ads, it’s actually just a great way to waste your ad spend.

With the release of iOS 14.5 at the end of 2021, Facebook and Instagram are now unable to accurately track your actions off of their platform.

With this in mind, you can expect better results if you keep your prospects on Meta’s platform using the following ad types:

Pro Tip: Ads with an image containing a human face tend to convert better than images of objects like a house.

While creating your Meta Ads you will be prompted to define an audience. This is arguably one of the most important steps to creating a successful advertising campaign that you can build on over time.

As we discussed earlier in this article, your audience is built on user data and will ultimately determine who sees your ads.

There are three primary audience types on Meta:

For Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences we recommend targeting the following sources:

As for Demographics, we find the best results with the following targets:

A successful social media advertising campaign can be built and managed by just about anyone with enough time and money, but most successful campaigns come from experience.

If you’re just getting started we recommend monitoring your campaigns closely. Your ads will be in a “learning” phase for approximately the first 30 days, or 30 conversions.

Once your ads are optimized check in at least once a week to ensure your CPM and CPL costs fit your budget and margins, then adjust as needed!

Implementing the social media marketing guide as defined above will produce results for your business, however, those tasks take time and energy.

Realistically, most painting business owners don’t have the time to learn, develop, and refine a successful social media marketing campaign.

This is where the team at Base Coat Marketing comes in. As a professional digital marketing agency exclusive to painting contractors, we can have your business up and running with social ads in as little as one week! BUT we are exclusive to only one painting company in each region so lock down your market before your competition does…