What a Painter’s Stars Can’t Close

I won’t ask your customers for reviews on your behalf.

Not from my email address, not through a tool with my name on the login, and not with a message I wrote at my desk and signed off as you.

The ask has to come from the painter who held the brush. Your customer is putting her name to something in public, where her neighbors can read it, and she should be handing that to someone she has actually met.

The second reason is less noble than the first. Painting companies have never once needed my help with this part, and the whole method of asking a customer properly is something this trade worked out long before I turned up with a page about it.

The question

Every second sales call, about ten minutes in, some version of this arrives:

“My reviews are already good. Do I even need a website?”

I get thirty seconds to answer before the conversation moves along, so I usually say something short and true and unsatisfying, and then we talk about the colors on his van instead.

The short version goes something like this: your reviews get you compared, and your website decides the comparison. It’s true, and it also sounds exactly like a sentence a web designer would say to a man holding a paint brush, which is why it has never once landed.

Here’s the answer I’d give if the call ran an hour.

You’re right about the stars

Painting companies average 4.9 stars, second of 47 trades I grade, and nothing else I check flatters this trade anything like as much.

It isn’t a handful of careful companies dragging up an average, either. 95.8% of the painting businesses in my sample have at least one Google review, so the habit runs right through the trade rather than sitting with the big operators.

So yes. Your reviews are doing the selling here, and I’d rather say that out loud than talk you out of something that already works.

Do you know your own rating without checking? Most painters I ask do, to the decimal, which tells you how much attention this trade pays to the part it’s already winning.

What a star can’t answer

Five stars gets you onto a shortlist of three. It doesn’t tell her whether you do kitchen cabinets.

Or whether you’ll work in a house with a toddler asleep upstairs. Or how long a stairwell takes, or what happens to her sofa while you’re in there, or whether you turn up in February.

When did you last hire anyone off a rating alone, without reading a word about them first?

She taps through with every one of those questions still open. Whatever she lands on is now doing your talking for you, and it has about ten seconds to do it.

The version I meet most often is five stars and a page that never says whose page it is.

Google hands her your rating, a few photographs and a button with your web address on it. Everything past that button belongs to you, and she pressed it because the rating told her you were worth the trouble of pressing.

The first thing I check when I land

A homepage contact form only counts with me when the boxes are sitting on the page she arrived at. A contact page one tap away comes back as a no, because a tap is a decision and she has already made a few of them getting this far.

33.2% of painting homepages I opened have one, twelfth of 47, and that came in higher than I expected when I started counting.

Which is the pleasant surprise of this whole trade. The fiddly job, the one that takes an afternoon and a fight with a plugin, gets done more often here than in most industries I audit.

Have you filled in your own form recently? Not looked at it. Filled it in, from a phone, and waited to see whether the email arrived.

What she still can’t tell

Whether you’re working this month.

Reviews carry dates, but she isn’t scrolling through them looking for one. She wants the fastest available proof that your company exists right now, this week, with vans on the road.

59.1% of these sites link a social profile, so a great many painting companies keep that proof in a place she can’t reach from the page she’s standing on.

The accounts exist. Almost every owner I ask is posting photographs of finished rooms somewhere. The website just never got told about it.

Flooring owners hand me four separate excuses for that same blank link, and I have some sympathy with exactly one of them.

Pointing the website at the account is an evening of work and it never needs doing again, and it turns a feed she would never have gone looking for into the most recent thing on your entire website.

The ones with nothing to send her to

78.4% of the painting businesses in my sample have a website at all.

The rest are a company name, a phone number and a wall of five star reviews pointing at nothing whatsoever.

I met one of those last winter. Lovely profile, hundreds of homeowners saying generous things about him, and the website field on his listing sent me to a Facebook page that had stopped in 2019.

Where does your own listing send her tonight, and when did you last follow that link yourself? I tell furniture shops to run that search on themselves before they lock up, and painters should be doing it from the van.

If that’s you, your reviews aren’t proof that you don’t need a website. They’re the reason you’d notice the difference faster than almost anybody else, because the interest is already there and it’s currently arriving at a dead end.

So, the answer

Yes, you need one. No, not the one you’re being quoted for.

Your reviews are the advertisement, and they’re a better advertisement than anything I could write for you. The page is where that advertisement lands, and right now the landing is the weaker half of the pair.

When I build a painting company a website now, the first screen carries the work, the towns and a box she can type into, and the argument about photography and color happens after those three are settled.

Want to know which of the three yours is missing? Send me the address and I’ll go looking for all three.

Two painters I didn’t write this for

The first has a book full through spring. If you’re turning work down in March, close the tab. You won a different argument years ago, and I’d only be inventing a problem for you.

The second already has a proper site, with a form on it and the numbers to prove the thing brings the phone to life. You know exactly what your website does for you, and you knew that before you read a word of this.

I wrote it for the painter with a five star profile and a page she’d have to be patient with. Your customers have already done the hardest part of your marketing for you, for free, in public.

Everything left to do is easier than the reviews were.

And if you’re reading this with a full calendar and a working form, none of it was yours. Send it to the painter down the road who keeps telling you his stars are enough.