Marketplaces like Angi and HomeAdvisor can fill a slow week. But their requests are often shared with several painters, and when the spend stops, so do the requests.
A pipeline you own works differently: homeowners find you, call you, and nobody else hears about the job. Here is how to build it.
Start with the leads you already lose
Before spending on anything new, count the calls you miss. For most one- to five-crew painters it is a third of inbound calls, mostly in the evening. Those are calls you already earned, through the sign on the truck or the neighbor's referral, and they are going to the next painter on the list.
A missed-call text-back fixes it in an afternoon. The homeowner gets a text in seconds, picks interior or exterior, and books an estimate slot. You answer when you are off the ladder.
Google Business Profile is the real lead source
For a local service, the Google map pack is where searches end. Three businesses, their ratings, their photos, a call button. If you are in it, you get the call. If you are below it, you get the leftovers.
What gets you in:
- A complete profile. Categories, service area, hours, a description that says what you paint and where.
- Photos every week. Real jobs, phone quality is fine. Google rewards activity.
- Reviews, steadily. Not a burst of ten from friends. One or two a week from real customers, asked for by text right after the job with a direct link.
- Replies to every review. Short, human, from you.
This takes months to build and then keeps paying for years.
A site that books, not one that informs
The profile brings the click. The site has to close it. That means:
- Click-to-call that works on a phone.
- An estimate request that lands in a CRM and triggers a text back, not an inbox you check at night.
- Recent exteriors above the fold in spring, interiors and cabinets in winter.
- A photo of a house that looks like the homeowner's, in their neighborhood, finished last month.
A page about your values is fine below all of that. Nobody scrolls to it before calling.
Reviews and follow-up run themselves
A CRM sends the review request after the final coat, the reminder before the walkthrough, and the check-in a week after an estimate that went quiet. About half of lost jobs are estimates nobody followed up on; this is where they come back.
Ads, last
Once the phone is answered, the profile is live, and the site converts, ads are worth running. Facebook and Instagram, aimed at the streets you already work, with a before-and-after from nearby. Ads before that point pay to bring people to a phone nobody answers.
Should you cancel the marketplace?
Not on day one. Get the foundation in so the requests you already get stop slipping through. Then lean on your own pipeline more as it grows, and adjust the marketplace spend to match.
See how marketplaces compare with your own pipeline, or book a call and we will look at your specific market.