Marketing for painting contractors

Case: Mr. Gary, Montreal

Mr. Gary is an owner-operated painting business in Montreal that lived on Facebook and Instagram. From February 2026 we ran Meta campaigns built from the owner's own footage, a short estimate quiz, a bilingual landing page and a CRM. The client's CRM holds 92 requests from 30 March to 24 August 2026, and 82 of them came through the quiz. When the business narrowed to on-site kitchen cabinet painting, we built a new site for that one service: 116 pages, 58 in English and 58 in Quebec French, with a photo quote as the main request. It waits on a staging address for the switch. Read the Mr. Gary case.

Quote logic: rooms and walls, or doors and drawers

A painting quote depends on units that differ by job, so the quiz has to ask in those units.

• Interior walls. Number of rooms, ceilings yes or no, the state of the walls (patching, stains, wallpaper to remove), a light-to-dark colour change, and whether the rooms will be furnished.
• Exterior. The siding material, the number of storeys, the sides of the house to paint and the prep the surface needs.
• Kitchen cabinets. The number of doors and drawers, the island and any vanities, the current material and finish (wood, MDF, thermofoil, melamine, previously painted), the colour change, and whether the doors are sprayed on site or taken away.

Each answer is a single tap. The quiz ends with a name and one contact field, and the answers arrive in the owner's chat numbered in the same order, so the call back starts with a rough figure.

Photo estimates

For cabinets and for walls with damage, photos replace most of the first visit. Ask for three to eight phone photos: the whole room from the doorway, one door or wall up close, and any damage. On a phone the upload button opens the camera directly. The photos land with the request, and the owner can answer with a range the same day and book the visit only for customers who accept it.

Seasons

Exterior painting fills late spring to early fall. Interiors and kitchen cabinets fill the winter, when exterior crews have free days and homeowners are inside looking at their kitchens. Plan the budget the same way: exterior ads and pages ready by early spring, cabinet and interior offers from November. In Quebec, Google Trends shows cabinet painting searches peaking from January to March.

Before-and-after photos as the main material

Homeowners choose a painter by comparing before-and-after photos. The workflow we set up with a painter:

1. Same angle twice. Before the masking goes up and after the last door is back, from the same spot, at the same height.
2. Day-by-day clips of each job, filmed on a phone: masking, sanding, priming, spraying, reinstalling.
3. One record per job: the area, the month, the starting finish, the colour and the coating. That record becomes a project page, a gallery entry and the caption of an ad.
4. The owner on camera for a few ads. In a trade where the customer lets a stranger into the house for days, seeing the owner's face helps them decide to trust the company.

The same pairs feed the Meta ads, the gallery on the site and the Google profile, so one job produces material for all three.

English and Quebec French

In Quebec a painter who works in Montreal, Laval or Gatineau sells to two language groups. Each language needs its own pages with their own addresses, written with the words people type in that language. A French page that only translates the English text misses the terms Quebec homeowners search for.

Reviews after the job

Ask for the review on the day the job is handed over, with a direct link sent by text. A painter who grew on Facebook and Instagram often has more recommendations there than reviews on Google. That gap is the cheapest one to close: the map results read Google reviews, and in our Montreal study the AI Overview lists for cabinet painting were drawn from Business Profiles.

Website for painters

A painter's site works with a page per job type (interior, exterior, cabinets, each cabinet material), project pages built from the before-and-after records, a page per area served, a cost page that explains what moves the price, and a photo quote as the main button. For an existing site that looks dated, see website redesign services; if the site is broken or nobody holds the logins, see website rescue and migration.