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By: John Devlin
Roofing
Below is my best advice for any up and coming roofer or struggling firm looking to boost leads.
Below your going to find what I deem to be the most critical aspects of marketing a profitable roofing company
Marketing is only one aspect and learning how to market a roofing company is going to be crucial if you want to have any long term success in the roofing industry.
Let’s get started
If you’re going to take away one thing from this roofing marketing guide then let it be this:
The mindset that you have when running a roofing company will ultimately determine whether you’re successful or not.
Most company owners that I’ve met over the years had predominantly been roofing contractors before venturing into owning their own business.
The next most common person I have seen that owns a roofing company are salesmen.
The biggest obstacle for these two types of owners is they have little interest in studying marketing for roofing companies.
Or due to working in the business, they have no time to research the latest roofing advertising ideas.
This is a considerable disadvantage.
We now live in a digital age where nearly 90% of all consumers start their search for new home improvement products online.
So if no one in your company is even a beginner or intermediate level of digital marketing how do you expect to be able to compete?
As the owner, it falls on you to learn and educate yourself about how to market your roofing company.
By adopting the mindset of a marketer, you will slowly learn fantastic roofer marketing strategies, gradually discovering what works and brings in revenue and more importantly, what marketing channels lose money.
Knowing things like:
Later being able to create basic YouTube marketing videos will move you very quickly into the fast lane of local roofing companies in your area.
Digital marketing is here to stay so my advice would be this:
If you don’t do anything else on this list of roofing marketing ideas then at least try to view yourself not as a roofer, not as a contractor but as the person responsible for learning roofing marketing.
A marketers mindset is all about leads.
Leads are their currency, and it’s all they care about.
By adopting this mindset of lead generation being the king and the backbone of your entire business plan will be an excellent foundation for future success.
Knowing how to start your own roofing company is one thing.
But you want to grow your roofing company, then you’re going to have to be prepared to invest.
Investing in marketing for any business as long as it’s successful marketing will produce an ROI (return on investment).
The amount of investment required to market a roofing company successfully is dictated solely by what are the ambitions of the roofing business
Over the years I’ve seen plenty of roofing businesses do well on small budgets.
I’ve also seen roofing companies go from one-man bands up to 100 + staff using much bigger budgets.
How much it costs to market a roofing company long term will all depend on a few KPI’s
And ultimately how big you would like your roofing company to be.
Having a understanding online marketing or better still having a roofing marketing strategy will allow you to stick to the plan and stay the course when things get tough.
To see all the posts I write about digital marketing for tradies it’s here.
The vast majority of new roofing businesses start without any idea around how they will find and attract new customers.
This is crazy and wouldn’t happen in any other industries yet seems to happen every day in the home services sector.
Roofers decide one day, they don’t want to work for anybody and that they wish to run their own business yet word of mouth is the only strategy they have to get more roofing work.
I’ve seen this happen countless times, and as you can guess, it really succeeds.
A simple plan to grow a roofing company could look like this:
Every week I’m going to spend the following.
Now, this is a marketing budget of around £1,500 a month.
What you have to bear in mind is that this is not £1,500 a month in lost money there’s going to be a return on investment in this spend.
It’s your job to find out which sections of the budget is making you money and which areas are losing your money.
So, for instance, let’s say the £400 spent on Google AdWords produces 12 leads of which three convert into roofing jobs and the total value you is £3,000.
This means,
The marketing costs of running a Google AdWords campaign for your roofing company is running at around 8%
Let’s compare this to the Facebook ads we may spend £150 a month on ads, and it produces four enquiries of which non convert.
This goes down in your spreadsheet as a £150 loss.
You can see what I’m getting at?
You need to spend money to acquire data to find out what works and what is giving you a return on investment.
Spending tens of thousands of pounds a month on marketing is perfectly fine as long as the company is making money.
So many small business owners look at marketing costs as an expense when this is entirely the wrong way to approach marketing.
As mentioned before, to promote a roofing company, it’s going to take cash but overtime you are going to refine your strategies.
You will work out what’s working and up the investment on the strategies producing returns.
Knowing your marketing winners and losers is the key to unlocking profitability.
No article online is going to be able to give you an exact amount of money to spend to acquire X amount of leads.
What I can provide you with today is the order on which I would be looking to invest based on advertising for the trades industry I have done.
Numbers are representatives of %
The general message the graph shows is, in the first 18 months use Adwords to get a strong start and get serious traction with your roof marketing.
After six months, your local SEO should be seeing tremendous growth, and this is where you want to cut back on PPC and invest heavily to nurture more organic leads.
Facebook should have a small, consistent budget to always push brand awareness to a five-mile radius of your location.
These people hyper-local to you should be retargeted continuously with ads to establish local dominance and pick up new customers.
In 12-18 months, you should be coming away from Adwords and only using the platform for brand searches and high converting keywords.
Your SEO efforts should be growing to cover a 30-mile radius, and use Facebook to promote expertise like case studies and testimonials while running retargeting ads.
PPC advertising is the quickest way to get new leads and customers in the door from a standing start.
Using the Google advertising platform can allow you to get new customers emailing and calling as soon as tomorrow morning
The downsides of PPC advertising is that it’s a constant auction of bidding against your competitors trying to win click, which ultimately will convert into to new customers.
I’d use this strategy in the early days while spending a substantial chunk of my budget, creating other forms of online marketing and digital assets.
The end goal with PPC is to use it to get early traction in your business and eventually reduce ad spend only to cover keywords that convert with an excellent CPC (cost per conversion) finally reducing the ad spend to nill.
I’m going to cover SEO further down this article so I only want to say at this stage that this is where are a huge portion of your budget should be allocated as long as you can afford to wait for results.
Also, you can learn SEO yourself, which is what I did and what I think you should do too. My tradies SEO guide is good place to start.
Facebook adverts specifically are another excellent way to reach potential customers for any roofing contractor
Although using Facebook ads to generate leads consistently for a roofing business is totally doable yet somewhat tricky.
To see how I generated 297 leads with Facebook advertising, it’s here.
A quality roofing website that looks the part has everything a customer wants to see and converts visitors into new leads and prospects is going to be critical to your success.
It’s well documented that 75% of searchers will judge a local company by their website design.
That’s a boatload of customers walking away if your website is rubbish.
It may not be fair, at the end of the day you guys are roofers not web developers but the customer is again looking to see how you invest in your own business and using that as a measure to what kind of company you are.
For your website to become your company’s number one asset, it’s going to need a few things.
If you have no experience building any web assets, then my advice would be to avoid even trying to build a roofing website on your own.
I know there are several major companies out there pitching the idea of building your own site to get more roofing leads, but the vast majority of these sites that I’ve come across do more harm than good.
The web design is understandably low quality, and the UX (user experience) is even worse.
Here is a list of pros and cons of free website builders
If you don’t have a website already or you think the website that you have is not up to scratch, then again invest.
There’s loads of expert web designers out there who could build decent 10 to 15-page roofers website for under £1,000.
Here’s a guide on how to hire them web designers
And if you think £1,000 is a lot of money for an excellent roofing website, then you are nuts, a fast converting roofers website will pay back that investment in no time at all.
Once you have a new site live, there’s a couple of things that you want to make sure are on point.
The first being the website speed, any sites that Lord in more than 3 seconds or losing customers. Ideally, you want to to have the site load in under 2 seconds used tools such as Pingdom and GTmetrix to check your site speed.
Make sure the website has plenty called the actions.
Call the actions often referred to as touchpoints on the website that make it easy for customers to contact you.
Potential customers shouldn’t have to look for your phone number or try to work out how to contact the company
The two big things that your website should include our case studies and accreditations.
Accreditations are the easiest part of this jigsaw.
You can get the logos from all the suppliers that you use locally.
You can get logos from any high-profile local clients that you’ve done work for. Anything that a customer will recognise and associate with authority in the industry.
Case studies are little bit more time consuming but well worth the effort in the end.
The two things that subconsciously a customer is looking for when visiting any local business website is trust and authority.
They want to know they can trust this business to do the job or project they want, and they want to know that this business is an authority in this industry.
To be assured, the firm has the expertise to complete the project well on time and in budget.
Case studies go along way to showing your expertise in the roofing market. Here is an example of a decent local case study that would impress a customer.
Take time to create in-depth 500 words at least case studies of previous projects you’ve completed.
This will not only show customers that you are a great local roofing company but also this will help immensely with search engine optimisation.
SEO is all about getting your roofing contractor business to the top of the search engine results page.
Most people know that Google is one of the biggest companies in the world; they are so huge because they have millions of searches every hour for people looking for businesses just like yours.
They make money by selling adverts at the top of search results pages, but customers are not there for adverts.
Around 75% of all people visit and search engines ignore the ads and go straight to the organic results.
If you can rank in the top 3 for roofing keywords in your location, then you are well on your way to having a stable lead generation system.
Long-tail roofing keywords are the keywords that convert best, and as your knowledge grows, you will be able to expand the size of your website to cover more services and these high converting local keywords.
There are probably over 30 major social media platforms out there today that catch more than a million visitors a day. This really shouldn’t mean much to you.
I have in the past seen examples of local contractor style businesses, making it big with social media advertising, but this is not something I recommend for a struggling roofing company or startup.
Startups or roofers looking to turn their business around don’t need to be spending vast sums of money on social where the intent behind the lead was not to contact you initially.
In the early years, your investment will be much better spent going after customers who are actively trying to contact roofing specialists.
If you do want to read about how social media helps local trades businesses like yours, then here is an article about social media marketing for tradies.
By this point, I hope you have a solid grasp on how to promote a roofing business, as you can see most if not all of the strategies that I believe work are online marketing ideas and systems.
One of the top roofing marketing ideas is around branding.
Branding, especially with small all contractors and one-man bands is something that is generally ignored.
You want to create a solid and consistent brand around your roofing firm.
On day one this won’t help much at all but the reason we do this is that over the next 2 to 3 years you are going to be spending a lot of money on marketing.
We want our business to be remembered by people who have seen us in the past.
The way we get our business remembered is by making sure there is consistency in everything we do.
So this includes everything from vans, website, Facebook pages, uniforms, and newspaper adverts.
Everywhere that your business is featured it should be the same colours same imagery same logo SIM fonts same everything.
Roofing
With over 20 years working in the home improvement industry, I have successfully transitioned from a small trades business owner to a digital marketer. I knew very early that the secret to growing a trades business would rely heavily on learning scalable lead generation strategies and marketing the business better than others online. This blog is where I share everything I learned (and continue to learn) on my journey.
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