While roofing is an inherently difficult job, one thing that might be equally as difficult is generating more roofing leads for your business. A lead is a person or business that may eventually become a client of yours, and in the roofing industry, generating leads can be tough because roofing is more often a need than a want, which makes it more tricky to market. To generate and close more roofing leads can take a lot of effort, but it can propagate more business for your roofing company than ever before.
One of the most important things about gathering more roofing leads is finding individuals or businesses genuinely interested in your services. In this article, we’ll discuss 7 ways that your roofing business can generate roofing leads through online marketing, trade shows, partnerships, and more.
01. Create a marketing strategy.
Before you dive into anything too complex, it’s important to start with the basics—come up with a smart, thoughtful, and effective marketing strategy. This can mean anything from making sure your name and brand is attractive, to nailing down more involved promotional methods.
After you come up with a witty, captivating, concise name for your business, the next step is creating an equally witty, captivating, and concise website. In a world where an online search happens more frequently than a yellow page search, it’s essential that you create a website for your roofing business. It only takes 0.05 seconds for users to decide whether they’ll stay or leave your website, so it’s essential that your website is attractive and user-friendly.
Adding content like videos, icons, testimonials, and pictures to visualize your high-quality services can quickly capture potential leads’ attention. Making your website easy to navigate and digest is important when potential roofing leads are taking a brief scan to understand what your roofing business has to offer.
After your website is built out to perfection, it’s important to get your social media up and running. With social media platforms like Instagram, Linked In, Facebook, and more, posting on various social media platforms is quick way to boost your business. You can write a blog post about common questions, simple fixes, or DIY projects and share the link on social media to drive organic traffic.
You could also send out a press release. Sharing something new and exciting about your roofing business with local news outlets is a great way to spread the word through trusted local resources. If you’re offering a special discount to new customers, you’ve added a new type of roofing to your lineup, or you’ve partnered with a new business, sending out a press release to those with important ties to your industry can be a quick and impactful way to make yourself known.
Think outside of the box for ideas for marketing roofing. Get your truck wrapped or make yard signs to place at project sites. Advertise your business on your company vehicles, as it makes your company name, phone number, and email address stand out around town. Plus, creating yard signs with your company information for your project sites means that those driving by will see your work first-hand, and your sign in the yard could mean a new lead for your business.
02. Improve your local SEO.
A strategic way to improve your online presence, capture roofing leads, and beat out the competition is to use local roofing SEO. Local SEO stands for local search engine optimization, and it’s similar to traditional SEO. Local roofing SEO is a way to improve your company’s website visibility in a web search engine’s organic results, but it’s unique in the fact that it uses a different set of ranking factors to rank the local search results.
An easy way to boost your SEO is through optimizing your Google Business Profile. Google Business Profile is a free, easy-to-use marketing tool for businesses, designed to help business owners like you manage their presence on Google—including Google Search and Google Maps.
How does Google Business Profile work? Well, when someone in your area searches for a local service, such as “roofing company in Boca Raton, FL,” Google quickly weighs all of the information it knows about those search terms. It creates a curated list of the best roofing businesses that meet those requirements.
Customers can quickly check out your services, see business hours, view each roofing company’s star ratings, read reviews, and ultimately decide if they’re interested in working with you. Google Business Profiles are a powerful way to increase your search engine visibility and reach new homeowners looking for businesses just like yours.
A well-optimized Google Business Profile also boosts your business’s reputation by leveraging the power of online reviews. Since 84% of people trust online reviews just as much as word-of-mouth recommendations, a listing packed with 5-star reviews and glowing feedback is a cornerstone of a reliable search engine strategy.
An optimized web presence on popular platforms like Google Business Profile encourages customers to check out your roofing website and learn more about your service offerings.
With a Google Business Profile account, you get more than a business listing. And better yet? You get it for free. Your free Business Profile lets you easily connect with homeowners across Google Search and Maps, so you can post photos and offers to your profile to illustrate what makes your roofing business unique. By optimizing your Google Business Profile account with accurate hours, contact info, directions, and more, you give customers reasons to choose you every time.
Blues Brothers Roofing Company’s Google Business Profile listing is an excellent example of an optimized listing. They include all of their location and contact information, a slew of high-quality reviews, photos, and they’ve even responded to customer reviews to show potential consumers how thoughtful they are.
And since your customers are already-fit to connect, by updating your Google Business Profile, your customers can call, message, or leave reviews all in the same place. Plus, with Podium’s Review tool, you can collect tons of new reviews—it’s as easy as sending a text.
03. Modernize your advertising (PPC).
While wrapping your van and making yard signs is a great way to promote your business, it’s also important to utilize modern advertising practices. One such modern practice is PPC, or pay-per-click advertising. Pay-per-click is a digital marketing model in which advertisers, such as your roofing business, pay a fee each time one of your ads is clicked on. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site, rather than solely relying on organic traffic.
And while organic roofing leads can be hugely beneficial for businesses, it turns out that traffic brought through PPC advertising yields 50% more conversions than organic advertising. This means that by using improving your local SEO to boost organic traffic, and by utilizing PPC advertising, you can increase your lead generation, close more roofing leads, and grow your business.
Along side your Google Business Profile listing, you can also utilize Google Ads, which is Google’s PPC advertising solution, which gives businesses owners like you the chance to show ads next to searches on Google.com, right when people are looking for what services your roofing business has to offer. In addition to Google Ads, you can also turn to FaceBook, LinkedIn, and other websites for PPC ads.
For more information on how to set up an effective pay-per-click campaign, check out this article.
04. Attend trade shows.
While seemingly endangered, good, old-fashioned offline marketing has not yet gone extinct. An offline way to market your business, generate roofing leads, and build connections is through trade shows.
Whether you’re attending as an exhibitor or a viewer, one of the biggest reasons to attend is for the potential connections you can make. You can meet other like-minded roofing contractors who are looking to network and learn within the roofing industry. These connections can ultimately lead to pivotal partnerships in the future and make lead generation more viable than in the past.
Some trade shows you could consider exploring include: the International Roofing Expo, the IIBEC International Convention and Trade Show, region-based trade shows, and state-based roofing trade shows.
Ultimately, trade shows will help you find more roofing leads, especially as an exhibitor. People who need services just like yours will be looking to connect and get to know how the roofing brands involved can help them get started with residential roofing, commercial roofing, roof repair, and more.
05. Focus on reputation management.
Reviews used to be a nice-to-have. Now, they’re a make or break in whether a consumer chooses to engage with your company. Review importance, influence, and consumption are rapidly increasing in consumer mindshare. And customers are turning to them more quickly—and more singularly—than ever before.
According to Podium’s 2020 State of Reviews, 87% of consumers say reviews influence them in discovering a business. This means that focusing in reputation management can have a huge impact on potential lead generation.
In our digital marketplace, reviews are the first link to connecting with your company and the first deciding factor in moving to a competitor. To stay competitive, companies need to proactively remove any obstacles that prevent customers from leaving reviews.
Implementing a reputation management software like Podium’s Reviews tool can help you gather, manage, and respond to reviews, and improve your overall online reputation.
When customers search for a company online, they’re not just looking for five stars—it’s not that simple anymore. Consumer behaviors around finding and choosing companies online have become incredibly nuanced—83% of consumers say that reviews must be recent and relevant in order to care about them. With that in mind, as you build and manage your online presence, it’s important to recognize that you need five stars, and review quantity, quality, consistency, relevancy, and diversity to increase lead generation.
06. Form strategic partnerships
As a business owner in a multifaceted industry, forming strategic partnerships can help you improve brand awareness and gain a competitive advantage, among other things. By forming a partnership with a realtor, or other businesses like a home improvement store, you can create a symbiotic relationship that could open you up to an entirely new population of quality roofing leads.
There are a lot of roofing contractors that have formed partnerships with these companies and used them to serve their clients. If you can get a steady stream of roofing leads using these partnerships then this will be great for your business.
By partnering with a realtor, you can offer the realtors second opinions on roof inspections, and in return, the realtor could recommend you to their clients if they’re ever in need of roof repairs. Through this partnership, you could gain access to a number of new quality roofing leads that you simply wouldn’t have otherwise.
Plus, chances are that as a local roofing contractor, you can be more speedy than big box brands when it comes to repairs, which is essential for those who need quick repairs done before closing.
Further yet, and perhaps more obviously, partnering with suppliers or a home improvement store, whether it be Lowes or a local shop, they can give you access to supplies at a significantly cheaper cost.
When it comes down to it, it’s truly a win-win-win operation; you buy from them in bulk, you start getting supplies in a cost effective way, and as a result you can offer more competitive quotes to potential leads.
07. Get a roofing lead generation system
While more roofing leads generally means more profits for your roofing business, your leads are only as valuable as your ability to manage them. Finding the right roofing lead generation system to help you manage your leads efficiently is essential for providing high-quality customer service to go along with your high-quality roofing services. Using a suite of business tools like Podium Starter enables companies like yours to gather reviews, chat with website visitors in real-time, gather payments, and manage all of your leads all in one place—it’s as simple as sending a text.
The bottom line?
Generating more roofing leads is going to take some work, but it’s essential if you want to compete and win against other companies. By taking the opportunity to optimize your online and offline marketing strategies, and by utilizing a lead generation system like Podium Starter, you can get more roofing leads than ever before, manage them all with ease, and grow your business.
