Advertising is Like Investing – How to Grow your Roofing Business in 2024

If you’re in the roofing business, you understand that advertising is key to your success.  Advertising in the roofing industry takes many forms: digital, word of mouth referrals, TV, radio, mailers, canvassing, etc.  More and more, roofers are understanding that digital advertising has tremendous potential.  Why?

Think of what it takes to train, motivate, and retain a team of canvassers.  Your bottleneck is physical location, time, and finding humans willing to do the job of knocking doors and soliciting.  This approach still works, but as many may know, especially in our post-COVID era, canvassing is starting to die a slow death.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with canvassing, albeit I am annoyed when someone knocks on my door to try and solicit something to me. Bug exterminators, security systems, or home improvement projects are usually the top culprits. 

There is such a small window for success.  The canvasser must find someone who is home, willing to talk, willing to buy (or schedule an appointment), and then the sale still may not occur.  For every 100 doors someone knocks, you may have 3 interested in your service.  To get past the 97 non interested people, it’s incredibly demoralizing for the canvasser, not to mention a waste of time and annoyance for all of those homeowners.

With one small caveat being this: knocking doors while a project is happening across the street is understandable.  Particularly for roofing, which is a large construction project, at least you have a visible and obvious reason to stop by.  Even more reason if there is storm damage.  But walking into a random neighborhood where you have not produced projects seems a little silly to me, especially in 2024.  If you choose to do canvassing, I recommend spending less than 30 minutes to an hour quickly knocking on doors, introducing yourself, letting them know you are doing a project across the street, and leaving your card for the homeowner to decide if it makes sense to invite you back to their home.  One roofer I follow on Twitter likes to drop off a beer koozie branded with his business, with his card inside – he doesn't even knock.  Do that!

TV and Radio are other interesting mediums.  I worked at a roofing company from 2016-2017 that actually found pretty good success with both channels.  I was not privy to the ad spend, but anytime I rand a TV or radio lead, I had tended to have a ~50% close rate and the ticket sizes were great.  Homeowners had heard the advertisement, and decided to call your business, knowing in the back of their mind they probably need your service. I don’t have internal data for radio or TV ROI, but it’s worth investigating if your business is mature and has already exhausted digital advertising.

Mailers are something I still believe in.  They are a relatively low-cost, targeted way of advertising.  You can take before and after pictures of a job in a neighborhood, then pay a mailing service to send out targeted postcards.  This kind of hyper targeting is hard to achieve with paid digital media like Google ads, Meta, TikTok, and NextDoor advertising.  The reasoning to invest in mailers is compounded when you can target neighborhoods with older roofs or neighborhoods that have recently been impacted by storm damage.

Now for the no-brainer approach: enhancing your own website.  A simple, clean and intuitive website can be created on WordPress with a contracted developer can be completed in the range of $5k - $10k. For that price range, you can expect to be able to broadcast basic business information, before and after collections, the ability to write your own blogs, as well as a simple lead form and maybe a handful of landing pages.  The hard part starts once the website is created.  You must produce meaningful content that’s relevant to the homeowner: things like expected cost (hard to do with roofing, unless you use a service like RoofHero), have a fast website that adheres to SEO and readability standards, and ultimately drive a conversion.  A conversion in the context of digital advertising typically means either a lead, where someone submits their information to be contacted, or an inbound call to your business.

In addition to setting your website, you should do a few other housekeeping items. Create a Google My Business profile, so that your business can receive reviews on Google, and your physical business location shows up when someone searches for a roofer on Google maps.  Create a Google Analytics account, and make sure your Google Analytics tag is deployed properly on your website.  This allows you to see how many people visit certain pages on your site, and can help you optimize your content, highlighting bottlenecks. 

Additionally, check out Google Guaranteed.  For homeowners searching for a roofer (or many other types of home services), Google has created a service that shows up above and around the sponsored search results with a nice snippet of your business.  I ran with that service for quite some time when I ran a roofing company, and it produced results for us.  Finally, consider driving leads and calls direct to your website by running Google Ads campaigns.  When a homeowner searches terms related to “roofing”, your business can pay to appear at the top of the search results, increasing your likelihood of landing a conversion.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that takes a long time.  Google organically ranks search results based on relevance to the user, as well as how “official” they think your page is.  Exactly how this score is derived is not revealed to us by Google, but we know things like backlinks, domain history, relevance of content, page speed, on page SEO (adherence to how your code is formatted) and location relevance all contribute to the score.

Of course, you should have a strong referral incentive program in place.  It’s completely normal to offer cash or gift cards ranging from $100 - $500+ for referring new customers.  Homeowners do take advantage of this.  Some roofers I know don’t even offer a paid incentive, but they are really good at asking for the contact information of the friends of a homeowner whose job they just completed. 

Now, onto buying third party leads.  Third party leads would mean paying for your brand presence on a directory website or lead platform. Think websites like angi.com, homeadvisor.com, homebuddy.com, yelp.com, porch.com, roofingcalculator.com, instantroofer.com, and roofhero.com. 

When I was running my roofing company, we engaged with angi, yelp, and porch.  We found some success with them, but one thing that was incredibly frustrating was the lack of transparency on the data (how many impressions did we get, how many clicks, etc), as well as the “shared leads” model. The shared leads model is this: a homeowner submits their information to a generic form that probably popped up as a sponsored result when they were looking for a roofer.  At the end, the homeowner consents to being contacted by any number of contractors.  This results in a few frustrating outcomes: homeowners get several phone calls (often more than 5), and roofers now have elevated competition on that lead.  It is now a race to the bottom in terms of response time, and ultimately the price on the job.

From the research we have done, we believe all the sites above, except for roofhero.com and homebuddy.com, are on the shared leads model.  We strongly believe the shared leads model will come to a screeching halt soon, especially given the recent FCC regulations (read more about them here: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/new-fcc-rule-lead-generation-expected-spur-wave-lawsuits-2023-12-12/).  Even if the regulations don't stop them, take a look at the stock prices for angi and porch.  The business model is not going to work in the long run.

It's no surprise – the US government is simply catching up with simple consumer intuition.  People don’t want to be constantly harassed by phone calls from businesses desperate for their attention.  All of these considerations outlined went into building RoofHero.  We have, and always will, only provide exclusive leads to roofers. 

RoofHero has a proprietary algorithm that, in the event there is multiple contractors in the same zip code where a homeowner uses our site, selects the single-best contractor. The algorithm rewards roofers that have been on the platform for a long time, and report sales in an honest and timely fashion.  It also balances rewarding our top performers with giving new guys a shot to build their reputation on our platform.  Reporting and updating statuses in our dashboard (www.roofhero.com/dashboard), allows us to tweak our paid media approach to drive you leads that are more likely to convert. 

You can read more about our payment model here: https://www.roofhero.com/blog/exclusive-roofing-leads.  At the time of this writing, we charge a minimum $2k subscription + 5% on sold jobs. We allocate your subscription largely towards paid media lead cost (with the bulk right now going to Google ads), and you receive leads to your email and CRM, as well as inbound appointments and phone calls.

We have built a scalable system to accommodate any honest and high quality roofing company in the United States, but we are particularly well suited for businesses that fit the following criteria:

• A roofing business not interested in handling marketing in-house.
• A roofing business that has diversified its lead generation across a variety of sources, and is looking to expand to another source.
• Above all, we are only interested in working with roofers that offer honest and transparent pricing.  Sales sharks will not succeed on our platform, given we show the homeowner your real pricing up front using our surface area algorithm, mapped to your specific material pricing.

Now, why is advertising like investing?  Regardless of the industry you’re in, spending money on advertisement has no guarantees.  But, done the right way, it will pay off overtime.  Imagine if you had a financial advisor that “guaranteed” 20% year over year returns in the stock market? Hopefully, you would run for the hills, as no one can guarantee that.  In fact, they shouldn’t guarantee any returns at all. 

A prudent financial advisor (one that adheres to a fiduciary standard) can point to historical returns and explain the tradeoffs of different approaches.  If they say something like, “Hey, I see you’re 35 years old.  You have a lot of time left to produce income.  I recommend trying the approach of dollar-cost average investing into a hybrid portfolio of 80% stocks, and 20% bonds.  There are no guarantees, but by investing in the stock market with a combination of index funds and mutual funds, there is a high probability you will grow your wealth over time.” – that’s a good signal.  Nothing drastic, nothing overpromise, nothing fancy – just a proven, boring technique that works.

Advertising should hold the same mantra.  If you have a leads provider guaranteeing you anything, that’s a red flag.  For the roofers that do their own Google paid ads, you should know this to be the case.  There were months when we were spending $10k/mo on ads in my roofing business, with no sales.  But the next two months would make up for it.  The key is consistency, and diversification.  As with investing, never put all your eggs in one basket.  This applies to any lead source producing an ROI.  As a general rule of thumb, you should set a target ROI on your ad spend.  As long as your ROI is at or above your target, you should be reinvesting into that lead source.  You are effectively printing money, for as long as your prudently analyze and monitor results, and reinvest appropriately.

This feeds into the premise of why RoofHero exists.  We strongly recommend driving as much business to your website as you can via the techniques described above.  However, if you have hit a point of diminishing return, or simply don’t have the time and effort to spend on advertising, RoofHero offers a solution.  One nice thing about our service – it is month-to-month in order to offer flexibility.  We understand not every roofing business is cut out for RoofHero, so if you want to try it for a month and evaluate your results, feel free.  As you start to see success on the platform, you can reinvest as much as you like on the subscription.  This additional investment will be allocated to driving leads to your business.

From point of sign up, it takes us 10-30 minutes to activate your campaign and go live, receiving high quality roofing leads.  We are on a subscription model to encourage consistent spend on our platform.  Consistent spend = consistent results.  Not every lead (in fact most) will not convert to a sale. But if 10-20% do, it makes sense to continue to invest with RoofHero and drive good leads to your roofing business. If you’re interested in seeing some projections based on our historical data, check out our leads ROI calculator here: https://www.roofhero.com/roofing-lead-roi-calculator.

Regardless of if you decide to reach out and take next steps with RoofHero, I hope this article encourages you to stay the course of running and growing your roofing business.  Small business owners are the backbone of America, so hats off to you for taking the risk of entrepreneurship and serving your local communities.  I hope you’re encouraged similarly to be diligent, diversified, and consistent with your advertising strategies – just as you should with your personal investing.

If you are interested in taking next steps with RoofHero, click the apply button below.  A member of RoofHero's team will work with you to customize a solution specific to your roofing business's marketing needs.

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