12 Proven Steps to get the best ROI with your Roofer Marketing Investment Plan.

You built your roofing business by delivering a great product and great customer service. Your business has grown through word of mouth, customer referrals, and a few online positive reviews. But all these techniques have the same thing in common. They are effective but slow. You can only meet so many people in a day and hand out so many business cards. Customers only have so many friends and business associates, and most of those people will only need a roof once every 20 years. And as for reviews? Well, customers can only write ONE positive review to document their experience. And a bad review can really hurt your business's good reputation. Therefore, you need a professional roofing marketing plan – preferably digital marketing strategies developed specifically for you.

Why do you need a Professional Roofing Marketing Plan? 

Before detailing the specific steps involved, let’s address the key concern of many roofing business owners: Why is a professional roofing marketing plan so expensive? One word. Expertise. You are paying for roofing industry marketing expertise. A professional understands all conventional and digital marketing aspects and how to maximize your roofer marketing dollars. As a Google 5-star rated certified professional, our agency has a proven history of creating successful, repeatable sales processes (more on this idea in step 8), resulting in upwards of a 75% closing rate with high-quality leads.

12 Proven Steps to get the best ROI with your Roofer Marketing Investment Plan

So, the Dirty Dozen…

1. Hire a Professional
2. Comparison shop
3. Develop a Digital Marketing Plan
4. Establish a rapport with your Marketing Team
5. Know your Numbers
6. Develop a plan for Roofing Leads
7. Support your Sales Team
8. Create a repeatable Process and Story
9. Develop a Mentorship Program
10. Maximize your Presence
11. Offer a Maintenance and Referral Program
12. Stay open and flexible

Step 1: Hire a Professional

Modern-day marketing is complex. Don’t go it alone; pay the professionals. The digital marketing agency owner is not qualified to replace his own roof. Likewise, you are not qualified to do your marketing efforts. Today’s marketing campaigns are a complex blend of traditional techniques such as in-person marketing (door knocking), truck wraps, print ads, websites, Google ads, social media marketing, video content marketing,Facebook ads for retargeting, programmatic, and on and on and on. A professional understands how these diverse marketing channels work together effectively to achieve your marketing goals.

Step 2: Comparison Shop

The value of quality marketing in generating qualified leads cannot be overstated. Therefore, this is not the time to hire your niece or a friend of a friend. You’re trying to build a multi-million-dollar roofing empire. Hiring your teenage daughter’s boyfriend to build you a roofing website will give you a website that looks like a teenager built it. Your fellow roofing contractors competition is spending money to develop an up-to-date, user-friendly, intuitive online presence. As a point of first contact with your business, your customers will feel more confident spending $15,000 - $20,000 on roof replacements if your website is state of the art.

Cost is an important consideration, as with other services; you should contact at least three to four marketing agencies before making a decision. Marketing companies that offer one size fits all marketing packages for a set fee do not have your specific needs in mind. You cannot do competent digital marketing with $399 or $799 off-the-shelf packages. Think about it. Pre-designed packages offer only the simplest marketing options. They are one size fits all; however, in marketing, one size never fits all. Your roofing company is unique, and the roofing services of your company are unique. Choose a marketing agency that can articulate what makes your company stand out and can develop a plan to communicate that to your target audience.

Step 3: Develop a Digital Marketing Plan

You comparison-shopped and chose a marketing agency that appreciates your company and its specific roofing demand needs. The marketing plan is finished, right? Not so fast.

Effective digital marketing is a complicated beast. There are many steps to best practices in roofer marketing. Here are just a few of the best ways to guarantee top of search results; set up pay-per-click advertising, optimize your Google My Business listing, get high reviews over a variety of customer review platforms, create blog posts, optimize the website with keyword research to the search engine’s liking, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), place LSA (local service ads) to trigger local SEO, regularly interact with all social media accounts, and create valuable content for digital platforms. These options require a significant initial investment of time, followed by regular engagement. Your time is best spent on your business. Your marketing team's job is regularly updating and modifying your digital platforms. Hence, why you should hire a professional!

Step 4: Establish a Rapport with your Marketing Team

A reminder. Developing and establishing an effective digital marketing plan takes time. Initially, you may need to set aside daily time to work with your marketing team on the lead generation strategies that will push your business to the top of digital search engines. Setting aside the appropriate amount of time while running your business may be hard, but this time is crucial. Provide clear and realistic expectations of what you hope to achieve through your marketing plan to your marketing team, and be ready to listen and adopt their suggestions. After the first 3-6 months, you will have evidence of how well your marketing plan is working, and together you will know where to make the necessary tweaks for the maximum return on your marketing dollar.

Step 5: Know your Numbers

Here are the cold hard facts of how best roofer marketing practices can translate into real income. Typically, anything north of a 4:1 return on ad spending is seen as favorable in digital marketing for roofers. So, let’s say hypothetically, you are investing $5,000 per month on ads and another $2,500 on all other digital marketing services. That is a $7,500 monthly total investment, which may be a lot for new start-up roofing companies, but actually very little for established roofers who often spend over $5,000, $10,000 and some as high as $45,000 per month on Google advertising alone.

So, in this scenario, if you received three leads per week for roof replacements and closed one of them at an average order value of $12,500 for a new roof, your business’ top line is essentially growing by $50,000 per month for a $7,500 investment or a 6.67:1 return. To break this down further, if you have a 35% profit margin, you are making $17,500 for a $7,500 investment or more than doubling your money, month over month.

The above calculations are based on 12 leads and a 33% closing ratio, better than many industries’ averages. Hubspot interviewed 8,900 companies’ sales organizations across 28 industries and found that the average closing ratio in the construction category was 22%.

You can utilize our Best Roofer Marketing revenue calculators to see what your actual numbers would be!

Step 6: Develop a plan for Roofing Leads

You have worked with your best roofer marketing agency. You have developed a marketing plan to generate your business leads from various digital platforms. Now what?

Well, now you need to have a well-defined and detailed process to follow up on those leads. Having consulted over 3,000 small businesses, specifically 100+ roofing companies, throughout the last 15 years, we know first-hand how poorly leads are handled. Customer calls or emails left days without a response; no follow-up with potential customers after initial contact; no written bid proposals submitted to potential customers; any or all of these failures result in loss of jobs. And the loss of jobs is not only costly, but unnecessary.

The job of your best roofer marketing agency is to present you with qualified opportunities for potential work. Your job, as the roofing company is to follow up thoroughly and close the deals. You must develop and commit to a solid sales process to ensure homeowners or business owners have the best customer experience.

That is why we created our Billion Dollar Impact program for Roofers. This is our promise to only work with 100 roofing companies and help them reach 10 million each in revenue.

Step 7: Support your Sales Team

Provide your sales team with the tools they need to be successful. Much research has been conducted into the exact process of getting a customer from no to yes. Your sales team should have access to professional sales training with an instructor with a proven sales record. In other words, you must invest in professional sales training for your team.

Once your team has benefited from professional sales training, create a specific and detailed commission or incentive path for your sales team to earn the income they desire. Personal ownership of the process to a fair salary and compensation is the best motivator for your team to pursue and deliver excellent customer service. Providing appropriate training and monetary incentives demonstrates that you value and trust your sales team, and in turn, they will be motivated to deliver jobs.

Step 8: Create a Repeatable Process and Story

To further elaborate on Step 7, the path to success is in creating a repeatable sales process and story. The process begins when your sales team contacts a potential customer. Again, be specific in developing a process for your team. Should initial contact with the customer be within 24 hours of obtaining the lead or 60 mins? What is the timeframe for follow-up with the customer after initial contact? Will follow-up be calls, emails, or both? What other specific steps be included in the process?

The repeatable story is, in essence, a script for your sales team. Your sales team will need to educate homeowners and business owners who need roof repairs or replacements with relevant information expressed in an award-winning format while still allowing your sales team to adapt the script to a potential customer’s specific situation. We have built top-performing sales teams within significant organizations. I once helped run the top sales team in the country for a $2B international marketing agency. For five years in a row, my team was the top-performing sales team. The trick? I developed a sales process and script that was so effective my team closed at a 75% plus rate one year, all the while giving our clients excellent results.

Step 9: Develop a Mentorship Program

Inevitably, some of your roofing sales team will find selling roof replacements and roof repairs much easier than other team members. Choose a top sales performer with good people skills to act as a mentor for newer or less successful sales staff. Pay this mentor a SPIF (sales performance incentive fund) for helping members of your sales team, so the mentor’s time is not wasted, and the mentor doesn’t feel he’s missing out on sales of his or her own. Assigning mentors communicates to your sales team that they are a team working together to bring revenue to the company. This strategy will level up your teammates, and more of them will be motivated to produce for you.

Step 10: Maximize your Local Market Presence

Digital marketing is the future of business marketing. The internet's social platforms and worldwide reach make it the most cost-effective marketing tool. However, some traditional marketing tools are not yet obsolete for roofers. When doing a roof replacement, you are likely setting up shop for a few days within a neighborhood. Use your wrapped trucks, yard signs, door hangers, personal letters from the owners, and neighborhood canvassers while completing a job. I have proven processes that will help your roofing door-knockers differentiate themselves from the pack to begin securing more new customers immediately within a designated neighborhood.

As a complement to these tried-and-true techniques, consider adding in another 21st-century technique – the live feed video on your social media platforms. Various cameras are available that you can use to show up close the work of changing out a roof, the best practices when doing so, and the overall result of the work. In most cases, the newer smartphones provide higher quality for your roofing pictures and videos than primary name-brand cameras. As they say, seeing is believing. Giving customers a chance to see your quality work and product before they commit to buying from your roofing company is an optimum way to close the deal.

Step 11: Offer a Roof Maintenance and Referral Program

Though most homeowners will only need a completely new roof once every 20 years, as you are well aware, most roofs will need ongoing maintenance. Consider creating a yearly maintenance program for a modest fee, in which you contact an existing customer to check on the health and welfare of the roof. If you choose not to develop a defined maintenance program, consider developing a process for staying in touch with previous customers. This process can be as simple as sending email marketing once a quarter to check on the health of the customer’s roof or as complex as sending regular (but not too frequent) emails with industry news, valuable tips, and contact information for repairs. These ideas aim to create opportunities to remind your customers that you are still available. Nurture customer relationships. If your previous customer does not need your services, the timely reminder of your presence may cloverleaf into new opportunities with neighboring customers.

Create a defined Referral Program and make it lucrative. You are selling $12,000 - $20,000 roofs. A $25 referral fee is hardly worth the time it takes to write a review or a social media post. Be generous. Offer a $250 or $500 referral fee, payable upon receipt of a signed contract, and you may find your previous customers become some of your best marketers!

Step 12: Stay open and flexible

Above all, choose a best roofer marketing agency that understands where you currently are and where you desire to go with your business. Trust the roofer marketing professional to develop a comprehensive, accessible marketing plan for you and your employees and commit to implementing that plan. However, understand that marketing in the digital age is a moving target. Best practices today may be obsolete tomorrow. Listen to your marketing professional and be willing to consider strategic changes immediately. The internet moves fast, so you should be willing to adapt quickly. But marketing is also a process. Some ideas work better than others, and some have a definite shelf life. If you try a technique and feel it didn’t work, see it as a learning opportunity. Move on and try something else. The goal of roofer marketing is not perfection; instead, the goal is generating new leads that turn into customer jobs. It will always be a combination of approaches that creates success. Be willing to try and try and try and preserve what works while ditching what doesn’t.

And so, there it is. The Dirty Dozen of Sales & Digital Marketing for Roofers. These are the proven steps that support the sales efforts you may already be utilizing. Embrace these steps and experience the best roofer marketing at the next level. Specifically, the level where potential customer leads seek you and your company out, and you close deals to increase your sales and revenue.