Competition in the roofing sector can be intense. Homeowners and business owners typically have many available choices if their roof needs to be repaired or replaced, so it’s essential to find ways to differentiate your roofing business from others in your service area if you want to attract new customers.
Select Funding offers small business financing to provide roofing companies with the cash flow they need to market their services and achieve their most important growth goals. Since marketing can be expensive, it’s important to understand which roofer marketing strategies are most likely to be effective and get you the results you need.
How Do You Market a Roofing Company?
Before we reveal some ideas for digital marketing for roofers, we should review some of the marketing basics that will help you understand how to promote your company and its services.
Identify Your Unique Value Proposition
The first step of roofer marketing is identifying your unique value proposition. Your UVP is a statement that describes what makes your roofing company special—what differentiates you from your competitors in the area.
To identify your UVP, here are some questions to ask about your company:
- Who is your target market? You may be marketing to homeowners, but what can you do to narrow your target? Some examples might be homeowners with historic homes, or homeowners who want a particular type of roofing, or even condo associations.
- What pain point do you solve for your customers? The answer to this question must be more complex than fixing or replacing their roofs. It might be that you offer roof repair at affordable prices or that you specialize in tile roofing or cedar shakes.
- What values does your company represent? Having a company mission can help you to define your unique value proposition.
Use the answers to these questions to figure out what makes your company unique. You’ll use your UVP to craft marketing strategies and campaigns that highlight what makes you special.
Create a Marketing Budget
Creating a marketing budget is necessary because you’ll use the budget to determine which marketing solutions you can afford to try and allocate funds to each.
If your target audience is homeowners, then the traditional amount to spend on marketing is between 5% and 10% of your revenue. However, businesses in 2023 are spending an average of 13.6% on marketing, which may be a reflection of inflation as well as increased competition.
Based on the 2023 numbers, a roofing company with $1 million in revenue should expect to spend about $136,000 on marketing annually. That works out to $11,333.33 per month. That might sound like a lot. Keep in mind that you can use small business financing to pay for your marketing efforts.
Choose Marketing Strategies
Choosing the best marketing strategies is a must because the right strategies are most likely to deliver the results you want. We’ll talk more about specific strategies in the next section, but you can figure out which strategies to use based on where your web traffic and roofing leads are coming from.
For example, if you got a lot of traffic from Google, then you may want to try search engine paid advertising or beef up the search engine optimization (SEO) on your website. Do many of your roofing leads come from social media? If so, you should dedicate a healthy percentage of your roofing marketing budget to that.
Create Marketing Campaigns
Once you’ve selected one or more marketing strategies, it’s time to create marketing campaigns to attract new customers and engage people who have already used your services.
For each campaign, you’ll need to choose a goal. Make sure it’s a SMART goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) so that you can track it. An example of a SMART goal might be to attract 10 leads per month for the next three months.
Track Your Results
Each marketing campaign you create should match with key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure their effectiveness. These KPIs will help you track your results and determine whether your campaigns are working.
Some examples might include tracking your number of new leads, return on investment (ROI), cost of customer acquisition, or social media engagement.
Adjust as Needed
The primary reason to track your campaign results is to use the information you collect to revamp your campaigns or to reallocate your marketing budget as needed.
If you were running a social media campaign on Facebook with the goal of building your email list, low subscription numbers might mean that you need to refine your ad or Facebook content to be more effective. It might also mean that you’d be better off using another form of marketing to build your list.
What Are the Best Marketing Strategies for Roofing?
If your marketing hasn’t been getting the results you want, here are some of the best roofing marketing ideas to help you beat out your competitors and attract more customers.
Give Your Website an Upgrade
A good roofing website should be generating leads all the time. If yours isn’t getting the job done, then it may be time to invest in a new website that’s properly optimized and designed to help you attract new customers.
It’s essential to optimize your website for local keywords and voice search, since that’s how many potential customers will find you. You should also emphasize the user experience, making sure your site is easy to navigate. Finally, make sure to have a landing page where people can sign up for your mailing list and useful content including blog posts and videos.
Build Your Online Presence
Another simple thing you can do to generate more leads and increase your profits is to make sure that your company is as easy to find online as possible. Upgrading your website is the first step, but you should also do the following things:
- Standardize your NAP (name, address, phone number) listings so they are all exactly the same. Even a minor difference, such as using Street in one listing and St in another, can dilute your online presence and make it hard for people to find you.
- Claim your business on all review sites, including Yelp!, Google Business Profile, Angie’s List, and anywhere else where customers may review your business. Make sure to fill out your profile completely, including information about service areas, services, prices, specialties, photos, and more.
These things will solidify your online presence and put your business within easy reach of anybody in your area who needs to have their roof repaired or replaced.\
Manage Your Reviews
Review management is undeniably important for all roofing businesses. Research shows that virtually all consumers (99%) read online reviews before buying a product or hiring someone for a service.
Someone at your roofing company should be responsible for monitoring review sites and responding to all reviews, good and bad. Your response to a good review may be brief, but should be personalized to the extent that it’s possible. In other words, if a customer mentions something specific, mention it in your reply, as well.
Responding to negative reviews requires careful thought. A bad customer experience can be turned around with the right response and can also show prospective customers that you care about the people who hire you and want to make things right when they’re not. You may want to ask the reviewer to contact you offline, so you can talk to them and figure out what needs to be done.
Create Useful Content for Your Marketing
Content marketing is one of the best ways to inform people about your business and what you do. Done properly, it can educate your target audience about what makes your roofing business special.
Some examples of specific content marketing strategies and tactics include blogging, email marketing, video marketing, and social media marketing. Content should be created with your audience in mind and provide them with useful information.
Embrace Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to build a community and get the word out about your roofing service. Facebook is the most effective site for consumer marketing while LinkedIn is ideal for B2B marketing. You don’t need to be active on every site for your social media marketing to be effective.
You may want to consider marketing your roofing company on visually-based sites such as Instagram, where you can make effective use of before and after pictures to show prospective customers what you can do. You can also use social media platforms to build your email list, get more readers for your blog, and share customer testimonials.
Direct Mail Marketing
There’s a lot of focus on digital marketing, but that doesn’t mean that you should eliminate offline marketing as you pursue your growth objectives.
A well-designed direct mail campaign in your service area can do a lot to build your brand and keep people informed of your services. People may not need a roofing company when they receive your mailer, but many will tuck it away and remember it when they do.
Hire a Small Business Marketing Agency
If you’re wondering how to spend your small business financing to attract more customers, hiring a small business marketing agency may be the right choice. It’s rare for small business owners to have the marketing expertise necessary to choose the right marketing tactics to grow their businesses.
A marketing agency will be able to help you with every aspect of marketing, from redesigning your website to building your list to managing your reviews. While marketing can be expensive, financing can help you pay for an agency’s services and any marketing campaigns they recommend.
Get Financing to Fund Your Roofer Marketing
The right marketing strategies and campaigns can help you get more roofing leads and attract more customers for your roofing company. When it’s done properly, you’ll earn far more money with increased business than you spend on marketing.
Do you need financing to pay for marketing for your roofing company? Select Funding is here to help! Click here to read about our small business financing and begin the approval process today.
