Roofing leads are an important part of running any roofing business. New leads give you more customers overall, but proper lead generation can make your new marketing efforts worthwhile.
No matter the scale of your roofing company leads matter. Understanding how to generate roofing leads regularly and consistently is vital for long-term commercial roofing business success, as well as short-term profits and customer numbers.
Whether you’re an expert in lead generation or a novice, finding roofing leads for your business can be challenging. This guide outlines effective strategies to help you get started. Understanding what leads are is important for success.
What are Leads?
Leads are any individual who has the potential to become a paying customer. When you generate leads, you try to connect with these potential customers in the hopes that they will be drawn to your roofing services.
Customers often show interest by providing contact details and email addresses or signing up for an account on your site. A good lead generation strategy aims to connect more potential clients to your business, enabling targeted outreach. This connection is important for understanding why leads matter.
Why Do Leads Matter?
Lead generation is an important part of marketing. Roofing businesses can use leads to find more clients and make more sales while evaluating whether their marketing strategy exposes them to the right audiences.
The sales team focuses on marketing leads but leads hold value beyond immediate sales. Consistently generating leads that convert into customers means your marketing strategy effectively targets a beneficial niche for your business. Below are the reasons why leads matter.
Exclusive Leads
Exclusive leads are any leads that only apply to your company rather than to you and your competitors. They are the most valuable type but also the hardest to earn.
This usually means you get leads through marketing since your marketing will not directly expose them to competitors. In the best-case scenario, they are leads because they looked up your brand specifically.
Shared Leads
Shared leads are sourced from third-party sellers and brokers who simultaneously distribute lead information to multiple companies. As a result, the potential customer is contacted by several businesses but will eventually choose just one. Therefore, understanding basic strategies for a roofing business to generate roofing leads is important.
Basic Strategies for a Roofing Business to Generate Roofing Leads
Lead generation can take a lot of different forms since the entire process is very open-ended.
This gives roofing companies a lot of flexibility: They can rely on multiple ways to get roofing leads, choose a single option to aim for the highest-quality possible roofing leads or develop some other strategy entirely.
With many ways to generate roofing leads, some have become far more prominent than others. Here are some of the most common lead generation tactics used by roofing companies across the US and beyond.
Paid Search Ads
Commercial roofing leads often come from advertising, and it is not surprising how many business owners rely on ads as their main lead generation source. Search platform ads are some of the most powerful you can get in digital marketing, even if they are costly.
Search engines can make your roofing lead generation far more effective and give you more targeting options for choosing a particular target audience or market niche. However, roofing contractors also need to factor in their budgetary limits.
Paid ads can be costly; the more you pay, the more leads you want to generate to compensate.
Since the roofing industry is always changing, you must regularly update your marketing campaigns to ensure maximum results. SEO tactics employing black and white hat techniques should be monitored closely to adapt to industry shifts.
However, getting paid ads right can be incredibly powerful and become the core of your new marketing tactics.
Paid Social Media Ads
Social media platforms often have a paid component that allows you to promote certain posts, spreading them to more people.
While these differ depending on the site, they can be a great way to promote your business and gather more leads without changing the content you are creating.
On certain social media sites, this can even become a powerful way to spread yourself into a new niche or to get an idea of which user audiences will respond positively to your ads so that you can intentionally target them in the future.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be a huge task with many variables to consider, but that also makes it a very powerful option for most roofing companies. Good SEO can have you ranking much higher in search results, meaning more potential leads will appear.
Commercial roofing leads can come from almost anywhere, and SEO allows you to pinpoint and capitalise on the most effective sources of traffic you are getting. If you use SEO correctly, you can successfully promote your business to a new target audience.
SEO covers all online aspects of your roofing company, from your ads and targeted site keywords to the overall design of your website and landing pages.
Platforms like Google have an incredibly complex algorithm for handling search engine rankings, making it tough to predict the markets. Good SEO can earn you quality leads, but bad SEO can harm your content marketing if you are not careful.
Email Marketing
Marketing to somebody through their email inbox can be risky, but it can sometimes work out if you are careful. Of course, your sales team must have their information, meaning they must have interacted with some of your content before.
Email is more useful for remarketing to previous customers or visitors than new ones. Either way, it can still help create company awareness among people who have long since forgotten about your roofing company.
Spam filters might catch emails, but you can also bulk-send them completely for free, making them a very affordable option. The only risk is that excessive spam emails might turn potential clients away from your roofing services if you begin to annoy them.
Direct Mail Advertising
If email marketing is not working, direct mail might. The average potential customer is much more likely to check their physical mail than an email since most people expect email marketing to be spam – direct mail is usually more important.
This means that sending direct mail can be a great way of generating roofing leads. While it costs some extra money to send out direct mail on a large scale, direct mail marketing is also far more successful than email marketing under most circumstances.
Cold Calling
Cold calling is similar to email marketing—easy but risky. However, the directness of cold calling means that the lead is more likely to respond at least, which can be important for generating leads quickly.
The important detail here is to time things correctly. Cold-calling after major storms, periods of hail, or anything else that might damage a person’s roof. The best cold-called roofing leads come from people who urgently need roofing companies to check over their houses.
Cold calling is an art, just like any other marketing option. Doing it well takes time, and it should not be your only method of generating roofing leads unless you are having great success with it.
Content Marketing
Sometimes, creating content is enough to spread your business further across your market niche. Creating decent content and paying attention to your roofing company can earn more commercial roofing leads in less time.
Good content can make your business more relevant and credible, earning you links from other sites that will improve your SEO. It is also a way to earn direct, free roofing leads from customers who visit your site for exact information.
Being an authority on exact information, like commercial roofing options, increases traffic from individuals seeking relevant roofing projects. The more your content aligns with your business, the better the results. This natural flow of focused content seamlessly leads to using these methods to generate commercial roofing leads.
Using These Methods to Generate Commercial Roofing Leads
While the basic strategies above all generate ways to get commercial roofing leads, each lead campaign or strategy involves many extra details.
If you want commercial leads, you must know how to approach them well. That means building a solid strategy to draw qualified leads from whichever markets you target first.
Here are some ways to leverage different lead generation methods to target unique audiences or exact market sections while ensuring you get sales leads regularly.
Local SEO
Local SEO is a powerful tool for any business with a physical store or office, including roofing companies. Even if you do not engage in door-to-door sales, leveraging your status as a local business owner will make a big difference.
Many people look for home service businesses in their local area since they offer the fastest results and the best prices. This means you can adapt your SEO to use area-relevant keywords, ensuring you appear for more searches mentioning your local area.
Google and most other search engines also do this semi-automatedly, ensuring that you will appear whenever somebody in your local area searches for “roofing companies near me.”
By investing money and effort in local marketing, you can carve out your local niche and receive much more traffic without doing anything important. Implementing targeted local marketing strategies can generate more leads for B2B companies.
Offer Lead Magnets
Roofing leads can be tough to acquire, and many simply pass you by because you did not offer anything that would draw them in. Lead magnets are an effective way to fix this problem.
A lead magnet is anything that sacrifices short-term profits for long-term lead generation. Offering a free inspection or roofing advice information pack will cost you in the short term, but it also drastically increases the chance of a visitor becoming a customer.
These lead magnets can be risky and must be designed well so you do not give away too much and lose your clients again. However, if you plan correctly, you can turn curious visitors into satisfied customers without ruining your company’s finances.
Plan an Email and/or Direct Mail Campaign
Do not just send mail or emails at random. If you plan and pick out the details you want to include step by step, you can usually develop a campaign that will attract many more leads.
For example, you might plan one email a week, each one going over different parts of your services while offering some trail to follow throughout each email. If you do this well, your email campaign can slowly attract readers to your offer.
The same goes for physical letters and mail. If you send the same thing repeatedly, it will get ignored, but a well-structured campaign can significantly improve how your target audience receives your marketing.
Combine Outbound and Inbound Marketing Strategies
Outbound marketing (sending content to users) and inbound marketing (creating content to draw them in) are two sides of the same coin. Combining them into a single strategy can be incredibly powerful if done well.
This does not have to be too complex—an outbound marketing campaign with a specially designed landing page can be far more effective than sending visitors emails.
Beyond that, these two niches can often overlap quite well. Half of your marketing is proactive, while the other is reactive, meaning you can focus on both without completely restructuring your marketing campaigns.
Update your SEO
Search engine optimisation provides many benefits; SEO is important in every marketing campaign.
Even if your campaign is just about sending emails, improving your site’s SEO is important. You never know when a certain keyword will be enough to draw in twice the users you normally get.
There are many ways to improve SEO; understanding basic techniques can make a huge difference.
Build Backlinks
Backlinks are a core part of improving your SEO and ranking your site, which results in more roofing leads. The better your backlinks are, the more high-quality leads you can expect.
Not only that, but good roofing leads often come from SEO before other marketing methods take hold. While a certain special offer might entice them in, it could have been SEO that put your site in front of them in the first place.
Simplify Pages
Sometimes, simplifying your site can get the best results. If your site is too hard to use and navigate, users will immediately leave, affecting your SEO.
Having a user leave at the landing page increases your bounce rate, negatively affecting your SEO. If your landing page is a door, you want prospective clients to be at that door, knocking to get in, not struggling to find the handle.
Streamline Code
Aside from uncompressed images and videos, the code is one of the biggest factors in a site’s loading. If your code is sloppy, the site will load slower, and a small delay can turn away certain visitors.
The longer a page takes to load, the fewer people will stay until it is ready. Therefore, keeping loading times low is important. Simplify your site at every opportunity to achieve this. Once your site is optimised, it’s time to check review sites and platforms.
Check Review Sites and Platforms
Reviews significantly impact your site’s overall perception, so securing positive reviews is important. You should always strive for more positive reviews than negative ones, addressing each review appropriately. Ensuring more favourable reviews will enhance your site’s image. Below are some review sites and platforms.
Positive Reviews
Always push for more positive reviews since these can improve your site’s overall standing and, therefore, the number of roofing leads you to earn. You do not want to pressure your customers too much, but a slight nudge always helps.
Getting positive reviews is far more difficult than negative ones since most people only leave good reviews if the service is exceptional. By gently pushing customers to complete reviews after each sale or transaction, you can influence them just enough to earn a few more good reviews overall.
Positive reviews reflect well on your business and can convince undecided visitors that your services are worth it. The only issue is getting the ball rolling with the first few good reviews, which can be tough to earn as a new company.
Negative Reviews
Negative reviews are much more serious and should be dealt with immediately. A negative review can reflect badly on your business and potentially drive away would-be customers, especially if it is scathing and supported by others.
Contact the person who left the review and offer some kind of compensation or other deal, even if that means giving away free services or products. It is important to get those reviews taken down or amended as often as possible since they can directly harm your business’ image.
Do not just try to get them deleted from the site unfairly. This is a serious breach of trust, and it can be enough to get you blocked by many people who would otherwise have used your services. In some cases, it might be a crime.
Visit Trade Shows
Trade shows allow you to form new business partnerships, learn more about other companies in your field, and potentially borrow ideas from them regarding their roofing leads. Beyond that, they can be a great place to interact directly with potential clients.
Anybody who stops by your booth can be a potential lead, and you can capitalise on that lead by providing them with leaflets, coupons, and other freebies to entice them into choosing your company.
Beyond that, trade shows are a great place to educate potential customers on your field and what you do. This might not make much of a difference to most, but it can still entice a couple of them to consider what your business offers.
There are many ways to promote your business, gather customer data, or convince certain customers to turn to your business for roofing help.
If you are going to a trade show anyway, turning it into a place to find free roofing leads is not bad. These shows can be expensive, so maximising the value you get from them can be a great way to ensure they are more than just a promotional visit.
Remember that trade shows are very varied, and you only have much room and time to work with. Do not over-complicate things if you can help it.
Spread Brand Awareness
While this might sound like obvious advice, one of the best ways to gather extra leads is to make your business more well-known simply.
Outside of appearing in ads or searches, people will only find your company if they know it exists. Therefore, you should build brand awareness to get roofing leads more often.
Anything you do to market your business can help to build brand awareness. Google Ads campaigns, social media marketing, and even cold calling are all ways of making your brand more widespread, even if that is not the main focus of why you are doing it.
However, it also helps to spread brand awareness to the right places. To make your company more well-known, you need to target audiences and platforms that are the most receptive and relevant to your business and its services.
Understand your Customers
It isn’t easy to handle roofing lead generation if you know nothing about the potential roof leads you are targeting. You want to ensure you understand your audience before generating roofing leads since they might be the wrong people to target.
For example, the audience for a metal roofing installation will differ from those for roof repair.
Even if they overlap in many ways, you can’t target these audiences in the same way, and there can be distinct differences in even the demographics that they average into.
Use as much data as possible to learn about your audience. Check to see what kind of services are performing best for which people, or look at the keywords they search for within your niche. The more you know, the better.
Plan Ahead
Marketing is more than random door-knocking. If you want to get roofing leads, you need to plan, including everything from Google Ads campaigns to your booths at trade shows.
Understanding the basics of the sales cycle can allow you to plan and understand how to target your leads more effectively.
You can’t attend a local Chamber of Commerce event or suddenly decide to market to property managers without at least some idea of how you will do it.
Think ahead and set your company goals in the long and short term. It would be best if you had an idea of how everything will work, and that means doing at least some basic forethought about what you want from your lead generation methods.
Lead Generation for Roofing Contractors
All advice above can be used differently depending on the situation, and no two roofing companies will approach lead generation similarly. That means you need to think about your company first and foremost.
Build your lead strategy using the most effective combination of tricks and techniques. Do not copy another business’s wholesale attempts; you will compete with them for the same leads.
If you want the best results, you need to carve a niche for your company and then focus on that niche. The more leads you want, the more tactics you might have to employ.
Regardless of the niches you target or the number of leads you aim to generate, remember that leads are not everything. Avoid neglecting other areas of your marketing or business in favour of lead generation. Extra leads are pointless without quality products or services to offer. This brings us to our final thoughts on generating roofing leads.
Final Thoughts on Generating Roofing Leads
Roofing leads are important for business success, providing new customers and enhancing marketing efforts. Effective strategies include paid ads, social media, SEO, email marketing, direct mail, cold calling, and content marketing. Optimising for local SEO, offering lead magnets, planning campaigns, and combining marketing tactics ensure consistent lead generation and long-term profitability. Trade shows, brand awareness, and understanding of customer needs are vital for nurturing leads. Balancing lead generation with other business areas ensures sustainable growth. Once optimised, checking review sites and platforms helps maintain a positive reputation and attract more customers.
Useful Guides
Please see some useful guides related to generating more business leads.
