Roofing leads are an important part of running any roofing business. Not only do new leads provide you with more customers overall, but proper lead generation can be an important part of making 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 have done lead generation before or have never heard of the concept in your life, being able to find roofing leads for your roofing business is a hard skill to manage. This breakdown of ways to generate roofing leads can get you started on the right track.

What are Leads?

Leads are any individual that has the potential to become a paying customer. When you generate leads, you are trying to establish some kind of connection with these potential customers in the hopes that they will be drawn to your roofing services.

These customers often show their interest through things like contact details, email addresses, or signing up for an account system on your site. A good lead generation strategy is focused on getting more potential clients connected to your business, allowing you to target them more directly.

Why Do Leads Matter?

Lead generation is an important part of marketing as a whole. Roofing businesses can use leads as a way to find more clients and make more sales, while also judging if their overall marketing strategy is exposing them to the right audiences.

The sales team is usually the group trying to market these leads, but leads are important even without being tied to a sale. If your company can consistently generate leads that turn into customers, then your marketing strategy is targeting a niche that works for your business.

Exclusive Leads

Exclusive leads are any lead that only applies to your company rather than you and your competitors. They are the most valuable type but also the hardest to earn.

This usually means leads you get through marketing since your marketing will not expose them to any competitors directly. In the best-case scenario, they are leads because they looked up your brand specifically.

Shared Leads

Shared leads come from third-party lead sellers and brokers who will give lead gathering results to multiple companies at once. This means that the customer behind the lead is being split between multiple companies but will generally only choose one.

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-possible-quality roofing leads, or develop some other strategy entirely.

With so many ways to get more roofing leads, some have become far more prominent than others. Here are some of the most common roofing lead generation tactics used by roofing companies all 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 source of lead generation. Search platform ads are some of the most powerful you can get when it comes to digital marketing, even if they are costly.

Using search engines can make your roofing lead generation far more effective and can 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, and the more you pay, the more leads you will want to generate to make up for it.

Since the roofing industry is always changing, you will also have to keep regularly updating your marketing campaigns to ensure the maximum possible results at every turn.

However, if you get paid ads right, they 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 actually having to change 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 Optimization

Search engine optimisation can be a huge task with a lot of 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 that more potential leads are going to show themselves.

Commercial roofing leads can come from almost anywhere, and SEO allows you to pinpoint and capitalize on the most effective sources of traffic you are getting. If you use SEO correctly, you can successfully promote your business to an entirely 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, and that makes it tough to predict the markets. Good SEO can earn you quality leads, but bad SEO can actually harm your content marketing if you are not careful.

Email Marketing

Marketing to somebody through their email inbox can be a risky move, but it can also sometimes work out if you are careful. Of course, this requires your sales team to actually have their information, which means that they need to 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.

Emails might be caught by spam filters, 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 obviously 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 at least respond, something that 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 are in urgent need of 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 a huge amount of success with it.

Content Marketing

Sometimes, creating content is enough to get your business spreading out further across your market niche. By creating decent content and drawing more attention to your roofing company, you can earn more commercial roofing leads in a lot less time.

Good content can make your business more relevant and credible, earning you links from other sites that will improve your SEO. However, it is also a way to earn direct, free roofing leads from customers who visit your site for specific pieces of information.

Being an authority on certain kinds of information, such as commercial roofing options, can ensure that you get even more traffic from people who need relevant roofing projects done. The more relevant your content is to your business, the better.

Using These Methods to Generate Commercial Roofing Leads

While the basic strategies up above all generate ways to get commercial roofing leads, there are a lot of extra details that go into each lead campaign or strategy.

If you want commercial leads, then you need to know how to approach them well. That means building a solid strategy, one that can draw in qualified leads from whichever markets you are choosing to target first.

Here are some of the ways that you can leverage different lead generation methods to target unique audiences or specific sections of the market, all while ensuring that you get sales leads on a regular basis.

Local SEO

Local SEO is a powerful tool that can be great for any business with a physical store or office, and that includes roofing companies. Even if you do not engage in door-to-door sales, leaning into your status as local business owners will make a big difference.

Many people look for home service businesses in their local area, since they tend to offer the fastest results and the best prices. This means that you can adapt your SEO to use area-relevant keywords, ensuring that you appear for more searches mentioning your local area.

Google and most other search engines also do this on a semi-automated basis, making sure that you will appear whenever somebody in your local area searches for “roofing companies near me.”

By putting some money and effort into your local marketing, you can carve out your own local niche and receive a lot more traffic without even having to do anything significant.

Offer Lead Magnets

Roofing leads can be tough to acquire, and a lot of them 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. For example, offering a free inspection or free 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 they have to be designed well so that 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 own company finances.

Plan an Email and/or Direct Mail Campaign

Do not just send mail or emails at random. If you plan ahead and pick out the details you want to include, step by step, then you can usually develop a campaign that will rope in a lot more leads.

For example, you might plan one email a week, each one going over different parts of your services while offering some kind of trail to follow throughout each email. If you do this well, your email campaign can slowly get some readers invested in what you can offer.

The same goes for physical letters and mail. If you send the same thing over and over again, it will get ignored, but a well-structured campaign can make a significant difference to how your marketing is received by your target audience.

Combine Outbound and Inbound Marketing Strategies

Outbound marketing (sending content out to users) and inbound marketing (creating content to draw them in) are two sides of the same coin. This means that combining them into a single strategy can be incredibly powerful if done well.

This does not have to be anything too complex – an outbound marketing campaign with a specially-designed landing page can be far more effective than just sending emails out to visitors, for example.

Beyond that, these two niches can often cover each other quite well. Half of your marketing is proactive, while the other is reactive, meaning that you can focus on both without having to completely restructure your marketing campaigns.

Update your SEO

Search engine optimization provides a lot of benefits, and SEO is important in every single marketing campaign.

Even if your campaign is just about sending emails out, it is important to ensure that your site’s SEO is improved anyway. You never know when a certain keyword will be enough to draw in twice the users you normally get.

There are a lot of ways to improve SEO, and understanding even a few basic techniques can make a huge difference.

Build Backlinks

Backlinks are a core part of making your SEO better and ranking your site higher, which results in more roofing leads in turn. 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 you just need to simplify your site to get the best results. If your site is too hard to use and navigate, then users are going to immediately leave – which counts against your SEO.

Having a user leave at the landing page increases your bounce rate, which negatively affects your SEO. If your landing page is a door, you want your prospective clients to be at that door knocking to get in, not struggling to find the handle.

Streamline Code

One of the biggest factors in a site loading – aside from uncompressed images and videos – is the code. If your code is sloppy, then the site will load slower, and it only takes a small delay to turn away certain visitors.

The longer a page takes to load, the fewer people will stick around until that page is ready. This means that you want to keep your loading times as low as possible and should aim to have the site simplified at every opportunity.

Check Review Sites and Platforms

Reviews are a big part of your site’s overall perception, so you want to be sure that you are getting reviewed well. Proportionally, you always want a lot more positive reviews than negative ones, and that means dealing with them in whatever way is most appropriate for that particular review.

Positive Reviews

Always try to push for more positive reviews since these can improve your site’s overall standing and, therefore, the number of roofing leads you earn. You do not want to pressure your customers too much, but a slight nudge always helps.

It is far more difficult to get positive reviews compared to negative ones since most people only leave good reviews if the service was exceptional. By gently pushing customers to complete reviews after each sale or transaction, you can influence them just enough to potentially earn a few more good reviews overall.

Positive reviews reflect well on your business and are a good way to 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 are something you need to deal with as soon as possible. A negative review can reflect very badly on your business and potentially drive away would-be customers, especially if it is a scathing review and there are others backing it up.

Try to contact the person who left it 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 cause direct harm to 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 blacklisted by a lot of 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 capitalize on that lead by providing them with leaflets, coupons, and other freebies to entice them into choosing your company.

Beyond that, trade shows are also a great place to educate your potential customers on your field and what you do. This might not make much of a difference to most, but it can still wrap a couple of them into considering what your business offers.

There are plenty of ways to spread your business name, gather customer data, or even talk certain customers into turning to your business if they need roofing help.

If you are going to a trade show anyway, turning it into a place to find free roofing leads is not a bad idea. These shows can be expensive, so maximizing the value you get out of them can be a great way to ensure that they are more than just a promotional visit.

Just remember that trade shows are a very varied space, and you only have so 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 an obvious piece of advice to give, one of the best ways to gather extra leads is to simply make your business more well-known.

Outside of appearing in ads or searches, people will only find your company if they actually know that it exists, meaning that you should build brand awareness if you want 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. If you want to make your company more well-known, then you need to target audiences and platforms that will be the most receptive and relevant to your business and its services.

Understand your Customers

It is hard to handle roofing lead generation if you do not know anything about the potential roof leads you are targeting. You want to make sure that you understand your audience before you try to perform roofing lead generation since they might end up being the wrong people to target.

For example, the audience for something like metal roofing installation will be different from the audience for roof repair.

Even if they overlap in a lot of ways, you can’t target these audiences in the exact 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 ahead, and that includes everything from Google Ads campaigns to your booths at trade shows.

Even understanding the basics of things like the sales cycle can allow you to plan ahead and get an idea of how you 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 both the long term and the short term. It would be best if you had an idea of how everything is going to 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 of the advice up above can be used in different ways depending on the situation, and no two roofing companies are going to approach lead generation in the same way. That means that you need to think about your own company first and foremost.

Build your own lead strategy using whatever combination of tricks and techniques seems the most effective. Do not copy another business’ wholesale attempts, or you will be competing with them for the same leads.

You need to carve a niche for your company and then focus in on that niche if you want the best results. The more leads you want, the more tactics you might have to employ.

Whatever niches you target and however many leads you try to generate, remember that leads are not everything. Do not neglect other areas of your marketing or business just to focus entirely on leads – there is no point in getting extra leads if you have no products or services to offer them.

Useful Guides

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