Become The Go-To Roofing Option For Home Repairs

When a homeowner needs roofing repairs, how will you stand out from the competition?  As a roofing contractor, generating leads isn’t the most straightforward part of your job, but it’s critical for your business.  

You don’t want to sit around and wait until the rain and snow seasons begin to get work. Instead, you want to position your business to generate leads year-round so that you’re booked solid.  To become an on-demand roofing contractor, you need to learn the two types of lead generation strategies and determine which one fits your business needs the best.  

Two Types Of Lead Generation Strategies

In general, there are two types of lead generation strategies. Those are classified as offline and online strategies. There can be an intersection between the offline world and online content, but the other should treat these two strategies exclusively.  

Offline Generation is the traditional way of creating leads such as cold calling and advertising in traditional media such as newspapers, radio, billboards, and TV. An advantage to offline lead generation is that a prospect will often come from a recommendation or referral, which boosts credibility when pitching your services. Offline lead generation is often time-consuming and hard to track the return on the investment. For example, you are a residential roofer, and it’s getting near the rainy season.  

Due to the potential for damage during the rainy season, homeowners are more open to considering renovating or repairing their roofs than at almost any other time of year. With offline lead generation, such as a traditional ad buy on the radio, it’s hard to track what leads came from the radio ad, who found you in a phone book or from a friend, or where else the lead came to you.  

Online Generation is a great way to have a broader reach and exposure than traditional media.  What’s more, with online lead generation, you can set out code and “pixels” that you can affix to an ad or social media page that will provide data points for engagement, clicks, and conversions. Then, you and your marketing team can easily digest these data points to tweak and improve your ads to boost conversions.  

Online lead generation is also a lot cheaper than traditional advertising. You can set up an online ad or website, create compelling content on a blog or YouTube, or leverage Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, or other social media platforms. 

How To Generate Offline Leads

As with any lead strategy, there are plenty of options out there that can help you, but to get qualified leads requires that you use some of these strategies and hone in on who your ideal customer would be and where they may be located to be able to get your message to them. 

Some examples of offline lead generation include; 

• Network and networking events
• Trade shows
• Partnerships
• Traditional Advertising
• Direct Mailer

Network Events: Networking events are an excellent way to expose your brand to potential clients, especially in the B2B niche. For business-to-consumer roofers, you could join organizations such as Rotary International or a business-oriented organization like the local Chamber of Commerce.  

Trade Shows:  Trade shows are another great way to get your brand out there, but it is often a passive lead strategy, meaning that you get your name out there without any way to close a deal. 

Partnerships: Creating a mutually beneficial partnership with other contractors or builders is a good idea. Partnering with a commercial real estate acquisition company would be an excellent idea for commercial roofing. 

Traditional Advertising: You can advertise radio and TV spots and place ads in magazines, newspapers, and billboards. The problem with this form of advertising is there is no way to track where the leads you generate come from and what advertising method is the most effective. 

Direct Mailer: A direct mail campaign is one where you create a business flier and mail it to specific neighborhoods. It becomes costly to produce the brochures and to pay for postage, but if you double the mailer with an incentive such as “tell us you got this mailer and call for a free estimate,” you may be able to track leads better than with other media.  

How To Generate Online Leads 

With offline lead generation, you’re taking a broad approach, developing brand recognition but may not get the leads you want or need. Instead, a better bang-for-your-buck is through online lead generation sources.  

Online lead generation can come in many forms;  

• Website optimization
• Software for roofing contractors
• Content marketing
• Lead magnets
• Online ads
• Social media content

Website Optimization: Optimizing your website means making it better for SEO and conversion opportunities. You can focus your content on a specific market or niche. Another way is to utilize localized keywords, meaning particular to your geographic area. Creating content that suits a need and solves the problem your reader has come to your site. 

Software for roofing contractors: You can invest in a lot of lead generation software, but the one-size-fits-all approach isn’t what is best for your contracting business. Having customized software that is designed for lead generation for roofers is crucial with a tight marketing budget.  

Content marketing: You need a blog and social media that you post to regularly. With each post, you should focus on three things; brand exposure, reader experience, and content distribution. The type of content you want for your marketing purposes should address a common problem and the solutions your service provides.  

Lead magnets: Lead magnets are items that bring attention to your services, often at a small cost (loss leader) to your advertising budget. Think about promotional coupons that you offer for contact information as an example.  

Paid online ads: Buying pay-per-click ads such as Google ads can be an effective way to get your brand in front of people as they are searching for roofing services. However, a paid ad can quickly become costly if done incorrectly or without a strong strategy targeting specific keywords and phrases. 

Social media content allows you to interact and engage with previous customers and prospects. Creating engaging social media posts that offer solutions and tips for homeowners is an excellent way to get likes, but to get leads, you want to create posts that specifically address a need. 

For example, you may include a case study on your website that addresses a topic such as “7 signs you need a roof repair” and provide video or other content that addresses how to prevent minor issues from becoming major problems. 

Then, after you’ve shown how to handle the minor issues, you mention how things may get worse, and if they do, you pitch that you’re a solution to those problems. 

With social media, you can create posts and ads relatively cheaply and advertise to a specific demographic, region, or within your friend group. 

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