How To Get Roofing Leads

By Mauricio Cardenal, Roofing Marketing Pros.

Online marketing is a powerful tool for roofing businesses looking to generate leads – but only when it’s used properly.

Quite often, roofers fail to get the most out of online marketing and end up with results that are hardly worth the time and money invested. What follows are tips and strategies showing you how to get roofing leads in your business.

Optimize your website for conversions

Your website is one of the most important parts of your lead-generating efforts. Even if prospective customers find out about you offline, they’ll likely visit your site to learn more.

Simply put, your website is often the first impression customers will have of you, so it’s important that it reflects well on you and your roofing business.

For a roofing business, a website is more than just an information source. It’s also a tool for converting visitors into leads. That means it has to provide value, make contacting you as painless as possible and use powerful calls to action to motivate prospective customers.

Dominate search advertising

Ranking as high as possible in local search results is essential to drive traffic to your website, traffic that could potentially become leads. There are three primary ways to ensure your business is as close as possible to that coveted top spot on search results: Pay-per-click advertising, Google My Business, and organic web listings.

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are run through auction-based systems like Google Adwords and Bing Ads, allowing you to show in the top positions (reserved for paid ads) where you can control the ad copy and landing page.

Google My Business is a Google Maps listing and review platform that you can optimize your descriptions and customer reviews.

Organic website listings are created by optimizing your website for keywords, gaining backlinks (links from other sites), maintaining an active social media presence and regularly updating your content (such as a blog).

Invest in video marketing

It would be a mistake for any article designed to teach you how to get roofing leads to fail to mention one of the most popular methods for sharing information online: Video.

While it’s a powerful marketing tool, few roofing companies take full advantage of it. Whether you decide to invest in a professional production company to make a commercial video, or create lower-budget “how-to” videos to educate prospective customers (how to select a new roof, what to look for in a roofing contractor, etc.), this kind of content – when optimized for YouTube search – helps to build credibility and trust, encouraging visitors to become leads and eventually, customers.

Make use of retargeting ads

Purchasing a new roof or repairing an older one is a decision that many people will take their time making. Unless the roof is badly damaged, some leads can take months to make a final decision on a roofer. Retargeting keeps track of visitors to your site and offers up your ads to them as they explore the internet. While the lead may not click on the ads, they will see them, keeping your business “top of mind” until the moment when they finally choose a roofer. Retargeting increases the chances that the roofer they choose will be you.

Differentiate your business

It’s an easy trap to fall into – to assume that as a roofer, you’re just like every other roofer. This kind of thinking makes winning customers a matter of luck. Roofers who dominate in their marketing do so primarily by developing a unique selling proposition (USP).

A USP identifies the specific and unique benefit you offer your clients, it clearly shows how you can solve a customer’s problem and it differentiates you from the competition by offering something they don’t/can’t. A USP is rarely ever related to price. It’s a benefit that makes a lead think, “These are the people I need.”

Manage your reputation

At some point, most of us have asked friends or family who has worked with a local company what their experience was like. With the explosion of the internet and the creation of online review sites, this common act takes on a whole new level of importance.

What other customers have to say about your business is now as important as what you have to say yourself. More and more roofing companies are realizing how important online review sites are to local lead generation.

Many prospective leads will now check reviews made on HomeAdvisor, Facebook, and Google, and base their decision largely on the experiences of other customers.

Closely monitoring what’s being said online about your business and responding to negative reviews with suggestions for rectifying problems can go a long way to ensuring an error now doesn’t cost you later.

Be willing to play the long game

Marketing has always been, and will likely be a long-term enterprise. The companies who succeed in marketing understand that not only do campaigns need to be given time to work, they must be flexible as well. Not every effort will work. When some part of your marketing fails or doesn’t provide the desired results, see it as a learning opportunity and try to determine why it failed – and be willing to put something new in its place. This process of flexibility and persistence will help you generate leads – and business – over the long term, long after your competitors have thrown in the towel.

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Original article source: Roofing Marketing Pros