Ice Cold Hail, Nice Warm Leads!

Use these five things to build an effective inbound marketing strategy.

By Roofing Contractor Marketing

If you own or run a roofing company, you know leads are the life-blood of revenue. Every roofing company wants more leads. And better yet, if you can figure out how to get inbound leads from your website or Google or some other online source, you have a good source of leads that have already committed somewhat to you because they are contacting you first! Your marketing message prompted them to take action and proactively contact you – this is a nice warm lead.

This type of internet lead is often referred to as an inbound lead. These are the customers that come to you via the web. They either visited your website, found you through Google or Bing or some other online source like the BBB, Angie’s List, etc. Your inbound marketing strategy caused them to pick up the phone and call you or fill out a contact form on your website. If you treat these leads well, they’ll go from “warm” to “hot” and your conversion rate will increase.

So, what makes an “effective” Inbound Marketing Strategy? This article will give you the pieces to the formula – the actual formula for your company will vary based on many factors… and that’s the challenging part. The combination of ingredients and messaging changes based on where you are targeting, market conditions, the environment (like is it a new hailstorm, an old storm, no storm) and many other variables. But the pieces are generally the same.

Here’s what you’ll need:

1. Landing Page(s) – these are web pages, on your site or sometimes not on your website, that give the consumer a reason to contact you today. A “call to action” offer is essential.
2. A Facebook Ad campaign
3. A Google/Bing Pay Per Click Campaign
4. Call Tracking
5. A Reputation Building Campaign

Roofing Landing Pages Landing pages are different than the home page of your website. Landing pages are designed to exactly deliver the information someone is searching for. This exact match helps convert the viewer to a lead IF the page message is compelling.   The goal is to give the potential customer a high degree of trust so they’ll do business with you and not your competitors.

Often times, the home page of a website is too generic or offers many other services that may distract from the information a searcher wants. Any confusion or question on the part of the viewer lowers conversion rates – so the more you hit the bulls eye, the better the chances of getting a nice warm inbound lead.

Facebook Ad Campaigns Facebook has come a long way in improving their ad campaign effectiveness. Facebook is the modern-day equivalent of the “Old Time Daily Newspaper”. Billions of people skim Facebook every day looking for interesting updates, articles or topics and also glance at the ads that catch their eye – just like the old paper did back in the day.

Here is Why You Need to Use Facebook to Advertise:

• There is no other medium as pervasive to the masses as Facebook
• There is no other medium that gives you such precision to target your exact audience. Target men, target women, target ages, locations, and much more
• It’s cheap to use (for now)
• Building a campaign is easy, which allows you to get your message out quickly

Google/Bing Campaign This advertising option isn’t new but it’s improved. Google has continued to improve its targeting and its response rates. While it’s still pretty complicated to execute, it is effective. Google has also improved its mobile device delivery – if you’ve noticed lately, it’s all ads on your phone at first. You now have to scroll down to get to any organic listings. And they even sell map listings now too. It’s the next best thing to organic listings and it’s something you can buy.

Why Google Ad Campaigns?

• You’re targeting “warm leads” – they are ready to buy!
• You can target by location
• You can control time frames
• You control budget
• It can be expensive but that's relative to the quality of the leads it generate

Call Tracking Call tracking can give you lots of important information that website analytics alone do not. By listening to the calls, and how your company handles them, you can improve the management of that “nice warm lead”. Your receptionist or whomever takes the Inbound Calls is your potential customer’s first impression, so that interaction and customer management is key to a successful lead conversion.

Why Call Tracking?

• You hear the how the lead comes in – what are they asking for?
• You hear how your front line welcomes them
• You can follow through to see what became of the leads, how were they handed off to a rep, how much information did you gather initially to help keep them “warm”
• This information helps determine the quality of the leads your marketing efforts are generating

Reputation Building The roofing industry is too famous for it’s hail storm scam artists. We still hear stories to this day of people getting ripped off. People are on high alert when dealing with a roofing company so informed consumers do their research. The research often entails just a google search of your company name. Through Yelp and other review sites, consumers can get a quick glance at what others are saying about your company.

No company is perfect, and if you do any volume of business, you’ll have to deal with an “impossible to please” client that will try to tell the entire world your company is no good. But the real story is that you have hundreds or thousands more that were very satisfied with your work. You want their glowing reviews…but you have to make it quick and easy so they’ll give you that review.

Why Reviews Matter

• Just like a restaurant, you can lose business you never knew was interested in you, just because you have a few bad reviews
• Drown out the bad one’s with good one’s – tons of them
• Use a review company to give you a system to ask for a review – most of these help filter bad reviews before they hit the review sites
• Add good reviews to your landing pages, in your Facebook campaigns, and everywhere you can. Warm them up to your good work.

Inbound leads are not easy to come by, and as more business owners and marketing people read articles like this and get better at executing online campaigns, it will get even harder. These steps listed above, when built properly, will give you great opportunities now for consideration by potentially thousands of qualified prospects.

Moving forward in time, the consumer will become more discerning in who they contact and why. Your warmest inbound leads will come when you get your compelling message in front of the right crowd and give them exactly what they want.

About Roofing Contractor Marketing RoofingContractorMarketing.com, based in Denver Colorado since 2008, works with roofing companies nationwide that seek lead generation strategies and Inbound Marketing campaign execution. For more information visit www.roofingcontractormarketing.com.