Roofing, Marketing, and the Truth About Leads (Podcast)

Are you fed up with your roofing lead generation? It’s a story we hear so many times at Roofing Webmasters: “I need leads, but I hate paying my company for them.” In our latest podcast, Jason and Nolen discuss the truth behind leads and where they ultimately originate. So if you’ve never considered how your lead-selling company works, be sure to listen in.

Helpful Tips for Lead Generation:

• Don’t forget: lead-selling services make local businesses compete for the same pool of leads.
• PPC campaigns offer better results than lead vendors, especially in tandem with local SEO!
• Organic SEO makes lead generation much more affordable for many roofing contractors.
• Always start your roofing SEO efforts by completing your Google My Business profile!

Lead Generation: Feeding Business

Have you ever met someone who only eats at fast-food restaurants? When they complain about the soaring costs of eating out, you want to point to the nearest grocery store and say, “Make it yourself!” While the process may take a bit of work, preparing your meals is ultimately much cheaper than dining out. That’s just a fact of life!

When it comes to online marketing, learning to feed yourself is just as important. Even so, thousands of roofing companies are stuck waiting for a third-party lead generation vendor to spoon-feed their business. All the while, those same vendors gather leads from the same sources that roofers should target independently.

How Roofing Leads are Born

Picture this: A laborer and a smooth-talking salesman walk next to an enormous freshwater river. On the bank of the water, the hard-working laborer notes the extreme heat and moans about how thirsty they’ve become on the walk. Then, as the two near the clean water supply, they happen upon a bucket set on the shoreline. The salesman walks up to the buck, dips it deep in the river, turns around to the laborer, and says, “For $20,000, I will give you a sip of this water.”

This story sounds ridiculous, but it amply describes many roofing contractors and lead generation.

Google delivers the most significant volume of roofing leads than any other digital source in the United States. The search engine craves trustworthy businesses to direct consumers and even provides free tools to simplify the process. In addition, because Google matches consumers with companies in their local community, the resulting lead quality is generally much better than other sources.

Lead generation companies step in and create a gap between consumers browsing through Google Search and roofing companies hunting for customers. Instead of connecting interested homeowners and businesses directly to a single local contractor, they offer the same leads to multiple roofing companies within the same community. This “lead” may be a person who’s simply looking for prices or bids, not a ready-to-buy individual to complicate matters further.

Alternative Lead Sources

Maybe you don’t buy leads from another company. Perhaps you buy them from PPC campaigns off Google Ads or Facebook. These advertising venues aren’t as cheap as they used to be, but they provide a dependable lead source. You also only pay for clicks, a very actionable source of business.

While PPC offers plenty of opportunities to grow your business, it represents an equally dangerous source of lead generation addiction. 

After all, these campaigns are relatively easy to manage and remarkably simple to track results. Moreover, even if a roofing company owner is too busy to run the campaigns themselves, dozens of digital marketing experts are willing to handle the load. That, of course, makes the endeavor even more expensive.

What’s the Solution?

Generate the leads yourself! You know all those businesses sitting at the top of your local search results are there for a reason. Self-sustaining lead generation doesn’t happen spontaneously. For example, those successful roofing contractors exercised the meager time, money, and effort necessary to win. Now they reap in the outstanding traffic and leads.

You don’t have to give up on purchasing leads or running campaigns all at once. Instead, simply start putting a little money each month into developing a long-term supply of clients.

• Your brand starts to earn greater recognition.
• Only your company enjoys each lead.
• The average lead is so much cheaper.
• The average lead is of much higher quality.

If you’re tired of paying out the nose for leads, or if you’re curious about creating more growth for your roofing business, we’d love to help.