Who knew at 7 I would be considered an advanced digital marketing professional for roof repair businesses in the minds and hearts of everyone?
Well, I wasn’t!
Truth be told, I was a harbored and introverted, but an inquisitive kid. I was always taking something apart to find out how it worked, instead of asking. I just liked having questions answered through exploring, rather than the nagging task of waiting, shoulder-tapping and being misinformed – yep, it was before the internet.
One time, in particular, stands out. I had asked my grandfather how a computer worked. At the time, we had just bought an old Texas Instruments personal computer.
The explanation both sums up how a computer works, how everything in life works, and the easiest way to give a small child the best answer without any details ever.
“A computer is a machine, that you can use to do things that you couldn’t do by yourself easily. There are a lot of small things happening, sometimes many more things than other machines, and they are a lot smaller – in fact it gets down to light and a bunch of 1’s and 0’s. Computers are so fast, with so many things, and they are so small, it adds up to great things. And, one day, everyone will have a few of these in many different forms. In fact, they will be everywhere.”
Nope, it barely made sense at the time.
But now, it is dead-on accurate.
I mean, isn’t everything this way – lot’s of things, smaller and smaller, working together to make something huge?!?
Today, we are going to look some small changes that your roof repair business can use for the business website to grow leads, find a larger following and more. And, what’s nice, there are only 3 things – so it’s not going to be impossible, and might take all of this upcoming weekend.
That’s not bad, right?
Ok, then let’s get to it.
Get your website right (or just get one started)
Your website is the public face of your company online.
That ‘sounds’ simple enough, right?
In the real world, it just isn’t that simple. I mean, yes, having a website is good. People can now see your brand in search, links and via social media.
But, then what?
Well, for many small businesses, not just roofers and gutter installers, a website ends there. There is a homepage, some services pages, a contact pages and some contact forms and a phone number.
Sound familiar?
What you SHOULD know about your roofing business website…
Before we talk about any of this, I just gotta say, don’t let anyone tell you what your website should or should not be. Your website is meant to move traffic in every form down your funnel to become an actual customer.
Remember that, all the time. Your website is to grab, convert and extend customers. Your website is for YOUR customers, not for everyone.
For the most part, websites can be modified to fit your needs. These needs can be very simple like a brochure-style, single-page website, or a large multiple page, multiple category service-filled website.
While every need is different, there are a few things every roofing company needs on their business website. Look, these are the baseline, minimum, ‘oh crap I need nothing else to be fully running’ kind of suggestions.
- A good, clear homepage
- “Services” mother page
- Individual Services Pages*
- About Us
- Contact Us
- Privacy policy
Website TOS
Notice the asterisk? This means you definitely get more organic search traffic ‘juice’, but they are not 100% necessary. And, if you want to hear something else that might throw you into a spiral, if you have a one-page website, you don’t ‘need’ anything more than a well-written homepage.
And, there are more things to consider in a business website
Now these pages listed above can be the start. Once again, customize for your needs (small edits and customizations).
For instance, you might want to focus on building a cold email list and a warm prospect list AND a paid ad lead list. For those to work, you need a very specific type of pages that could run into the thousands of variants for you over the years.
These are called landing pages.
Landing pages are just what their name suggests – pages meant to be the one and only point of landing for traffic for a particular need of the visitor, as well as traffic type. Landing pages are usually associated with targeted traffic, meaning, they have a specific source, with a specific offer (even freebies are possible) and a single, final resolution you want that person to take.
As an example, let’s say that your company is looking to do more roofing in Cranberry. You might have an offer for a “free consultation and estimate for a new roof installation in Cranberry”. Traffic can come from anywhere, but paid digital advertising is the most used. And, the copy on the page needs to compel the visitor to click to call, email or fill out a contact form to get that free consultation and estimate.
Why would this be important?
With paid digital advertising for roofing companies, you can target a type of person and their location. With Facebook Ads, for instance, I can target only married couples with kids, living in their own home, in and around Cranberry Pennsylvania, that make more than $75,000 a year.
Sound about right?
What if you want to target Erie, Pennsylvania home owners for a new metal roof?
Simple…
Make a new landing page, that targets Erie residents, specifically. Change the copy to target Erie residents. As well, edit your copy for “new metal roof installations” for the targeted offer and the individual.
The offer changed, so the landing page changed.
Everything needs to be inline and on the path of the final goal. The ad has the same topic and CTA as the landing page as the offer as the content.
Simple.
One other consideration for your website being ‘right’
Ok, this one is simple.
Use a blog!
With a CMS (content management system) like WordPress, installing a blog is simple. And, by extension, building new pages and new articles for your blog is dead simple!
Now, if you’re wondering what the benefit of a blog is, think about this one…
Every building season there are trends. Last year it was health and safety. This year, there will be a lot freer spending at times for home improvements. Blogs can allow you to target those trending questions or topics to gain a lot of ground in organic search traffic (SEO from Google).
Cool stuff.
One more thing…
Don’t let yourself not being a professional writer stop you from actually writing articles for your blog to boost traffic. Check out this article that will help you write better for your roofing business website in 4 simple steps!
Yes, you can hire writers. Yes, you can also write small articles and headlines off the cuff now. But, knowing what headlines can and can’t work, knowing how to use them correctly and, best of all, doing this fast yourself is important.
Making real use of paid digital roof repair advertising
If you’re worried about spending a ton of cash of paid digital advertising, without getting anything back, let me give you a few facts about paid advertising in 2022…
- Paid digital advertising is cheaper now that it has ever been (thanks, COVID!)
- Because most platforms are not just general marketing groups, and actually let you fine tune the age, location, affinity targeting, your ads are super-targeted, thus cheaper to run
- More people use Google Search (with ads) and Facebook (with ads) than any other platforms except for maybe YouTube and Amazon
- You can control what you spend, nearly to the single cent to prevent spending too much and getting nothing back
These are just a few of the reasons that paid advertising works as an affordable method of generating new roof repair leads and roof installation customers.
Now I just want to cover the basics of using paid digital roofing advertising. We are not going to look in-depth at each platform. With that said, we will look at what you will need to do to make your advertising campaigns hum, and get the most roofing lead generation out of your efforts (and dollars).
Understanding paid roofing advertising campaigns
Ok, so imagination time…
I want you to relax, and free your mind up a bit.
I want you to think of an advertising funnel as a waterline. Do you know what a waterline is? It’s a shoulder to shoulder group of people passing water buckets down from a water source to a fire.
On the left, we have our ads. On the far right we have our happy customer.
There can be many steps to take that ad view and make it into a customer. But they are small steps. They are simple steps.
Here is one example…
- Person sees the ad
- The ad is relevant to them so they click it
- The click takes the person to a landing page on your website
- The person sees the landing page headline, and is further intrigued
- As the person reads the landing page, they fill out a form or click a button to contact you
- Your system records their information
- This is now a “new lead”; who you will contact ASAP
But, you can do more.
For instance, sometimes the initial offer is a free guide. Maybe it shows general costs for roof replacement, a new metal roof or some other service that you offer. The idea is simple – if someone is looking for this thing in particular, it means that they need the service. Now, they enter your cold lead mailing list.
In this example, you offered nothing of service directly, just information. They pre-qualified themselves for the service. And, now, you can build on that to work on getting their business.
Other campaigns might be WAAAAY more direct. Some might be a simple video of a roof in emergency need of repair, with a simple button that says ‘Call us for emergency roof repair now!’. Others might be for a fast “10 minute estimate” with a contact form, and some will be long proof-of-testimonials, where there are a lot of videos of happy customers of your work.
The point of all of the above examples is a good one – each campaign will be different, with different goals and a different process to get that traffic to become a customer.
Just like in the above discussion, your website can be a customized, edited and worked (and reworked) place for you and your customers. It is not one solid, unchangeable thing.
Your business website isn’t a pamphlet – it’s a lead generation tool
As you can tell by now, your website and online marketing activities for your roofing business are more than just what’s on the surface.
Now, let’s talk about the true meaning of a website for a roofing business – a lead generation tool.
What is lead generation? How does it work the most effectively on a website?
In 2022, for the roofing, gutter and chimney industry, people find you online in one of three ways.
- Running a search for your brand or industry-specific keywords
- Clicking on an advertising
- Clicking on social media (a post, offer or a link someone shared)
Yep, these are the 3 most simple methods of people finding your website and visiting it.
Let’s break down each so that you can understand the unique parts of a website that you need, and overlapping more ‘general’ needs in your website.
Organic search, SEO and what Local SEO really is
SEO (search engine optimization) for small businesses works – and it works well. However, for any small business in an industry-specific category (roof repair, HVAC, accounting, insurance agency, etc), lean on Local SEO for their traffic.
What is the difference between SEO and Local SEO? What makes Local SEO work so well for local businesses?
Let me show you an example of using organic search for SEO versus Local SEO…
Ok, so for our first example we’ll be looking at the process of finding a local roofer to fix (possibly install a new one) my roof. Then, after you see how that works, I’ll show you what happens with the introduction of Local SEO.
I need roof repair. I live in New Castle Pennsylvania. I run a search on Google for “roof repair”. I get a list of 64,000,000 results. The first result is from a company in Los Angeles. The next two are for Miami. Then back to Los Angeles. Then I get some directory sources. Then another company in New York/New Jersey.
In fact, this scenario goes on for pages and pages and pages.
Then, I get the bright idea of searching for “roof repair in new castle pa”. Great!
The results are for companies that mention roof repair, some never mention roof repair but discuss Pennsylvania, while other talk about New Castle – but in Delaware, England and elsewhere.
It takes 20 to 30 pages to find companies that do “roof repair” in “new castle” in “pennsylvania”.
Now, let’s look at something bit different in Local SEO.
I still need roof repair. I still live in Lawrence County Pennsylvania. However, this time, when I run “roof repair” as my search, I get results for ONLY around Lawrence County PA – specifically in and around New Castle Pennsylvania. Even the directories listed show specifically western Pennsylvania areas and my home city.
This is the power of Local SEO. We mix content with context for the industry and search like “roof repair”, with the region of the person searching for items.
You can see this by running searches for industries in other cities across the country. You will still see results from local business to your home city.
Your website content can take advantage of this.
What if you have one page for each mother service you offer, and each child service you offer? Well, you’ve built strong SEO for that topic.
Now, make up pages for each city served for each of those services!
After you do this, and they are indexed by Google, someone searching locally for that service of yours, within that region will see those results.
BOOM!
These individual pages can use content and context for those specific users visiting your website from search.
Paid advertising – fast reactions, fast leads
Above, you saw the power of using region and contextually relevant content.
And, before that, you saw the value of aligning the offer, with the location, with the landing page content of the offer for maximum lead generation.
Those landing pages are needed. You might have 3 landing pages for advertising. You might have 3000.
Just remember, on landing pages you are writing ads and ad copy for people who have clicked an ad to get there. You don’t have to worry about SEO and search-friendly copywriting and linking and such. You just have to write well and write to convert.
What about content types on landing pages? What about length of copy?
There is no one single rule on landing page copy (the depth, length and density).
Not working with a marketing or advertising agency and you want to know where to start? You can check out this article that actually discusses how to use digital paid advertising.
Social media’s ability to broadcast, multiply and sell passively
“Social media isn’t about selling things – it’s about connecting…”
Ok, so technically, social media is about connecting. However, as a small business owner, I want to connect with people who want to buy my services, right?
How do you effectively use social media? What are the ‘rules’ for using social media?
Some people might tell you there are checklists, or suggestions, or they might even push a book to you.
Here’s the thing…
There just isn’t one hard-and-fast rule.
Yes, there are foundational things that can be done on social like:
- Educated
- Entertain
- Enlighten
But with what content, how often you produce content, how interactive you make the content, where the content leads and so on are all specific to your industry, region and brand.
Looooooooots of small, simple things adding up to large gains – you see it?
Social media can lead your followers into specific topics of discussion and even offers.
BONUS TIP: when using social media heavily in a brand, I like to duplicate a landing page on a digital paid advertising campaign, and alter the content and flow to match the social media audience. In this way, you can cut down on writing and content hours, but also provide a customized offer to your visitors from your social media platforms.
You can also use social media to do some content experiments, experimenting on content types, lengths and the overall density of the discussion. You can see how visitors to the social media pages react and interact with your website, and your offers.
A good first step is using social media to highlight projects that are fully described and showcased on your website – a portfolio page, or a projects page… you get the idea. As well, I would offer a lead magnet from social media specifically (something like a “5 Hazards Of D.I.Y. Roof Repair In Western Pennsylvania Summers”). Lead magnets get you the email addresses of people needing roof repair. And, they get you more followers on your social pages.
Bonus: Get an expert to review, create a plan and help you follow it through!
Wow, we covered a lot in this article. There were plenty small, simple things that you can do for your brand and its digital marketing starting today. We looked at your website, how social media and paid advertising can be used, and how you can even handle some of the writing and maintenance yourself.
But now, I want to give you one more of the “small, simple” free tips here. Maybe you aren’t comfortable in this. Maybe you need some direction, guidance, assistance?
The most simple, small step would be to simply give me a call at (724)510-7201 or email me at email@jamesblews.com to schedule a free 1 hour consultation. There are no strings attached, and no jokes – just good, solid advice for moving in the right direction.
We will discuss your brand, what you are doing now for marketing and advertising, what you would like to be doing and what your digital marketing success would actually look like. Once again, this is a temporary free offer for you, so take part in it before it’s gone.
