Can I tell you a story about roof repair marketing and lead generation in New Castle? Ok, cool!
2015 seemed like a fast storm of a year. The weather was nearly spot on for the whole year, my kids were really hitting home-runs with their schooling and their lives. My wife and I were celebrating our anniversary in June.
Right before Halloween I got hit with it; something I hadn’t given one thought to because I hadn’t seen it.
“Dad, what are those spots on the ceiling?”
I immediately knew what I was looking at – water damage from a leaking roof.
The next thing that happened amazed me. I saw a flash of smoke and a sudden *POOF* and a roof repair specialist was there to give me an estimate.
Seriously?
Nope. That didn’t happen. Well, it didn’t happen entirely like that.
My wife and I started by asking around for ‘the best roofer in New Castle’. We then reviewed listings and 4-star and 5-star reviews. We then viewed their websites for their background and experience. Finally, we started making calls.
The above occurred in New Castle; a small town. We hired someone who lived AND worked here from a list of about 20 roofing companies.
Roof repair lead generation in New Castle is a reality
New Castle roof repair lead generation can happen, even in a small town. We don’t live in Mayberry, right? We also don’t live in a land of mages and wizards – so don’t look at lead generation as a mythical and magical entity, reserved for only Pittsburgh businesses.
Lead generation (and to a larger extent, digital marketing), is essential for your business. Lead generation allows you to find, target, drive and close on new clients and customers.
Look, I’m going to give you a harsh truth…
Lead generation, in every form, is the only way for your business to not die.
That statement is a bit morbid for your company, but it doesn’t have to be the outcome. You just need more customers. With a general pool of 22,000 residents in New Castle, and 87,000 in Lawrence County, you can find customers.
Here’s the catch:
Without lead generation, no matter how large or small the area serviced actually is, you will have a difficult time growing your business.
What are other benefits of digital marketing for lead generation?
Spring and the Fall are the best times of the year to push for roof repair and roofing. Summer might be the ‘hottest’ (pun intended) part of the year. And what about Winter?
And more specifically, how can you have leads coming into your business year-round?
That is the cool part about the internet: with a website, and the right lead generation and marketing, you can see similar volume of business traffic through-out the year. Your website should work as hard as you do, right? If you build it right, your website will be a year-round lead generator.
Proper lead generation can also allow you to move your business into new areas. Thinking about moving from New Castle into Sharon and then into Clarion and Erie? Having a complete and working lead generation engine in place will allow this to occur with ease.
One final benefit of good lead generation is that your pricing models can always be stable. You will find that you will not need to compete on pricing for work. As well, you may encounter times where you want to scale back new customers. When you have the right lead generation methods in place, you can increase or decrease your efforts as needed – usually with a few simple clicks.
With all of the benefits covered, let’s start getting into lead generation for your roofing business. We are going to look at the planning and process. And, by the time we are done, you’ll have everything you need to implement proper lead generation on your website (yes, I have a free download for you, too).
Basic roofing lead generation is a plan and a process
Landing pages are the only thing you need for roof repair lead generation in New Castle, right? I mean, Pennsylvania residents need their roofs in working order and solid. So, that might make sense.
But a landing page alone means nothing by itself. You need a plan – you know what I mean.
A landing page is simply a targeted page that focuses only on one product or service. We can go further by saying that a landing page also must take into account:
- The platform used for the incoming traffic (so ads, social media or SEO)
- The end-user of the product or service
- The device or platform used for that process of traffic into the landing page
The above might seem like a lot to grasp. But you’ve likely experienced the same thing with offline sales.
Think about this…
People who will travel to this landing page, your website or your platforms will, indeed, need help with their roof (roof repairs, a new roof, etc) for their home in New Castle, or western Pennsylvania.
This is the truth. People will not stumble upon someone who is selling roof repair and roofing services in New Castle by some randomness. They are coming to your website, or your Facebook profile, or seeing your Porch or Yelp pages because they are looking for a roofer here in New Castle.
What makes you different from other roofers that they are seeing is that your offer needs to be resistible. Your landing page also must be clear and direct. Finally, your path from traffic to sales must be just as clean.
So, what is the path?
Roofer lead generation works like this:
TRAFFIC(social media, SEO, paid advertising, email, etc) into WEB PAGE (your landing page) into PASSIONATE TO TAKE THE OFFER into THE SALE (this could be a price in a sale for money, a consultation, a freebie, etc)
The sale is the goal. Traffic starts everything. The messages and content and copy from the traffic through the path into the sale must be consistent and clear along the way.
New Castle roof repair business landing pages, 100% explained
Landing pages on the internet are primarily focused on your goal for the page. Are you selling a service or product? What is the offer for that service or product? What device will the end-user be using to view your web page? What source was the traffic that is coming into your landing page? What do we want the potential customer to do in the end?
What’s the goal?
Good question. Take a moment and think about that. What is your goal with a particular landing page?
For many, it’s receiving money for a sale. Amazon and eBay and WayFair are FILLED with product landing pages. But there are other ones:
- Phone calls
- Emails
- Contact forms submitted
- Free downloads
- Free information (newsletter, email course, etc)
- Leaks
- Gutters
- Shingles
- Chimneys
- Tiles
- Warping / softening
A good call to action for the area is to give a free consultation on a roof repair project in New Castle. With the amount of varying weather that Western Pennsylvania receives, from snow and zero degrees temps into 100 degree temps in the Summer, and lots of rain all year-round at the other times means roofing needs.
Now a weight is off of your for created content to carry the load. Here is why.
You no longer have to try to fill the landing pages and social media and created content and links for SEO and your email marketing with a goal of ‘buy a $20,000 new roof’. In New Castle, the average new roof for a single family home is averaging about $20,000; including insulation, framing, gutters and the like.
Have you ever bought a $20,000 product from a website in a single visit?
Likely, no.
But, have you ever received a free quote from a phone call or email?
Yes, probably.
The best outcome of getting that call or email comes down to the goal you have. Of course you want someone to give you money for a new roof or that emergency patching or that emergency roof repair. Of course you want that goal to immediately happen.
But having a goal for a landing page of getting that call is far more attainable, and quite frankly a lot easier to write for, than having someone call and say ‘I am willing to spend $30,000 on a new roof today, can you help?’
That is a practical tip right there: focus on goal of lead generation and collection, rather than a sale. Your landing pages will be far more successful.
How to build quality traffic into your roof repair website
When I ask you about traffic coming into your website, what do you think?
Probably you think about the type of traffic. For some it is SEO. For others, social media like Facebook, Twitter and even Instagram and Youtube works. Some roofers rely exclusively on Google AdWords.
What type of traffic is just as important as what your offer is.
This is true because the way you speak will change based on the type of traffic AND the offer.
Let’s look at this further
Let’s say that you are creating content to drive traffic from your business’s Facebook page. And you are looking to collect an email from your landing page on your website. On another page, you are looking for the same email collection from a lead. But, the traffic, instead, comes from SEO. And on another, we are looking for the email of the lead, but the traffic is from paid advertising from Google AdWords.
How are these platforms different?
First, traffic coming from your Facebook Business page already are people who follow you. They may know your brand intimately as an existing customer, or just follow you because you have such great information and discussion. These are people who do need to see validation of your brand, your business, you or your employees.
For SEO, these are people searching for a specific need that relates to more information. The are looking to understand their problem further, and how you can help – not just if you will help.
In paid advertising, these people are seeing the irresistible offer presented to them and are looking to collect it. They know that by following the ad on a click, they will get a free consultation, or schedule a free estimate, or what the offer is to collect that lead.
Each of the platforms had the same ending result of collecting their email to contact them later. But each type of traffic has an umbrella assumption about the person that you need to address.
While ‘type’ of traffic really is important, quality traffic is a game-changer. If you had 100 people visit your website and only 1 emails you, or ten people but half email you…which number is better? Five people emailing you, of course.
The type of traffic will dictate how you build the content and the landing page. Quality traffic will dictate how many leads are generated from your efforts. Quality traffic means we match the source for our wording in the offer.
But, what should we NEVER, EVEERRRRRRR do on a landing page?
Simple – never deviate from the Rule Of One!
We need ONE offer, for ONE product or service, from ONE source of traffic, targeting one specific type of person, with only ONE call to action.
Using the Rule Of One for your small business marketing efforts
The Rule Of One is a pretty simple concept that you have likely used in different areas of your life – you just haven’t defined it as ‘The Rule Of One’! Basically, The Rule Of One means that we are going to focus on just a single thing.
We mentioned this above…
We need ONE offer, for ONE product or service, from ONE source of traffic, targeting one specific type of person, with only ONE call to action.
To use this method on your landing page sounds simple, but we have a lot of moving parts to account for to maximize it.
First, we need to have an offer. In your case, it is likely “Roof Repair Estimate”. Let’s refine this better into a “Free Roof Repair Estimate”. That is our offer. While your service is roof repair in and around New Castle, we need an actual single offer.
Next, we think about the platform of traffic that we are targeting – just one. This means this particular landing page will be for either SEO, social media, email marketing, cold emailing, circular URL, paid advertising link a banner link, paid advertising like Google AdWords. Remember, we aren’t targeting all the traffic; we are only targeting one type of traffic for this one landing page.
We are also looking at the visitor. Are they a new customer? Are they an existing customer? Are they a current customer that might need an upgraded service? Are they knowledgeable about our brand, or do they have zero knowledge about New Castle roofers? You need to pick one type of person to target to make the message effective.
We also need a single call to action. Are we looking to get this visitor to call us? Do we want the visitor to email us? Do we want them to fill out a contact form for more information? Do we want then to click a link to something else? It does not matter what the next action that you want them to take, you MUST only have one, single item that is a CTA on the page.
Where do most people run into problems with landing pages and The Rule Of One?
Quite simply, you have too many links on your landing page. You do not need a link back to your home page. You do not need links like on your main website (service page, about us page, contact us page, etc). You also do not need your email address, phone number, physical mailing address and whatever other forms of contact that you think you might need but don’t. Even further, you do not need social media links on a landing page.
The only link or action that you need on your landing page is the one action that you want that visitor to take.
Examples of New Castle roof repair lead generation in action
We’ve covered a lot so far concerning landing pages and New Castle roofing lead generation on your website. But, I haven’t given you a real example, and practical steps in creating a good landing page that converts.
We’re going to do that now.
Before we do, you can download these templates (basic web pages that you can edit) and a free checklist for landing page content and elements below.
Before we get our hands dirty, let’s have a good understanding of the type of business that we will be using in this example. We will be using a business that has 3 employees. The roofing business has been operating in New Castle for the last ten years. This New Castle business ONLY does roof repair, gutter repair, flashing, shingles, tarring and leak repair – the business does not do new roofing installations nor chimney capping and repair.
While businesses in town have been known to pay well and on-time, for this offer, our New Castle business will be targeting normal Joe and Jane homeowners. We will be targeting single family homeowners looking for roof repair services.
Defining our New Castle roofing lead generation path
Now we need to define exactly what the ‘free estimate’ is. Are we looking for a simple repair that, while quick, also isn’t that expensive? Or are we looking for a larger repair? The average cost of roof repair in Pennsylvania is up to $500 for a simple shingle replacement, up to $1500 for a medium repair and up to $3000 for a larger roof repair like a large leak, gutter replacing, etc. Cost and time estimates all the same, we are going to focus on leaks and soft spots from weather damage.
Before we go any further, let’s look at our basic landing page. We’re going to add a lot more to this page as the article progresses.
The above page shows a basic webpage; possibly something like what you have on your website. We took the content in the middle of the page out, and replaced this with our main offer and our CTA. For this example business, our CTA will be to click to call for a ‘free estimate’.
What is wrong with this page?
I’ll give you a second…
Guesses?
The biggest issue on this landing page is that there are far too many links. Remember, the goal of a landing page is for the visitor to convert for our goal action. In our example, our goal is to click to call on the button.
Check out the amount of issues we have in the image below…
You can see what should be removed. We had a linked logo that would go back to the home page – no good. We want people to call, not to click to visit the rest of our website. We have links in the heading navigation bar. We also have links for social media. Plus, that footer has links to all over our website, AND our email!
Once again, the goal of the landing page is to lead the visitor into taking part in our CTA. Too many options means that the chances of our goal being met is decreased by a similar number.
Our next step is to start building content. There are a lot of options for a landing page when it comes to basic template and design. You can have short form, or long form. You can use two column, or single scrolling columns. You can have multiple buttons to keep CTA in constant view of the visitor, or only use one button on a whole page.
For our roofing business, we’re going to focus on mobile customers. Because of this, we’ll be using a simple short form landing page. We can also think about the traffic source (it makes content creation between the source and the landing page easier). In our example, we’ll be using Google AdWords.
To recap, our lead generation path with be:
Paid Ads via Google AdWords into Our Landing Page into The CTA (call us)
Next, we need to focus on creating the irresistible nuggets to get our visitors to complete our CTA. Our targeted visitors will have little to no knowledge of our brand. Our landing page will be specific to people who have searched for roofing or roof repair needs. In a way, those people are blindly looking for a solution. We’re going to give them a solution, and it will be free – not the service or roof repair, but the estimate will be free.
To determine some persuasive copy, we need to answer ‘what does our customer need?’. For our business, they need roof repairs. This might be for a leak. Or from weather damage. Or even from basic age and wear and tear.
With the clients you’ve had, or do have, what is the main complaint and need from New Castle homeowners? What do residents of New Castle need done when it comes to their roof?
When you have that, now you can show them that your solution will work for them. Sales always has had a stigma of underhandedness – this isn’t the case. You are trusted. Your New Castle roofing business can solve their problems. You aren’t shady, and you’re not dishonest.
Simple design elements will turn traffic into new business leads
Ok, so let’s have a small recap.
First, we have the landing page devoted to one type of customer, for one offer, from one specific source of traffic. We have eliminated the extra links and clickables. And we have added clear and honest content to persuade those visitors to at least call.
What else should we do to these pages?
One main area to consider are colors we use.
Check out the image below. While you do, I want you to decide on which looks more clickable, and which just looks better?
As you can see, colors will persuade a click. Your landing pages should be as black and white, clear and simple as possible. However, colors will allow you give subtle triggers while your visitor is on that landing page.
Here are a few colors and button combinations to consider.
The button examples above show you the differences between different colors and the different actions that you want your website visitors to take. The first three are solid buttons next to secondary ‘shadow’ buttons. These main buttons are our main actions we want visitors to take. The secondary buttons are shadows – a visual cue to possible click them, but they are not as important.
The bottom two buttons show something very clear – green means go, red means stop. You never want to mix messages. For visually acute visitors, if they see a message of ‘go’ with a red button, they will not convert as effectively. The same goes with a green button that clears a form, deletes a features or order, or a button that is green that ‘ends’ the visit.
Messaging, alignment and walking your brand down the aisle
One of the last things that is needed is to verify that our messaging is aligned through the whole lead generation process. Our ads on Google AdWords need to be keyword and message focused for our offer, and our landing page must not only match our offer, but also the ad we will be using.
Here is what I mean…
Let’s say that we are going to target the keyword roof repair. We know that are area will be only in and around New Castle Pennsylvania (we can set the area and distance in Google AdWords). The keyword is the key.
Now we want to add some social keywords to our ad. First, you need to remember that people will actually be using their phones without typing. So, what would someone ask Google or Siri about roof repair? Likely, they will ask ‘who is the best roof repair in New Castle’, right?
We take that question, or query, and we make it a statement because we want to be an answer. The answer is ‘the best roof repair in new castle’.
Next, we think about our offer. We want to give a free estimate to anyone that calls. So, what do we need to say both in the ad and on our landing page?
Simple.
Get your free roof repair estimate
That makes sense, right?
We need one more line, and here’s why. In Google AdWords, we can use a few lines. The first is the headline. It is bolded and clearly advertising the link. The offer is in the body of the ad, and likely the end of the ad. This gives us an intro line in the body of the ad. This is a good place to describe what would be in the repair.
Here are a few services that our example business does:
So let’s put these into a clear line of text.
We do leaks, warps, gutters, tiles, shingles – your whole roof!
Now we have nearly a full ad!
The title should be clear. The body of the ad has two lines of text that are smart, clear and describe our offer to the ‘T’.
Putting things together for your roofing marketing needs
We’ve got the colors, we’ve eliminated the fat, and we’ve got the ad. Now what do we need?
Frankly, nothing!
Here is the ad that we’ll be using for our lead generation campaign:
And here is our final page for our example New Castle roofing company:
As you can see, we’ve aligned the landing page offer, to our ad. We could go further on the landing page, and mention 24/7 support to better match the ad.
One thing to mention here, that really is beyond the scope of the article, is to use A/B testing to fine-tune your roofing lead generation campaigns. This means having a ‘control’ for your ad and for your landing page. You then send equal traffic to the control and to a change. You then look at the difference in conversions.
When you do go into fine-tuning mode, remember to only change one element at a time, either in your ad or in your landing page copy. If you change too many, you will never know which worked – which kind of negates the goal of A/B testing!
Either way, you are now on your way to a more conversions.
Now that you know what it is and how to use, what should you do next?
I know this has been a pretty big article, covering a lot of ground on lead generation and landing pages for your roofing business in New Castle. But, I hope you’ve seen that you now have everything you need to handle landing pages and conversions yourself.
What were the major points that you should take away from this discussion?
Hopefully, you are starting to see your marketing in a holistic manner. Your offline and online advertising and marketing can all funnel into a single landing page. But you can’t have that without your own website (so get one!). By looking at all platforms, all traffic sources as potential lead generation sources, then you are a step up on your competition.
Next, having a singular focus on what you are offering is your goal. Without following The Rule Of One, you will likely waste time and money on too much low-quality traffic.
Finally, you’ve seen a practical method of creating an offer, a landing page and driving traffic into your lead generation funnel. In fact, you now have some templates for pages for your offers. You can edit those today, and start driving traffic into those landing pages, and into some new leads.
Look, over the last few minutes of reading, I’ve tried to show you the most simple method of lead generation for your roofing business. But the real fact of the matter is that lead generation for roofers isn’t so clear cut. There is testing involved, there is timing involved and lots of analysis and patience. The good part about this whole process is that you hopefully know a lot more about it; and maybe enough to get started today!
Here is your freebie pack for landing pages and roof repair lead generation
Speaking of ‘freebie’, let’s look at how to download and use your landing page templates.
Go ahead and download the templates. Then, after you have the process and path laid out on paper for your offer, you will need to edit the page for your goals and content. This page is singular, it is your’s, and it is for your clients and your offer.
Once edited, you need to upload this to your website.
And really, that’s it!
Keep driving traffic into the landing page using the rules of the landing page for traffic sources and targeted persons. Closing those calls will be the easy part. Even giving the free estimate will only take a few moments, but can pay off after the close.
And if you need more help, you can schedule a consultation with me by contacting me today.
