Many people have told me not to bother with Angie’s List, Home Advisor, Thumbtack etc because the leads are cold, or sold to multiple contractors, or people lowballing you and you get low value jobs.
Have you tried these services? Is hiring a marketing firm the best route? Google? Facebook? I mean price is one thing, but I want results.
Plus salesmen as SO expensive, they can only cold call and door knock for so long.
Thanks.
Ive found generating your own leads tends to be a lot better than lead generation services. For all the reasons mentioned. Designing your own message, your own information for the customer to read, educating the customer in your environment. Having the customer pushed directly to your website, controlling the message end to end. Directing them there with blog posts shared on facebook, paid ads on facebook, and a google google adwords campaign is far better.
The people who know how to do that, are creating these amalgamated sites, and controlling your lead flow. They generate leads for $30 a pop, and sell them to 5 roofing companies for $25 each and have zero skin in the game as far as making sure these people meet a quality contractor or get a good roof done right.
http://www.sargeantsroofing.com - this is what we did… the blog generates a ton of leads as do the ebooks.
Very nice website, I like how you have a 2 hour response time, that’s a good way to set you apart. I also like the idea of doing ebooks as well. Have you considered a lead gen service that does exclusive leads for you? On another forum someone mentioned they had good luck with that. but I agree if you can do your own that’s best, how are you using paid Facebook ads for leads?
You should invest in a website and start doing your own blogs, it might even drive customers your way. You are right, spending money on sites like Angie’s list and others is a gamble
Well there is a number of ways I have found it works, but the number one way, was the blog posts, sharing them via our facebook page… and then boosting those. Performed a lot better than an “AD” asking for business, promising estimates, or best prices, or same day quotes… boosting posts offering free information was always our best results.
You’re right… the blogs has been our number one source of fresh leads. We increased our business huge this way. The best part was that our customers werent really comparing prices that much. They wanted to know how much it cost for SARGEANTS ROOFING to do their roof… not how much a roof costs. Which was a huge bonus because profitability was higher too.
Citytop – we tried other lead gen services. Like ones that promise to give you exclusivity. They still werent all that exclusive because the customer was using 3 or 4 different lead generation sites. What we found is that those people would get bombarded by roofing companies offering to do the work. Then our success depended on follow up, for weeks! Finally I start asking customers what was taking them so long, and they kept saying “gotta do my research” “gotta think about it” or they were just price hopping between me and other roofing companies because they couldnt decide on the BEST roofer so they went with the cheapest. Thats where we got the idea to be the place where people did the RESEARCH, and sell to them when they were on our turf… instead of throwing our name in a hat and doing estimates out the wazoo hoping we could win on salesmanship, work ethic in follow up efforts, or pure dump luck, combined with a race to the bottom dollar.
I won’t pay for a lead gen service ever again!
Marketing is just part of the business, it needs to be done everyday in some small way… go where you customers are and be seen by them… get involved in the community facebook pages and also look for influencers in your local area - start posting were they can be seen…
Have you thought about working with a “pay-per-lead” marketing company? They have the ability to provide you with exclusive leads on your behalf that aren’t shared with other contractors. Or you can always start generating leads yourself. I write often about how roofers can get more leads, if you need some advice you are more than welcome to check it out it can be found here → roofermarkertingguide.com
As you’ve heard, we found the leads from Home Advisor and Angie’s List to be pretty low-quality. It ended up being a sinkhole in our marketing budget. To further back what @Adam_Sand said, we have seen our search rank improve greatly by just taking the time to write some blog posts that are helpful to homeowners. If you’re looking for some content ideas, take a look at what we’ve written - Blog – Slate & Slate Roofing
As far as paid advertising goes, we’ve seen pretty good results from Google’s Pay-Per-Click ads. We’re still fine tuning the demographic to target with Facebook ads, and would love to hear what’s worked for others there, because we think that could be a huge hit and not many competitors are using them effectively yet.
I like the design of the site. A few things that may help improve the site:
On mobile views you can add a click to call button, check out the plugin “Click To Call” it adds a really cool call button to your site when views on a mobile device. Since over 50% of searches come from mobile devices, it could help with conversions.
Also, I didn’t see any pics other than stock photos, consumers want to see the business owners and employees…it builds trust, which is crucial for small business these days.
Eric
Roof Marketing Guide
Thank you, @Eric_Ainsworth, much appreciated. I will look into adding that click to call button for users on mobile devices. Good call, we’re buying a nice camera and we’re going to start buckling down on the photos as well. The feedback is much appreciated.
Hey Adam_Sand, do you write all of your blog content in-house, or pay to have someone write the articles for you? Love the website man, it looks very nice.
We produce all our own content on the blog, have written and design everything myself. That is my background, sales and marketing. This is my latest addition to our marketing efforts.
Video 
A simple Guide to Roofing on Youtube
So far the success rate is pretty good for 3 days. We aren’t investing too heavily in paid traffic yet because its -25 C here yesterday. Not great for roofing haha!
So it’s mostly branding and planting the bug in peoples heads.
Youtube - CPV is $.04 CPFV is $.43 CPM is $9.54 (these are CAD$)
Facebook ads - CPV $.02 CPFV $1.27 CPM is $6.91
Thats the results after 3 days of running paid traffic to it.
The big thing is seeing what it has done to our website. last 3 days vs the 3 days prior:
181% increase in traffic to the site from the paid traffic.
120.1% increase in duration on site.
272% increase in page views
Good results from experimentation, we will lean in full tilt as the season draws near.
-adam
You should try writting your own blog, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. You could just go through your last couple of projects and come up with a short text explaning what you did or something like that.
Getting your own leads is the best, but VERY time consuming (especially in the beginning). Nevertheless, you should start immediately! Start website + blog. I publish job overviews, as well as answering questions (on the blog) that many homeowners ask in person. Soon enough you will start getting visitors and leads.
Speaking about leads - we bought leads from Quality Smith (not so much on the quality side )… those were a complete waste… so in 11 years of generating (1000s) our own leads, i’ve learned a thing or two…
Because lead gen companies suck so much (especially thumbtack), i decided to do my own FREE Leads for Life service (no kidding) … it’s in beta now, but open to registration here
Leads are obviously local, so they come when they come. Because they are free, we don’t call to verify (that’s on you) … but they will always stay free!
Our leads won’t be enough (at this point) to sustain you 100%, but as this grows, there will be more and more of them
Cheers to that ! Should never pay for something that does not pan out to good business!
Service.com can help drive some traffic later this year. We will be turning on our marketing as we ramp up our online market place!
Love this idea Georgia, what I think we lose sight of is that what homeowners spend most of their time doing is researching the process and what will be best for them. They don’t want your free inspection, they want your KNOWLEDGE.
If you offer them that in the form of videos, blog posts, guides, checklists, etc. they’ll come back to you when they’re ready to pick a roofer because you helped them get the knowledge they need to feel comfortable and they trust you.
Here’s a sample of something we use: http://roofermarketingsolutions.com/insurance-claim-guide/
If you’re good at graphic design, you can easily create your own.
solidconstructionleads@gmail.com we work exclusive for 1 company in any area and DO NOT resell any lead our service its close and personal its guaranteed excellent quality