Good Roofing Marketing Makes the Phone Ring (Not Your Reps Happy)

When we want to make marketing grow, we have to come up with an offer. The point of an offer is to compel people at a higher rate to click on our ad and convert on our landing page. That has to be an incentive of some kind. So in roofing, it's about saying the customer has to value the thing. So I'll tell you an example of one that went bad. We were selling EuroShield shingles before anybody heard of it. It was a Canadian product outta Calgary made from our old tires. Nobody really knew what EuroShield was yet. The thing is that EuroShield didn't have distribution. You literally had to drive to the factory in Calgary, 3 hours away. When we would drive there, we would have to pick it up. So we had a big, you know, F-350 dually with a big trailer so we could pick up the roof load and bring it back. Now, this is about $900 is what they would charge to truck it to us. We would do the delivery ourselves because we had the equipment. What we did was the biggest incentive we ever offered, the one that cost us the most money, was when we offered free delivery of your rubber roof. Now, the problem was is that homeowners didn't value it. Because they didn't know it cost $900. We could say it was a $900 value, but homeowners were, you know, this is 2020, 2019. People are getting Amazon Prime free 2-day shipping. Like, they don't inherently value shipping to their door. They don't think of the enormous logistical challenge of getting dog food delivered to their door, let alone delivering, you know, 8,000 pounds of rubber shingles delivered to their door. And so nobody clicked and nobody converted because nobody cared. Then I ran an ad for free drip edge and it followed an infographic and a video talking about how drip edge can add 5 years life to your roof, talking about how it prevents the water from creeping up and damaging the fascia board and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, like all the benefits of drip edge. And then we would retarget anybody who watched that video with an ad offering free drip edge. And that one slayed and we got like $90 leads from it. And every roofer who ever hears that I got $90 leads from offering free drip edge, Felt like I was a crook because they're like, drip edge, that's like $300. Yeah, but the customer sees it as 5 years more life to the roof. You can do free gutter cleaning with every inspection. You can have a gutter cleaning. You can charge for $89 gutter cleaning and then do the inspection on the roof and tell them when they need a new roof, knowing sometimes you're going to charge more for the gutter cleaning because it's a way bigger house, and sometimes you're not going to get a lead because the house is fine, but you're going to get $30 leads that make you $89, you're gonna make 20% gross profit on it. So you're not going to make any money, but you're not going to spend any money on your marketing either. If a storm has recently come by, you can offer a free tarp, then you charge to install the tarp and then lock up the contingency. You can do free drip edge, free metal valleys, free ventilation. Usually there's a pre-education component. You need a good video, but do free something. Free upgrade to Architectural Cat is another great offer. So Now that I've like brain dumped some good offers, I'll talk about a financing offer that will piss you off. Everybody's seen the Erie Home ads. New metal roof from $119 biweekly, right? And $119 is big, from is small, and biweekly is abbreviated and small. So it says new metal roof, $119. Or you've seen guys that do new roof for $6,000. Now it's not the numbers. Every market's different, right? Could be new roof, $16,000 would be a deal, right? If you're in Florida, the thing that everybody hates Or the thing that I would tell you is that as a general rule, you do not let the sales team run the marketing team. What do I mean by that? Good marketing pisses off the sales team. What do I mean by that? When I worked in the car industry, this is where I learned the fundamentals of advertising. And this is like 2014. Nissan was coming out with a new truck, the new Titan, and the new Titan had a diesel engine. It was a basic truck, had no features. So there's 3 trim letters. S, the SV, and the SL. SV was the one everybody wanted because nobody bought a Nissan Titan for this, for the luxury features in the SL. You bought a Nissan Titan because they're indestructible, and you got a lot of truck for the money at the SV because it was kind of everything but leather. You had a sunroof, you had heated seats, you had a backup camera, you had a heated steering wheel. You got good features for the money. And everybody who buys a truck wants a crew cab, right? The 4 big doors. Well, we had a Nissan Titan SV So the everything but leather truck, king cab, 4x4, and it was 2014, the year where they were like, didn't make a Titan. Anyways, important point was, is that in the newspaper you can only advertise a unit that you have in stock, and you have to tell the make, the model, the trim level, and the drivetrain. So you have to have Nissan Titan SV 4x4, which is what everybody wanted, but they didn't really want a king cab. They wanted a crew cab. But you didn't have to say whether it was King Cab or Crew Cab. And we showed a picture, and it was a picture of King Cab, but nobody notices that 'cause they go look at the picture, they go Nissan Titan, and they look below and they see which one it is. And ours was $24,998. Everything in newspaper is generally at cost 'cause you're trying to advertise a low price to make the phone ring. Like a Nissan Titan Crew Cab 4x4 cost price was $29,998, and the King Cab bottom dollar price was $24,998. Now here's the thing, we would get phone calls on this King Cab All the time. So whether it was an internet lead or a phone lead, we hated it. People all the time would be pissed off. And the worst was when they came into the dealership. Oh, I saw this truck in the paper. And then you pull it up. Oh, king cab. I wasted all my time, drove all the way here. So I went to my manager, the general manager. He runs the advertising, the sales, the service, the tire changes. He runs the whole dealership. And so I said, Ryan, I said, we've had this truck forever. The sales guys hate it. I hate it. It's such a wasted lead. You know, it makes our close rate go down. And he goes, Adam, this is the thing you need to learn, okay? All that's preamble so you learn this lesson. He says, Adam, my job's to make the phone ring. What do those customers want? Well, we want a crew cab. He's like, I got 13 crew cabs right over there. He's like, Adam, he says, my job's to make the phone ring. Your job's to sell them what they want. That is the last Nissan Titan King Cab in the country. No dealership can put the words Nissan Titan 4x4 SV in the newspaper for $24,998. Nobody, according to the law, can advertise a truck they don't have, and they can't advertise anything they haven't— they don't have in stock. So they— the only thing they can do is put Nissan Titan SV 4x4 crew cab, $29,998. That truck makes the phone ring. Your job is to sell them either a $25,000 truck that they want or to sell them a crew cab that they want. That's your job. And that's when I learned the sales department can't run the marketing department. And so when you're slow and you want to get leads and need to run a special, you're going to run a special on something that people either don't always necessarily want or don't always necessarily have. So what does that mean? Well, you could offer new metal roof or new roof. You take a 4/12 roof, you take— you go to your financing, you find the lowest fee on the longest term at the lowest rate. So 0% for 10 years. You know what I mean? So 120 payments and it's got a 16% fee. So you take a 4/12 roof, 2 sides, you know, 25 square, like small roof though, the smallest roof that's feasibly in your market. If you have a 17 square, 2-story, 1960s bungalow, that is fairly common. You take that roof, you take your longest term on your lowest rate with the lowest dealer fee from whatever finance provider you have, and you divide that with your payment and you go, If that's $123 biweekly, then you go new roof from $123 biweekly and you run ads, you run videos, you run image ads, you put that as a slide-down call to action on your website, you put that everywhere. And the sales team is going to complain and say that nobody gets that. Nobody gets that. We can't do that for anybody. And you're going to say, Billy, my job is to make the phone ring and your job is to sell them what they want. They want a $123 roof. It's like, well, they should move into a $123 house. You could do a 20-year payment at 7% interest, maybe get that, but you can't get it at 0% for 10 years when they live in a 35-square mansion that's got 8 12s and a turret and eyebrows and skirts and bay windows. They're not going to get that. But what do they want? They want a low payment, right? So get them a low payment. Well, no, they want a low price. Okay, well then sell them a cash price. Oh, if we don't have to get our financing department involved, we can actually do a lower price on cash. So the sales department's gonna have to do some work. If they don't want to do work, then go work at the post office because people will walk up and say, hi, I need 10 stamps. And then you're gonna go, okay, here's 10 stamps. But you know what? You're not gonna have this, hey, I sold 10 stamps, high five, high five, I'm the king of the world. Where do I get a sticker on my monthly awards? Do you have an award for me? You're not gonna get that because you work at the post office. People just walk up and buy it. But everybody who bought a roof would have rather bought a boat. Nobody bought a roof because they wanted to. They bought a roof because they had to. And when they have to, That means that the only reason they're going to be compelled to take action even a week or month early is if there's an offer incentive that promotes urgency, opportunity, or scarcity. So the opportunity is a low payment. The urgency is we're offering a discount on silver gray shingles, you know, or urgency— scarcity could be back when there's Timberline HD and HDZ. It could be a discount on HD shingles. Urgency could be get 2024 5 pricing in 2026 before March when they raise the prices. You could teach your customer that, hey, the roofing industry typically gets a bunch of purchases in March, so they raise the prices in April once the roofers have sold a bunch of roofs. And then we end up having to pay more because you already signed a deal. But right now in January, we can give you 2025 prices in 2026. So I hope that helped.