Roofing lead generation has been a challenge for both new and experienced roofers. With digital marketing advancing faster every year, roofing companies need to get on board with web advertising if they want to continue securing new leads. Many roofing businesses opt for the traditional Google PPC campaign and organic SEO and that’s certainly a viable strategy, but we’d like you to consider an alternative route to roofing lead generation — sales funnels driven primarily by social media ads.
Google Ads is one of the most popular forms of digital marketing used today and very few online marketing campaigns don’t include pay-per-click. PPC is a solid part of any digital marketing campaign and ad spend should reflect company size/annual profit. Despite having carved out a permanent place in lead generation efforts, Google Ads may not be the most effective way, especially for roofing companies.
Google Ads tend to have a lower click-through rate, or CTR, than other forms of advertising, like social media or even banner ads on other websites. Web users have come to expect the sponsored ads at the top of their search engine results, and they know the company paid for that top spot. They may scroll down to the organic search results — making good SEO more important than ever.
The way that PPC ads work is you set a budget and Google displays your ads for certain keywords until you’ve reached your spend limit. However, this means that you get charged each time a person clicks on your ads. The cost is reasonable for most markets, although some markets like insurance and legal can get expensive. For example, Wordstream reports that the most expensive keyword in Google AdWords is “insurance,“ which is upwards of $50 per click. Loans are the second most expensive AdWords keyword, at $44 per click. Since many roofing companies work with insurance companies to replace damaged roofs or help customers get loans to cover roofing costs, the cost of Google Ads can add up fast. This makes it important to design PPC campaigns to capture high-quality leads, versus focusing largely on the quantity of leads.
Google Ads sometimes produces lower quality roofing leads than other forms of advertising. This is because people in varying stages of the buyer’s journey click on the ads. They may only be looking for information or a quick answer to a question, and they may not necessarily be ready to make a purchase. This means that you have less overall control over when and at what stage of the buyer’s journey potential customers see your marketing assets, which can result in a higher bounce rate and fewer good leads.
Although Google Ads are great at getting you to the top of search results with minimal effort, they lack the ability to collect information on a potential customer. Google Ads are not able to collect email addresses, names, or phone numbers. When you use Google Ads alone, this can make it more difficult to flesh out other important parts of your digital marketing efforts, such as email drip campaigns.
Sales funnels nurture leads throughout the process of making a buying decision, and they collect information that allows you to get back in touch with the people visiting your funnel, making it an excellent addition to your web marketing campaigns.
Sales funnels capture the name, email address, telephone number, and other important pieces of information that can help you build processes that allow you to get in touch with potential leads that didn’t follow through. You can customize the information that is collected, so you can add company name, address, best time to call, and other data. Note, however, that less is more when it comes to form fields for conversion optimization.
Sales funnels allow you to retain the leads that you’ve worked so hard to get and even if they don’t make a buying decision right away, you can nurture them through different types of marketing, such as email marketing. You can create an automated campaign that sends promotions, information about products and services, the latest blog content, and more to the emails of leads who haven’t purchased yet. This enables you to address the needs of your potential customers — is there anything preventing them from making a buying decision? The answer may surprise you.
Although social media platforms are free for users, if businesses want to make any impact at all, it’s pay to play. While some people may scoff at paid social media advertising, such as Facebook ads, but the fact is that these channels offer impressive returns on investment and are easy to use with granular audience targeting that you may not get on other advertising platforms. Here’s what you need to know about using Facebook ads to promote your roofing company’s sales funnels.
Facebook ads have surprising granularity. You can market to your target demographic down to a handful of miles within a specific location, and even target only people who have certain interests. For example, it doesn’t do any good to market a brand of dog food on a website about cat care, because the people there aren’t looking for that product. Roofing ads, on the other hand, can be targeted to older males who are homeowners or who have an interest in home repair or renovation.
Facebook is largely a visual platform, meaning that ads there have the potential to make a much larger impact on consumers than the average small banner ad or PPC ad. Today’s consumers don’t want to read a lot of text — they respond best to high-color, high-quality images and video that let them know what they can expect in a product or service. You can utilize Facebook’s visual platform to your advantage when you use top-quality imaging in your marketing materials.
A recent exercise conducted by The Next Web broke down how many social reactions were garnered with just a $5 per day Facebook ad budget. A $5 spend resulted in 9 page likes per day, 1 homepage click per day, and 787 new people reached within the target market. There are few other types of advertising that have this amount of return for such a small initial spend. You can customize your Facebook ad spend and create unique campaigns designed to reach your target audience when they’re most likely to be online.
Roofing lead generation can sometimes be difficult without the right processes in place. By developing a strategic sales funnel and using optimally targeted Facebook ads along with your other digital marketing campaigns like organic SEO and PPC, you can obtain leads that are exactly where you want them in the buyer’s journey. At Tactical SEO Consulting, we are passionate about making sure that lead generation efforts are focused on quality leads, and we’ve developed proven techniques to drive leads through a strategically designed sales funnel to maximize the potential that users will make a buying decision. If not, you have all the information you need to continue reaching out to interested users who haven’t made a decision to purchase yet.
Contact us today for more information to learn more about how to utilize sales funnels and paid Facebook ads to generate roofing leads. Call now at [number] and speak with one of our digital marketing experts.
