If you own a roofing company, then by this point, you should know that storm chasing isn't enough to sustain long-term growth, to make you the biggest player in your area. You need a better plan than that. On the flip side, though, if you start advertising to everyone all the time, you might find yourself in the poor house faster than Taco Bell will send you to the bathroom. What you need to do is combine strategic pre-storm season advertising with smart, hyper-local advertising in storm affected areas. And this is how you do it.
Prepare BEFORE the Storm Season
First let's talk about pre-storm season. You need to start building your name locally and smart ways. My recommendation is actually make the whole plan hyper-local. Pick the strategic neighborhoods in your area where, you can have the biggest bang for your insurance buck for your company.
And once you determine what those neighborhoods are, you need to find the schools associated with those neighborhoods and sponsor school events. You also want to sponsor charities in those areas. Find sort of charity events that have visible participation. So it could be like a walk for cancer or things like that. Get your name out into those local communities. Ahead of time.
The next thing you need to do is make sure that your website is optimized for local SEO. This requires you having specific localized landing pages. And finally, this is a big one that some companies seem to forget. You need to triple check your NAP. And when I talk about your nap, we're not talking about sleeping. We're talking about your name, your address, and your phone number. If your business has been around for more than a year or two. And if you've changed your phone number or location, there's a good chance that there are records out on the internet that have the old address and phone number. You want to get those cleaned up because if you don't, it can affect your performance on the internet. And those are things you can do before storm season.
Right Before and Right After Storms Hit
Storm season varies area to area and isn't always predictable. Some of the following will need to be done close to when you think storms are hitting. Others, right afterwards. Let's dive deeper.
Billboards: The Constant Drip
First things first. You don't have to run one year round. But if you have a time period storms are more likely to hit, go ahead and get a billboard that affects the neighborhoods you selected earlier. Find the billboards that have traffic going AWAY from that neighborhood TO the highly trafficked business areas. You want to catch them on the way to work. If you can afford it, get one in each direction.
Mailers: The Best First Response to Storms
Now, the next thing you want to consider is to get high performance mailers. Here's the thing. There's a lot of people out there that rightly suggest getting mailers to neighborhoods, but what they don't really discuss is how to get high performance mailers. I'm going to have a video linked around here, somewhere, click on that, and we'll discuss exactly what that means, but the key is make sure there's a great call to action on those mailers.
Most people waste money on mailers because they don't have a solid call to action. And that should be enough to cover it in this video.
Geo-Targeted Ads: The 1-2 Punch with Mailers
The next thing you need to do is have geo targeted ads. Geo-targeted ads where you select the neighborhoods and say, only run my ads here. In fact. If this neighborhood has been affected by a storm, it makes sense to actually bid more than normal because these houses need roofs. And if you can outbid your competition to be the first one in front of their eyeballs. It's worth your money.
The next thing to consider is that when you're running these ads online, don't forget the power of video ads. Well done video ads can make all the difference. Too much to go into with this particular video, but just realize that video ads are under appreciated, especially by service companies of all stripes.
Door Hangers: The Classic
Door hangers are the classic method that a lot of companies use. So keep on doing it just don't rely on it as your sole method to reach these neighborhoods. Do a neighborhood blitz, hit them from every single angle possible. Why? Because we found it used to be about seven points of contact before someone made a decision. Nowadays it's between 12 and 20 points of contact are required by someone before they will make a purchasing decision with you. Make sure you quickly do that. In fact, that's why the first tactic I recommend is a billboard. Why? Because it gives you lots of repetitions in front of your potential customers before you hit them with that sales conversation.
Making the Most of All This
Finally, here's a few keys to make success on all of this.
Nail Your Offer
One have a smart offer. Here's the thing. Too often, it's easy to go in and say, Hey, hire us to replace your roof. That's cool. But that doesn't necessarily get the sales conversation started. Offer free inspections. Now here's irony. You probably are doing it anyway. That's fine. Just make that the framing of the offer that you're putting on the mailer that you're putting on that digital ad that you're running in geo located ad. Use something like that, get the conversation started, offer them something that they want to respond to not just to jump to the sales conversation.
Keep It Consistent
And related to that is the fact that you want to maintain consistency across all your advertising. If you can keep some sort of visual image or saying in the billboard. The mailer. The digital ad the hanger that's going to help reinforce and magnify every point of contact you have through advertising with your soon to be customers.
Have a Follow-up System
The third thing you need to get the most out of all of his ad dollars that you're going to spend is you have to have a solid top tier follow-up nurture system. When they reach out to you, you need to be able to fall on quickly with email. With text messages, right? And phone calls of course, is given with your sales team. But too often, we don't leverage the power of automated email and text messaging to keep that lead warm, to keep them in that sales mindset until your salespeople can close the deal.
Don't Forget Retargeting
And finally don't forget to use retargeting. Too often people will spend money on digital ads and not realize that you should have a whole system where you retarget people who engage with your ads. Because again, going back to what I said earlier, it takes between 12 and 20 points of contact. Before they're ready to make that purchasing decision. And retargeting is one of the cheapest ways to push that person over the finish line to talk to you.
In the meantime, if you have any questions about this as this is confusing, you need some blanks filled in on how all this works. Go ahead and click this link to book a time free consult with me.