Marketing for roofing companies, without waiting for the next storm

Storm work is real money and a terrible business to depend on. Here is what a roofing pipeline looks like when it does not need the weather.

What the search behaviour actually looks like

After a storm, every roofer in the county is bidding on the same searches on the same afternoon, and the click price reflects it. Between storms, almost nobody is searching at all.

Roofing has an unusually wide spread — a repair and a full replacement differ by more than an order of magnitude. Averaging them into one cost-per-lead figure hides whichever one is actually paying for the business.

The arithmetic, with your numbers

Say a customer is worth $11,000 over twelve months — weighted across repairs and replacements — and you close 18% of the leads you get. Then:

That last figure is the one that settles every argument about whether advertising is expensive. If leads cost you a fraction of it, the correct response is to buy more of them, not to negotiate the price down. If they cost more than it, no amount of bidding strategy fixes that — the close rate or the customer value has to move first.

Run it with your own numbers: how to work out what a lead should cost you, and what that means for a monthly budget.

Which channel does the work here

Google after a storm is the most expensive auction in the trade, because every roofer within sixty miles is in it on the same morning with the same budget. That week you are buying clicks at their peak price against your most motivated competitors. Meta between storms costs a fraction of it and reaches the same roofs — the difference is that you are talking to the homeowner before the queue forms rather than inside it.

The general version of this question, and how to tell which one you need: Google Ads or Facebook Ads for a service business.

Timing

Demand spikes with weather and with the weeks before winter. The pipeline that survives a mild year is the one built during the quiet months, when a homeowner is thinking about a roof that is fifteen years old rather than one that is currently leaking.

What we hear from roofing companies

"We do fine off storm work."

Until a quiet year. Storm work is revenue that arrives on someone else's schedule, and crews you cannot keep between events are crews you have to rehire.

"Door knocking still works for us."

It does, and it does not scale past the hours in a day. The point of advertising is not to replace it but to make sure the door being knocked on is one that already recognises the name.

"Homeowners just want the cheapest quote."

They want the safest decision, and price is the only signal available when everything else looks identical. Give them a second signal and the cheapest quote stops winning automatically.

What we would build

An offer that works when nothing has blown off: an inspection or a maintenance plan that gives a homeowner a reason to call you in a quiet month. That is what turns roofing from a business that waits for weather into one with a pipeline. Alongside it, the response system — after a storm the job goes to whoever gets on the roof first, not whoever is best.

Around it, the rest of the same build: the offer, the page it lands on, the filter that stops you quoting people who will never buy, the follow-up that reaches them in minutes rather than hours, the tracking that tells you which ad produced which job — and then the campaigns. All of it in month one, and we do not charge for that month.

Your offer, your page, your follow-up and your ads — built and run free for 30 days. You pay Google and Meta directly and never pay us. All we ask back is an honest review. Needs $2,000 a month for the platforms. Leave a number and we’ll call you back.

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