Nine weeks to fill the fall schedule, starting today
Listen to this post (6:27)
The strongest retail roofing stretch runs mid September to late November. Here is the 30 day plan: the storm list, old proposals, and where to move budget.
It is the first week of September. In most of the country the strongest retail replacement window of the year opens in about ten days and is effectively over by Thanksgiving. After that you get half of December and then the phone goes quiet until March.
Nine or ten good weeks. Companies that fill them are not the ones advertising hardest in October. They are the ones doing unglamorous list work in the first two weeks of September, while everyone else is still finishing summer jobs.
Here is the 30 day version.
Week one: the proposals that never closed
Your best list is one you already paid for. Pull every proposal from the last 24 months that did not sign, plus every storm inspection where the homeowner decided to wait.
These people did not say no. They said not yet, and the reason they gave was almost always money, a spouse, or waiting on a carrier. September changes the pressure on all three, because winter is a deadline that does not need to be invented.
Send one text, from a local number, in small batches so it does not read as a blast:
"Hi [name], this is Dave at [company]. I looked at your roof in April and you decided to hold off. We are building the fall schedule now and the last weeks before the weather turns fill up first. Want me to come back out and see whether it made it through the summer? No charge either way."
Expect somewhere between one in eight and one in five to reply on a list of quoted proposals. On a list of 150, that is 20 to 30 conversations with people who already have your number and your price in a folder. At roofing tickets, three signings pays for the entire quarter's marketing.
Text the non-responders once, ten days later, and then stop.
Week two: work the storm addresses
If you canvassed a neighborhood after hail in the spring, you have a list of addresses where a large number of homeowners were told they had damage and did nothing about it. Some had claims denied. Some got a check and spent it. Some never filed.
That list is worth more in September than it was in June, because a marginal roof that survived the summer is not going to survive January, and because the out-of-state trucks left months ago.
Door hanger or postcard, addressed to the street rather than to individuals: "We inspected several roofs on Willow Bend in April. If yours has not been looked at since the May storm, we are back in the neighborhood on Thursday and inspections are free." Name the street. That is the entire trick.
Week three: move the ad budget to the terms that convert now
Search behavior shifts in the fall. Leak and repair searches climb with the first serious rain, and replacement searches get more urgent because the homeowner is thinking about snow.
Three adjustments worth making this week:
Raise budgets on the replacement campaign and on repair and leak terms. Cut anything aimed at summer discretionary work.
Turn the storm campaign off if there has been no event. It should be paused and ready, not running on hope. The structure is in the Google Ads guide.
Put financing into the ad copy and onto the landing page. A homeowner in September is doing the arithmetic on Christmas at the same time she is looking at your quote, and a monthly number changes the answer. The good-better-best structure that carries it is in the pricing guide.
On Meta, shoot new creative this week. A drone flyover of a roof you replaced in the last month, narrated, aimed at the surrounding zip codes. Summer creative is fatigued by now and you will feel it in cost per lead.
Week four: make sure the calls get answered
The busiest weeks of your year are also when the owner is least likely to answer the phone, because he is on a roof or at a kitchen table.
Before the rush starts, confirm three things are actually working. Missed-call text-back fires within seconds. Somebody is reading the web form at 8 p.m. and not at 9 a.m. Your Google profile lists Saturday hours, since Saturday morning is when homeowners walk the property and notice the missing shingles.
Across 102,385 roofing listings, only 42.8% show Saturday hours and 27.2% list no hours at all. Google shows closed in red, and she calls the next name. Run your own numbers through the calculator if you want to know what that costs at your average job value, and the sequence for working the leads is in the follow-up guide.
What not to do in the next 30 days
Do not start a website rebuild now. Do it in January, when you have the time and the ad money is cheap anyway.
Do not launch a brand new ad channel in the middle of your best quarter. Learning curves cost money and this is the worst nine weeks of the year to be paying tuition.
Do not stop asking for reviews because you are busy. The median roofing company has 13 reviews, and the fall roofs you complete this quarter are the easiest fifteen you will ever collect. The reviews guide has the driveway script.
The one thing, if you only do one
Text the old proposals. It costs nothing, it takes an afternoon, and it is the highest-return hour in roofing marketing that nobody bothers with.
If you would rather have the list work, the ads and the follow-up run for you, any one service is free for 14 days with no card through the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175.