How to Turn 80 Cents into an $8k Roofing Job Using Facebook
I love Facebook. It’s definitely changed the way we interact and opened up some interesting opportunities for businesses. Google made it possible to pre qualify potential customers based on their searches. That’s the real reason Newspapers are dead-not because people get news online-but because why would an advertiser pay to carpet bomb a city with their message in print when google only charges you when somebody actually clicks on your ad. Similarly, why would you limit yourself to just what a person searches for when you can target them based on information they freely give out every day about every single aspect of their life and what they like?
What’s really cool is that since cost per click advertising like google and facebook is priced based on the amount of people bidding on those keywords-Facebook creates a unique scenario never before seen in business where the more honed in you get on your target audience, the less money you’re paying to get there because naturally the amount of competition decreases.
For example, the first thing I ever sold on the internet was a book about organic gardening. That search in google has a lot of competition and running ads for it would be expensive. Someone searching that in Google might be looking for fertilizer or any number of things. But in Facebook, I could target people who “liked” Whole Foods, Anthony Bourdain, Birkenstocks, etc.,etc. and have zero competition and pay pennies per click.
As you all know, hail storms are chaotic. One street can be torn up pretty bad and the other end of a large neighborhood can seem like nothing ever happened.
A lot of roofers steer clear of adwords advertising altogether. There’s usually more competition and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can end up losing your shirt. For example, to try and capitalize on the recent storms in Chicago, most end up paying $10 to $20 per click for leads that more often than not don’t even have any recent hail damage. This adds up really quick. Even worse, the real expense is the opportunity costs incurred by wasting resources and man hours on Inspection Appointments that produce zero return.
However, I know from my Hail-Track map that 1.75 ” hail fell in the zip code 60941
In the Facebook Ad Editor, I set 60941 as the target area. The ad will only be shown to facebook users living in this area.
As a general rule of thumb, I always set my bid at one half to two thirds of Facebook’s recommended bid, see if that brings in the volume of clicks I want and adjust upward as necessary. Another benefit of this approach is that with such low competition, half the recommended bid is usually sufficient to bring enough traffic. Since there’s little to no competition targeting just this zip code, or any other single zip code for that matter, I can pay .60 to .80 cents for clicks which I know are coming from people who live inside an area that was hit with hail big enough to warrant replacement by the insurance companies. This approach has additional benefits as well:
- The whole dynamic of the relationship with the customer is different. By default, anyone who comes into your sales funnel this way has voluntarily taken the action of clicking the ad. They want more information on whether they can possibly get their roof replaced through their insurance company, and are coming to you for assistance. If you’ve done much insurance work you know-the people in any neighborhood who come to you to see about an inspection are always much easier to deal with than ones you’ve had to pitch to.
- There’s a much higher perceived authority when someone finds your roofing company through facebook.
- Many states are passing laws that forbid roofers from doing things like offering to cover a homeowner’s deductible. Yo can, and should, offer incentives to customers for referrals to their friends and neighbors. There’s no better platform than Facebook to really make that happen.
