Transcription
Roofing companies have pretty strong opinions about marketing agencies. And most of the time, let's face it, it's not very positive. And honestly, I get it because I hear stories like this every single day from roofing company owners.
So, here is a very typical situation. Maybe this resonates with you. Roofing company owner, great at what they do, earnestly starts a business, wearing 14 hats, working 12 hours a day, knows they need to do marketing and figure out marketing, but also knows that he doesn't have the time, the interest, the knowledge, the capability on how to do all the marketing himself. So, he sees a marketing agency. Great. I can pay this marketing agency. They can run my marketing. They can generate leads for me. I can sell 90% of jobs. Sure, everyone says that, right? But I can sell, I can build, I can collect, I can build a great roofing company if I just have that marketing piece done for me.
So, they start doing their research hopefully and start talking to some marketing agencies and they see the polished slide deck and the impressive case studies and the fancy dashboards and the charts that go up and to the right and they hear the promises of better visibility, getting highly ranked in the search engines, SEO and AI optimizations, Google ads, Facebook ads, as many as you can handle. And everything sounds great. That's the solution the roofing company owner has been looking for. So they sign that contract and they're committed for something like two grand a month, three grand, five grand, 10 grand a month inside that contract.
Then what happens? Well, the first few months there's a lot of activity. There's a lot of excitement going on. There's new landing pages, maybe a new website, some ads being launched. There's a lot of good promise and excitement. But then things start to get a little foggy and the roofing company owner is like scratching her head like, "Where are all the leads? What are you guys actually doing? Why aren't I seeing any results like you promised?" You might go into that monthly marketing dashboard or report that the agency is sending and seeing things like impressions and clicks and traffic, but nothing that really ties into actual revenue, like actual dollars and cents.
Fast forward 6 months later and not much has changed. There's little results, little accountability, and very few answers. And the owner's like, "Man, did I just light a whole bunch of money on fire?" And maybe that cycle repeats. I mean, normally I talk to roofing company owners and they're like, "Yeah, I've worked with like two or three or five different agencies kind of hopping around hoping that the next one is the solution." And man, the frustration is real. I totally get it. Not only are you lighting money on fire, not only are you wasting time, but the bigger factor is that you're missing out on that opportunity to grow your business going months or even years without having good marketing in place. You're missing out on millions and millions of dollars in potential business that you could have had if you had good marketing working for you.
So, as always, I want to educate you so that you are in a position of strength to make great decisions for your company as a responsible and earnest business owner. I'm going to walk through five things that marketing agencies don't want to tell you so that you can understand how to make those smart decisions. And by the end, you're going to understand pretty clearly how you can actually spend less money on marketing and drive more revenue and profit.
So, I know that you're skeptical of marketing, but here's the thing that most people don't talk about. It's not always the agency's fault. Many times, roofing companies try to fully outsource marketing without really understanding how marketing works. And I always use the analogy of bookkeeping or a CFO service. If I as a business owner don't understand the basic financials of my business and I hand everything over to a bookkeeper or a CFO and say, "Hey, just do the money stuff, right? And let me know how much I made at the end of the year." Well, I'm not going to get great results and there's a good chance that I might get taken advantage of because I don't understand the finances of my business, right? So, that would be silly if I did that. Well, that's exactly what most roofing companies do with their marketing. And so at at least a basic fundamental level, you need to understand how marketing works so that you can determine and you can judge what is a good marketing agency from a bad one. And also, as I'll get into in a little bit, how you can actually take control of your marketing and bring some of it in house so that you can grow with more consistency and predictability and less risk.
So let me share the five things that most marketing agencies will never want you to know.
Number one, most marketing agencies have limited time. Most agencies have dozens, if not hundreds of clients. And regardless if you're paying 2 grand a month or 5 grand a month or even 10 grand a month, there's only a certain fixed number of hours that they can dedicate to your account every single month. So take an average monthly marketing retainer of just say like five grand a month, right? Even for that, there's only about five to 10 max hours that they're going to be able to dedicate to your account every month just because they have so many other clients to manage. So, think about that. Even if it's 5 to 10 hours a month, that's 1 to two hours a week basically that you're getting. And that is not nearly enough time for them to dive deep on your business and help you create the strategy and help you create the content and your marketing and be fanatical about optimizing your ads and your marketing which is what's required in today's noisy and competitive world. So most agencies want to build scalable models and they operate like factories and they take you as a client. They plug you in and you have the same ads and content and marketing strategy as all their other clients. And maybe you've experienced that where you have the same cookie cutter website and the same social media content as the other clients of that marketing agency. And so the big mindset thing that I want to communicate here is even if you are paying good money and you're getting 5 to 10 hours, even if you're getting 10 to 20 hours a month of their time, contrast that to the roofing company in your local market that has a full-time in-house marketing manager that's dedicating 40 hours a week to their marketing. So there's 160 hours a month that that competitor is getting for marketing and you're getting 5 to 10 or maybe 20 hours if you're lucky every single month. So when you look at it that way in just a time invested perspective, it makes sense that the company with a well-trained in-house marketing manager is going to be able to gobble up market share and and really just win. And often times you're not paying any more money to have that in-house marketing expert than you are to an agency. A lot of times you're actually saving money because most marketing agencies are blowing through your budget and you have no clue what's going on anyway.
Number two, most marketing agencies are specialists, but they sell themselves as everything as a turnkey solution. So really, most marketing agencies might be good at a couple of things like they're good at the Google stuff or they're good at meta or they're good at direct mail or something like that. It's very rare that you have a full-service kind of old school agency of record, but most agencies when they pitch their prospects, when they pitch you, they kind of sell themselves as, "Yeah, we're the only thing. We're the Swiss Army knife. We're the only thing that you're ever going to need. We're going to help you create your brand. We're going to help you create your strategy. We'll do the Google stuff. We'll do the Facebook stuff. We'll do the direct mail stuff. We'll do the tracking. We'll do the technology. We'll do the AI. We'll do all the things. Mr. or Mrs. Roofing Company owner, you don't need to worry about a thing. It's going to be very easy." So, when I put it like that, you can probably see how no real marketing agency can do all of those things. And so, there's naturally going to be gaps in your marketing strategy. And today, I'm recording this in 2026, you can no longer just rely on a single channel like the good old days where you could just dominate Google or dominate Facebook or whatever it might be. Now, it's more complex. There's more competitors than ever before. There's AI, there's more technology, there's private equity companies. We've got to have a kind of multi-faceted approach to our marketing. It can't just be single channel.
Truth number three, your account manager at the agency has never owned or been a leader in a business. Now, they might be super smart and super ambitious and know a lot more than you about marketing, but they've never run payroll, hired employees, managed crews, worried about cash flow. And that perspective really matters because as a roofing company owner, everything you do in your business regarding marketing relates to hiring and overhead and revenue and profit and all of those things. Marketing could not exist in a vacuum. As of this recording, most of our client-facing team members at Contractor Dynamics, whether account managers, marketing coaches, marketing trainers, have previously owned their own businesses. So they understand that owner mentality of what the owner needs to see in terms of results and ROI and progress and real data and accountability and transparency in order to build that relationship that is mutually successful. So not in all cases but many cases this this is what I'm about to paint is the truth. Like you're hiring a marketing agency and they're assigning an account manager to you who's probably has a couple of years of experience and that's you know someone that's younger and is really helping you to drive a significant lever in your business which is marketing. There's a little bit of a disconnect there. Just something to be aware of.
Truth number four, this is something that no one wants to tell you and honestly I was a little bit hesitant to talk about this for a few years cuz it really doesn't sell. But the truth is that marketing is hard. Marketing is hard. Marketing is complex and marketing takes time. Now, like I said, I've been doing this for 13 years. Contractor Dynamics started in 2013. Back in 2015, 16, 17, like running Google ads, Facebook ads, blog posts. It was all pretty easy. You got something working pretty well. You wanted more of it. You just put more money into it and you got more out of it. That was pretty cool. Today things are wildly different for many different reasons. I don't want to go into them in depth, but we have consumer behavior has shifted. We are doing more of our research. The algorithms have shifted. There's AI. There's technology. There's more noise in our world than ever before. There are more roofing companies in every market than ever before. There's private equity with big money coming into the industry. So, we have all these different factors which makes marketing more complex today. And that might sound intimidating and I don't want to intimidate you. However, the obstacle is the way because it is harder. Most roofing companies have not adapted and they're not putting in the work to try to figure it out. They are still being lazy. I can tell you that with conviction after working with over 500 roofing companies and working with a hundred right now, I would say probably one in 250 roofing companies have marketing like figured out. And that might be actually pretty generous. It might be one in 300 or 400. I don't even know. But not many companies have this figured out. So I don't want to intimidate you. I want to highlight the opportunity for you to go all in on this and achieve all your goals. So marketing requires a strategy, multiple channels and testing and patience and optimization on a weekly basis. So for example, the roofing companies that we're training on their marketing, we train them to optimize their marketing every week and keep a marketing scorecard and have a marketing meeting every week. And then for the companies that we're running ads for, we're in their ad accounts at least on a weekly basis making optimizations and encouraging them to create new content and creatives and things like that. So, we're constantly testing and trying new things and adjusting the strategy. But still, most marketing agencies, they want to sell you this thing. They know that most roofing company owners don't want to do much work. No offense. You just want to kind of press a button and have all the leads flowing into your business. And agencies know that. So, they sell you that. Sign up now. Sign the contract. Pay monthly and you'll start seeing leads coming in within 30 days or so. The reality is, as I just went through, it does not work that way anymore.
Truth number five, you need to lead your marketing. This is the most important one. The most successful roofing companies do not fully outsource their marketing. They own it just like they own their sales process and system. So, the owner or someone on the leadership team or the in-house marketing person is the one that sets the vision. They create the strategy. They're reviewing the budget and reviewing progress and helping to strategize on an ongoing basis and make the necessary adjustments. Marketing agencies can support the execution, but you as a roofing company owner leader have to own the strategy and the leadership of marketing in-house. The reality is that besides the amount of time that you're going to be able to dedicate in-house that I already talked about, no one is going to care more about your business and your people and your customers and your market and your success than you and your team inside your company. This truth number five is one of the most important things that we ever talk about here at Contractor Dynamics. If you came to me and said, "Hey Joe, you guys have been in the industry for over a decade. You worked with all these companies. You travel around the country and speak at all these industry events every single month. What kind of patterns do you see in terms of the successful roofing companies that really own their market and continue to grow year after year and then the other ones that just kind of struggle year after year?" One of those things that successful companies have in common, this is not just roofing, this is any industry, is that they own their marketing in-house. Like they have someone in house that is in charge of their marketing. Sure, they might hire agencies to pour fuel on that fire and do some of the technical things because it's really hard to be able to do everything in house, but they have ownership and control of their marketing in-house. That is one of the biggest determining factors in a roofing company's success. So, if you've got someone else in your company, another leader, a co-owner, a partner, an in-house marketing manager, a leadership team, they need to hear this message as well. So share this video, share this podcast with them. So you guys can collaborate on this together cuz I don't want to see you getting taken advantage of by marketing agencies because you really don't understand marketing and there's a lot of unethical agencies out there. I want you to win, which is why you could probably see my passion right now.
So to sum it all up, although most marketing agencies are pretty bad and many are actually unethical, marketing agencies are not always the problem. Blindly outsourcing marketing is the problem. And the companies that win with marketing, they understand it, they lead it, and they work with partners collaboratively. If you want help building out a real marketing system inside your roofing company, check out Contractor Dynamics at the link below. This is what we do all day, every day. We help our clients build and run their own marketing. And if you don't have that in-house marketing person and you would like that in-house marketing person, we can help you to recruit, hire, onboard, and train that person so they are a full-time driver of growth for your business and you never have to depend on a marketing agency or a lead aggregator ever again. So again, if you'd like to learn more about what we do, how we might be able to support your growth, check out the link below.