Transcription
If I had to start marketing a roofing company in 2026, this is exactly what I'd do. And the funny part is this isn't even hypothetical. I'm doing this right now. And I'm going to share with you everything I'm doing as somebody who's been marketing roofing companies for the last 10 years and now gets to do it for my own roofing company. I'm so excited to share with you.
Here's what I wouldn't do. I wouldn't just chase viral videos. I wouldn't try to do everything and do it for everyone, but I would choose what I want to be known for. And I'd choose a set of activities that I'm going to do consistently and I do them relentlessly. And I'm going to share with you what tactics specifically I'm doing right now. And it is aggressive.
Hi, I'm Tim from Hook Agency. And I just want to share with you everything that I've got going on right now that I'm doing for Owl Roofing. It is super fun and I'm not scared. I don't have this small mindset. Oh, everyone's going to steal my tactics and I'm not going to share them. That's not how I do things. I do things in a way that's open. I'm going to share with you everything that I do. I'm going to tell you if something fails. I've got some really good ideas for you and specifically from doing them in the trenches on my roofing company, Owl Roofing. Go check it out. All roofing.com. Follow us on social. You'll get to see everything we do as live. And I've got other people around the country saying, Tim, I'm just copying your stuff down here in whatever state. And I'm like, do it. I literally found the best stuff I possibly could and I'm doing it right now for my company.
So, first I want to share with you the framework that I think everyone should go at this with, which I'm calling the known for framework. And a lot of people mix this up. They want to make their roofing company targeted at everyone. And the first thing you need to do is embrace the target. And embracing the target means obviously, yes, we know what we want, which is leads, but also it's what people do we want specifically to be attracted to this marketing because if you want to be known by everyone, you're going to be known by no one.
So, first, what we did tactically is we chose an ideal customer demographic. This is classic marketing 101, but if you're not familiar, you want to choose a persona, somebody that you're targeting all your marketing at. And so, when you make a tagline or you make a design or you make swag or whatever it is, you've kind of got this person that you're thinking about in your head, and it should be a very specific person. In our case, we chose a 45-year-old female who is a working mom who has two.3 kids and she's in a higher-end neighborhood and she's got a husband that is also working and she could be single. It doesn't matter. The point is is this person has a lot on her plate and she's juggling it and we're going to make things easier for her by being overcommunicative and doing a three-step cleanup. And we're, you know, with our insurance specialist mindset, I'm going deep. But the point is is we've chosen this person, everything is going to be targeted at her. And you'll see how that plays out in the rest of the marketing. What do we want to be known for? And it's those three things I just said.
So once you choose who you want to be known to and then what you want to be known for, then we need to be consistently pushing that message out there with our content. And that's what we're doing right now. As far as tactics go, I want to I want you to know this video is going to have a bunch of tactics in it. I'm not telling you to run out and do exactly what we're doing. This is all based on that customer. Once we figure out who our ideal customer is and we want to market towards her a lot, the reason we chose that, just a lot of you might be wondering why did you choose this female? Well, 70% of the first reach out to every home service and roofing company right now is from the female, the the woman leading the household in a lot of ways. And she's doing the initial reach out. Yes, she might consult with her husband. Yes, we want this to be trusted. And no, we're not making everything super feminine in the traditional feminine sense, but we do want to think about the types of things she's got going on her mind. She's juggling a lot of projects. She just wants it to be simple. So that's why we chose her is because of the 70% of people or that initial reach out in the why did we choose 45? Well, from my point of view, this person is somebody who is a little bit more established. Maybe this is their second home or they're willing to at this point in their life invest a little bit in their home, not just the new homeowner. Traditionally, there's a little bit less money there on the earlier homeowner. So, just to be very explicit, I chose the 45-year-old female partly because they have money and ultimately like I don't want to be competing on price as much. So, that's why I chose that ideal demographic. Do I think I'm going to scare off the 58-year-old man or the 32y old female? No, I don't think so. I think if we can get laser target on this person, everything we can do is talking to her.
You've seen it and I've seen it. A lot of people are posting big checks on social media. maybe a Rolex, maybe a supercar. And while I think that could attract great salespeople, it scares off homeowners that want to get a value-priced home service for their money. So, how can we mirror community love and connection versus being prideful and have a bunch of ego on our social media? I'm not mad at you if you're rich. Point is partly to make money in your home service business, but I'm not asking you to sit there and hammer it and tell all the homeowners, "We're rich. We're rich. We're rich. I want you to figure out ways to be involved with the community. Can be sponsoring a sports team. It can be giving to a charity. Can be volunteering. It can be talking about the ways in which you're involved with the community on social media. The idea is to find things that your ideal customer cares about and to get involved and to be involved and to essentially shake hands and kiss babies and being around and giving and does matter where you're at in the country. What are the values of your area and your ideal customer and mirroring that in your marketing? Being involved with that in your marketing. That's all it is.
I'm not telling you to do it this specific way I'm doing. I'll give you a couple examples though that I'm doing it. Like we sponsored a gingerbread house making workshop at our local country club. We put up banners that said gingerbread roofs provided by Owl Roofing and then underneath in parenthesis it said we do real roofs too. And I'm going to look for other ways to make ourselves involved. I'm imagining, and I don't know for sure if I'm going to do this yet, but I think I'm going to do something where at Easter we go and give out, you know, 200 stuffed owls to all the kids at the egg hunt. The point is is I'm trying to, you know, get in front of my ideal customer and their families and give them something that that expresses the vibe I'm going for, which in my case, I'm kind of going for make it easy and comfortable and cozy. I'm going for cozy. That's what I want the brand vibe to be. So, what do you want to be known for? And who is the target? And how can we mirror community love and connection and create a feeling a feeling in our marketing that then can go into everything else we do?
Where did I get that stuffed owl idea? I rip off and duplicate what's working around the country. And I saw somebody else doing this. Gettle, which is an air conditioning company. They were giving out stuffed things and toys to their customers and it's worked and they they've scaled it up to a large quantity. I look at these large companies that have found something that works and are hammering it over and over again and I say, "Hey, how could I do that at my scale, at my size, at my point in the business?" A big thing is not only ripping off and duplicating, you know, what's getting visibility out there, but why do these bigger companies do things and trying to understand that and trying to take the principles for yourself and what is working to get customers? And so I've found a bunch of things that I've seen other companies do because I go out and do these tours at roofing companies and see what they're doing all around the country at, you know, home service businesses, HVAC companies. A lot of the stuff I'm just pulling in to my own company.
So, an example of that would be I went down to Trust Roofing in Florida and they had these things. There are boxes for extra shingles to give to the homeowner. It's a kind of a golden rule thing. A lot of people give an extra bundle of shingles to homeowners so that if there's a small repair that they at least have that color and that type of shingle right there for a small repair. It's just what they would like as a homeowner. So, they're doing it for other people. And in this case, they put them in these boxes that have the Trust Roofing logo on them. You can go back and see that in our tour. And they also have all the information about the shingles, the warranties, and then you can also put business cards on the outside. So, I decided we're going to do that at Owl Roofing. And doing that right now, we're setting all those up so that we're going to give those out every single time. And we're also marketing it on our homepage. So ripping off and duplicating what's working in other companies.
Another thing I saw and actually we just got a lead this morning from it which is so exciting. Every lead now I get for all roofing I'm like it's so exciting to get this first actually I'll just tell you all I've gotten three leads so far because this is so new. Um one the one that we got this morning is from a service called Ride the Wave. and ride the wave posts in Facebook groups for you like heartwarming stories or like things that you got going on in the community. They essentially do that. They join like hundreds of Facebook groups in your area and then they just post to at least one a day and then they give a little form essentially people can fill out and come in as a lead. So, somebody came in as a lead last night. I was like looking up their address and I'm so excited. So fun.
Another lead we got, one of the first, I think it was the first lead we got was from Roffl on our website. So, Rufle is a tool that allows for instant roof quotes on your website. And in like a minute or less, they can get a and I know a lot of you guys already have this on your website, but if you don't already, it's a great tool. It kind of lowers the barrier to entry for people that they they might just want to look at what the price is. They use this tool to look at what the price is and boom, you get their contact information. So you get it usually sooner than other people because if they're not offering price transparency then they're not going to get that lead. I think the other lead was just from a a field on our website and I actually you know I'm using Hook Agency as you can imagine for our marketing our website. Um, we're not started on PPC yet. We're just doing SEO kind of in the off season and then as spring hits we're going to do PBC. But we've got this beautiful hook agency website um allwhalloofing.com if you want to go check it out. And we've got pictures. I think the principle is like you see pictures of our families and you see see pictures of like happy people and it's positive and it's a good vibe and it's we're trying to have some emotion to the website. So I think if there's a principle there and the way we did that you can go see it now. There's humans and emotion and family and trying to make even like the call to action at the end of the page. If you scroll down there, you can see like there's this family with like kids on their shoulders and they're like having a good time. It's like the customer feeling relief. It's not about the roof. It's about trying to give them an emotion about your company and to help them imagine themselves in the same position as the people you're showing that are happy customers.
Next up, you'll see this if you go to our social media. A lot of people are doing commercials on their social media all the time. They're constantly talking about why you should work with us, why you should work with us. Well, you can do that from a different angle that actually is interesting on social media, which is answering the top seven questions that people have in the sales process. So, what I did is I talked to my founder who's been selling roofs for over 5 years and I said, "What are the top seven questions people ask in the sales process?" And then we shoot videos about those topics. And we've already started to put those out. And these are things you can do in the offseason. They might have it even before they talk to a roofing company, right? So the ability to make that content, turn it into a blog. You can turn all this content into five different types of content. You don't have to just do one video. You can make it into a YouTube video. It can make it into a real can make it You can take the transcript from YouTube, put it into a chat GPT, make it into a blog. You can make it into a Google business profile post. You can even send it out as a email or put it as a little Canva graphic with a quote from the video. You can do a lot of things with one piece of content. And I think that's something that we're trying to build into our roofing company right away from the beginning is how can we make one piece of content and turn it into five.
If you can't explain why your company is different in one sentence, the market won't do it for you. We need to make word of mouth easy for our company. And that means boiling down the three things you want to be remembered for. Why not 50, Tim? Well, because no one can remember 50 things. And it's hard to repeat it as much as you need to repeat it for people to remember it. So, the three things you want to be remembered for and then repeat them constantly and everywhere.
Now, the things that Owl Roofing wants to be remembered for. I kind of touched on this earlier in the video. that's so so important is we want to be overcommunicative. We have a three-step cleanup at the end of every single job and we're insurance specialists and we're going to constantly talk about those three things because they are a little different than other competitors and they're a little bit sticky. So why didn't I just say thorough on thorough cleanup? Well, I want to kind of have a process that I can specifically sell. Thorough cleanup doesn't say that. So, the three-step cleanup is why I'm doing that. But you got to find these words that are sticky and maybe something that the homeowner can remember. So, overcommunicative. Why that? Well, it almost might have a negative connotation, but that that's its edge. And it's finding a way to have a little bit of edge and stickiness with your words instead of just saying what everyone else is saying. So if they say quality and customer service and whatever else it is, right? It just goes in one ear and out the other. And if we can't boil it down into something sticky and memorable that other people aren't saying as much, it's really hard to get anyone to remember it.
One other thing that we're doing with our roofing company is what I call brandable chunks. So, we've come up with these kind of phrases that we're going to say over and over again. One is protect your nest. The podcast that we're doing with the two wives, which that's another big piece of our marketing is we're doing a podcast with the two wives where they're mostly having females on and the logo is everywhere on a backdrop behind them. So, that on the reels on social media, the logo is constantly there. And so they're going to have only people from our area in the northeast Twin Cities on the podcast and the logo is just going to be on the background and I'm trying to get as many logo impressions as I can. Another one that we have is who Owl Roofing and I'm making like yard signs and I'm going to put them everywhere that just say who huge to create curiosity and then smaller it says owl roofing and you could take issue with the idea but I'm trying to create curiosity in the marketing. Why is this yard sign just say who huge? I'm trying to create this curiosity. And then the wise choice is another brandable chunk. But we're creating these brandable chunks that kind of call back to the name owl. Owl roofing. And I've got, you know, an emoji, you know, the emoji for the owl. The ability to market with an emoji, the ability to market with very few words because who that's one word, but I want to own that in people's brains. I want anytime anyone hears who for them to think of owl roofing which is insane but it's aggressive and that's what I'm trying to do. I think the ideal long-term thing is that we have that for radio who owl roofing owl roofing and then they literally every time they hear who they can't stop thinking owl roofing and I almost want to be a little obnoxious with it for you. What's practical about that is can you come up with three to five brandable chunks in addition to your three unique value propositions that you can repeat constantly and everywhere. Brandable chunks. What could you make as brandable chunks? I think the old way is taglines. Oh, we have one tagline and we say it all the time. I think the new way brandable chunks. This way you have five options. So, we can do billboards and yard signs and radio with different taglines that kind of interchange and relate back to the brand. I think the ideal scenario is your brand is something iconic, specific, and when I say it, I can imagine it right away and I know exactly what it looks like. Owl does that. Hook does that. I usually have a Hook hat on. Hook does that. And like a lot of like animal brands do that, but there's a lot of other things that are like that. like hook is not an animal but it is specific and iconic and you immediately can think of it. That's probably the most important thing and we did think about our name for a long time.
Now once you have your three unique value propositions and your brandable chunks, we need to repeat them constantly and everywhere. What does that mean? We want to make weekly series that talk about this. We want to put it on the If you go to our Facebook and our Instagram, you can see the three bullet points of our unique value propositions. We're constantly I'm putting out yard signs all over town, all over the tight area that I serve just to get that like mini billboard strategy out there. I want brand impressions. Brand impressions come cheap. And right now I just this last week I went out and put out about 20 yard signs just to see what sticks. And then some of them go away and some of them stay. And then I figure out the principle about where yard signs stay. And now I'm going to go put the other 80 out. This Wednesday and Friday I'm going to go boop boop. It's a little I feel like a little bit like sneaky. It's kind of fun. Where can you put these yard signs where people are going to see them? I'm going to all I'm kind of mapping out the major commerce going on and I'm looking at the connection points to those and I'm like, "All right, I'm going to put them at the intersections. I'm going to put them coming out of our daycare. I'm going to put them coming out of our gym. I'm looking for places like that where people are there's tons of traffic and there's people going through and I'm putting those yard signs everywhere." Now, this is kind of a scrappy upstart move. I don't know if you're a super established company if you're going to feel super comfortable doing that because some people there's a chance somebody's going to review. I decided I'm willing to accept that consequence if somebody reviews me because I put out too many yard signs and I do think there's a certain amount of audacity that you need at the beginning of a company and ideally continue the audacity to continue to promote yourself in a extreme way.
Other ways to repeat yourself constantly and everywhere. Talking about at the end of stuff like end of podcasts, um talking about it whenever you're going and promoting in in you know print or um video or social trying to figure out ways to repeat those three things that we establish as unique value propositions. Like for instance on the ends of reels, the brandable chunk stuff like who owl roofing or you know protect your nest or whatever it is like take your brandable chunks put them at the end of reels or you know put them at the in the middle of videos. That's what I'm doing essentially. I'm taking the like branded chunks brandable chunks and then I'm putting them at the be after the first 20 seconds of a video and then at the end of videos. So those are just some ways that you could kind of repeat these constantly and everywhere. We're trying to get them stuck in people's heads. The funny part is now my daughter whenever she sees an owl in like a book or something, she'll be like owl roofing.
Why does all this stuff work? Or why do I think a lot of this stuff is going to work? Well, it's psychology, not hacks. And people do business with people they know, like, and trust. So, how are you creating that sense of trust with your ideal customer and not chasing shortcuts or, you know, waiting to feel ready? I've chosen a 100,000 people that I want to be famous with on the northeast side of the cities and I'm going to hammer them. And no matter what, if somebody wants to compete with me, they can't just throw up a Google ad or a landing page to try to compete with me. they would have to hammer those people, those 100,000 people as many times as I'm going to, which is going to be very hard to do. We want to focus on one type of homeowner. This same conversation, the same messaging, and make it clear and obvious and consistent. This is how you become the obvious choice. This is how you get referrals without asking. And this is how you charge premium prices. We want to be a premium high-end brand in our market. and not just compete with the lowest end stuff. Stop chasing homeowners that don't understand your value. Start building a local brand that's trusted, known, and liked by being consistent and relentless in a smaller area.
What part of this framework was the most helpful to you? Was targeting the biggest thing? Was positioning or consistency the biggest thing? If something was helpful to you about this video, can you comment below? And if you'd like to work with Hook Agency, just click the link in the description. It's hookaggency.comyoutube-deal and you'll get $1,000 off and we'd love to work with you. We have 170 plus five-star reviews. We're super grateful for our clients. We love serving this industry and we're diving in even deeper to share with you all the things that are working at Owl Roofing as we take this next adventure. I hope it's useful for you guys and I'm going to be documenting the journey. Grateful for any support and positivity and I'm rooting for you guys. See you. They're so thorough with every detail of the website. Working with Hook, the design is probably 50x better than any other design I've ever had. Their team is super communicative and I mean this genuinely. Um, I'm happy to pay you guys to to work with us. It's been a tremendous experience.