Avoid Budget Blunders: Track Where Your Roofing Leads Are Coming From

14 MIN READ
Why roofers need lead tracking

When a new lead signs up for your email newsletter or follows you on Facebook, it’s rarely by coincidence. Chances are, you’ve captivated that lead with your great programmatic campaign, SEO efforts, or Facebook ads—and now they want to know more about your roofing company. Sure, it’s easy to get caught up with the excitement of new leads, but your hard work doesn’t end there. 

After all, you’ve spent countless hours building brand awareness and generating new leads. You’ve spent thousands on PPC campaigns, a brand new website, and local SEO, but without the right data, it’s going to be difficult to figure out which marketing strategies are working. If you don’t know which arms of your marketing campaign are successfully generating new leads, how are you going to make the most of your marketing budget? 

“Attribution systems, a way to track sales all the way back to where the lead came from, are something that you absolutely want to have in place,” says John J. Antognoli, Senior Client Advisor at Company 119. “You want a solution that tracks calls, something that tracks how people got to your site, and something that tracks every lead you are working on.”

When you track where your roofing leads come from, you can build even more strategic, powerful marketing campaigns in the future. You’ll be able to figure out what’s working (and what’s not), tweak your campaigns as needed, and watch a steady stream of leads flow in. The best part? You won’t have to worry about flushing your marketing budget down the drain or wasting your marketing efforts on leads that won’t convert. Here’s how to track leads so you always know where roofing leads are coming from.

 


 

How to Track Leads: Why Roofers Need Lead Tracking

If there’s anything we’ve learned from the pandemic, it’s to make sure you know exactly what’s going on in your company. In such a saturated, value-oriented market, more roofing companies are fighting for the attention of local homeowners than ever. You need to stand out from the crowd so you can be there when they need you—but that’s not going to happen without a compelling marketing campaign. So, what can you do?

To maximize your marketing campaigns, you need to hold a microscope up to your lead generation strategy and figure out what to fix moving forward. To pinpoint leaks in your strategy, you need the right data.

If your marketing team isn’t helping you track data, it’s doing you a disservice. At the end of the day, lead tracking and reporting should guide your marketing decisions and determine how your budget is allocated. If your business outsources marketing, your partner should be sharing all the details about your leads. And if they don’t? There’s probably something they don’t want to be transparent about.

You might be thinking, “I’m getting new leads. Who cares where they’re coming from, right?” Wrong. If you’re not paying attention to your lead tracking data, here’s why you should start.

 

1. Not All Leads Are Created Equal

Tired of draining your marketing budget on dead ends or nurturing leads who won’t ever turn into paying customers? It’s time to start focusing your attention on qualified leads. But how can you define a qualified lead?

First, let’s define a lead. A lead is any person that has shown interest in your roofing services. They might have clicked on your Facebook ad or signed up for SMS messages. Regardless of their initial point of contact, a lead is a valuable opportunity for your business. 

But not all leads are created equal. According to marketing statistics, 63 percent of your leads who inquire about your business won’t convert for at least 3 months—and 79 percent of your leads won’t ever convert to sales.

By setting criteria for lead qualification, your sales team can prioritize leads that enter the sales funnel and devote the right resources toward qualified leads. With lead tracking data, you can streamline the process of distinguishing qualified leads from unqualified leads. Combined with a great CRM, you’ll have easy access to lead scoring data for every single one of your leads.

In turn, you’ll maximize sales productivity and make the most efficient use of your resources. And if you don’t have time to separate the good leads from the bad, your marketing partner should be doing it for you.

 

2. Figure Out What’s Working—and What’s Not

Sales and marketing integration is a crucial—but often neglected—part of the sales process. When you’re tracking leads, you can figure out which campaigns (marketing) and techniques (sales) work better than others.

When you invest resources in campaigns that are paying off, you can boost your lead generation. You’ll also free up other resources allocated to the campaigns that aren’t working. Plus, you can tweak underperforming campaigns before ditching them completely. This way, you can personalize your email newsletter, adjust your wording, or change your target audience to make the most out of every marketing campaign.

With lead tracking data, you can also finetune your sales process to start converting more leads. Prepping your sales team with the right data can help boost sales productivity and streamline the lead generation process so you’re capturing every ounce of value from your leads.

 

3. Plug Leaks in Your Sales Funnel

If you think paying customers are the only ones you should focus on, think again. Leads are the lifeline of your roofing business—they’re profitable, and they can help you generate insight into what works (and what doesn’t) in your sales funnel.

Some leads will inevitably slip out of the sales funnel, but lead tracking can give you a better idea of why you’re losing leads. The sales funnel is a great way to track stage-by-stage conversion. Basically, keeping track of leads will help you pinpoint pain points in the sales funnel and seal up any loose ends.

For example, if you notice that 50 to 70 percent of leads slip out of the sales funnel during the consideration stage, they’re probably not impressed with what you’re offering. If you notice that 30 percent of the leads that drop out haven’t been contacted within 3 or 4 days, it’s probably a sign that you should work on your response times.

 

4. Get the Most Bang Out of Your Marketing Budget

When you’re throwing money into marketing efforts, you want to be 100 percent sure that you’re getting a return on your investment. Digital marketing should never be a guessing game, and lead tracking data is critical to accurately measure your ROI.

Lead tracking data gives you insight into which landing pages are converting and which marketing campaigns are working so you can reduce wasteful spending. A better idea of how customers reach your business—the cost-per-response—can lead to huge financial gains.

 


 

How to Track Where Your Leads Are Coming From

Lead tracking not only provides valuable insights for your marketing team but countless opportunities for your roofing business. It can help your sales and marketing team work seamlessly to find more qualified leads, close more sales, and generate more revenue for your roofing business. On top of that, it can help you create a better user experience and a more convenient buyer’s journey. So, how can you start tracking where your leads are coming from?

 

1. Call Tracking Technology

Before you say, “Customers aren’t interested in calling me,” let’s take a look at the statistics. According to 2015 research from Salesforce, 92 percent of all customer interactions happen over the phone. Sure, today’s customers are interacting across more channels, but there are still people who want to talk to a human being.

Once your sales team connects to a lead via phone call, call tracking is the obvious continuation of the lead management process. Call tracking software preps your sales and marketing teams with data to synchronize their efforts and maximize their productivity. With call tracking technology, you can place a unique tracking phone number in each marketing source, such as your PPC ads, to find out where your calls are coming from. Call tracking provides valuable insights into:

  • What marketing campaigns drove your leads to call
  • Which keywords to continue to target
  • Which channels are effectively reaching your target audience

Plus, most call tracking solutions record calls so you can gain further insight into your leads. If you’re not listening to every call, it’s time to start. How many calls lead to appointments? How many calls are miscellaneous, like a caller asking a general question about roof repairs or shingles?

By listening to every call, categorizing every call, and tracking data on the call transcript, location, date, and time of the call, you can identify areas of improvement and training opportunities, which can make all the difference in closing sales. Start classifying your referrals, solicitations, missed calls, and calls from different marketing campaigns. Even though it requires a lot of time, the payoff is well worth it.

Call tracking technology is essential, but it shouldn’t be your sole source of lead tracking data. Instead, consider combining call tracking solutions with other options, like a CRM, for a full picture of your lead sources.

 

2. Lead Tracking Software

Leads can contact you in a few different ways on your website—from submitting a form to requesting a free quote—and call tracking isn’t always enough. Tracking numbers also isn’t ideal for some sources, like local listings. Where call tracking fails, lead tracking software swoops in and saves the day.

Lead tracking software works on your website to track lead conversions, including phone calls and form submissions. It can identify the source where your lead originated, such as PPC ads, social media channels, and organic search results. 

If you’re already using a CRM, it’s time to tap into its lead tracking capabilities. And if you don’t have a CRM, it’s time to get one. Generally speaking, roofing contractors who don’t use a CRM don’t have a customer relationship management system. Instead, they use a few loosely connected processes to generate, convert, and manage their leads. Sometimes, an account manager keeps track of lead details manually, but this can create countless opportunities for error—from a forgotten detail to lost paperwork. On top of that, it’s incredibly time-consuming.

In contrast, most customer relationship software offers lead management and lead nurturing data, with built-in tools ranging from lead tracking to email automation. Some CRM solutions also provide additional data on your website traffic, lead information, and call recordings. CRMs compile data in an accessible format, providing your sales and marketing teams with valuable insights into your leads, sales process, and marketing campaigns. Your CRM does the work for you so you can spend more time in the field.

Our clients use CRM solutions to track their leads because it gives them the best visibility into how effectively their marketing is working. Plus, they don’t have to worry about their information being legible, correct, or dirty from spending time in a field tech’s truck.

 


 

How to Track Leads: Can’t You Just Ask Leads Where They Came From?

Let’s dispel one of the biggest marketing rumors: Asking a customer where they heard about your company is not a sufficient lead tracking strategy. Combined with other strategies, asking leads has some benefits: It helps you build rapport with new leads. And if you have a website form, you can include a field to ask users how they found your site. The best way to track your results is to create a system for recording these responses—like a spreadsheet—but manual tracking often leads to errors.

With that said, relying solely on customer insights to track your leads and allocate your marketing budget can be catastrophic to your business. Think about it this way: If your campaigns are working, leads will interact with your company somewhere between six and eight times before converting. Most leads will only remember the first place they noticed your business or the last place they interacted with your brand. So, when it’s time to evaluate your lead sources at the end of the month, you’re only seeing a fraction of the whole picture. You don’t want to make important marketing decisions based on what your leads can remember.

Instead of asking leads how they heard about your business, sit down with your marketing team and actively map out each of your lead sources. How are they labeled within your CRM, and how are those leads tracked? For every lead source, figure out how to prove that a lead came from that source. And no, the Internet isn’t a source. You need to lay out every possible way a digital lead can enter your CRM—from social media to PPC ads—to perfect your marketing campaigns.

“My advice is to set parameters from the start. Make sure that everything that goes into the CRM has a lead source assigned to it,” says Antognoli. “Think about things like referrals, walk-ins, and offline marketing. How will you ensure that when leads come from these sources, you will be able to tell?”

Antognoli recommends giving specific groups of leads a unique coupon code, or having calls go to a unique phone number. The bottom line is that if you think all of this through from the beginning, you will come up with a lead attribution strategy–and an experienced marketing team can help. Your marketing partner can assist your roofing company by putting a QR code on mailers, or adding a place to enter a coupon code into an online form—anything to help you attribute where a particular lead came from. 

However, Antognoli cautions roofing companies and other home services businesses to be honest about their blind spots when it comes to lead attribution. 

“Understand what scenarios exist where you will not be able to track attribution. There will always be web visits with ‘no referrer’ and calls without a source. The goal is to minimize these,” says Antognoli. “I like to think of this as plugging holes in the bucket: You might never plug them all, but you can narrow down where these leads might be coming from and, in some cases, figure out how to better attribute these ‘mystery’ leads as well.”

 


 

Never, Ever Guess Your Marketing ROI

Whether you’re handling marketing campaigns yourself or paying an agency to generate leads, you need information beyond the numbers. Sure, statistics on local SEO, PPC ads, and email subscribers are always good to have, but knowing what’s behind those stats is even better. You deserve data that doesn’t leave you guessing.

That’s where CRM will be your MVP. CRM solutions can help roofing contractors make key marketing decisions with confidence. We’ve worked with many residential and commercial roofing companies—and we know how important it is for our clients to have accessible, dependable, and efficient access to their analytics. The world is your office, and you need solutions that can meet you wherever you are.

Above all else, CRMs return data. You don’t want to waste hours staring at spreadsheets when you could be working in the field. Our clients use CRMs to view all of their lead tracking data on the front end and gain valuable insights into their campaigns. Instead of guessing which campaigns are working or wasting time scoring leads, CRMs help you stay on top of new leads, track their movement along the pipeline, and identify trends in your sales process.

 


 

How to Track Leads the Right Way

Lead tracking can make a dramatic impact on your bottom line, but it’s only the first step. Holding your marketing team accountable is huge. So is knowing your ROI and tweaking your marketing campaigns to generate even more leads.

Whether you’re searching for the right CRM solution or working on your lead generation strategy, we’re here to help. Reach out to our team if you have any questions about growing your business with the power of lead tracking.

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