Hiring a roofing marketing agency, or doing it yourself
What roofing marketing costs, the red flags specific to this trade, the questions to ask before you sign, and why a trial beats a twelve-month contract.
Roofing owners get sold to more aggressively than almost any other trade, because the ticket is high enough that a bad agency can lose money for a year and still look worth trying. Storm season doubles the volume of pitches, most of them promising exclusive leads or a territory.
Before you decide whether to hire anyone, decide what the work is. Then decide whether you or someone in your office has the hours for it.
What you can genuinely do yourself
Some of this trade's marketing is straightforward and mostly costs time.
The Google Business Profile is a week of evenings: categories, service area, twenty service entries, thirty photos, hours, ten Q&A entries. The checklist is in the profile guide.
Review generation is a process, not a skill. Somebody asks in the driveway, somebody texts the link, somebody tracks it on the board. That is entirely in-house work and it is the highest-return thing on this list, given that the median roofing company has 13 reviews and 44.2% have fewer than ten.
Missed-call text-back is a $50 a month setting in your phone system.
Basic social posting is a crew lead with a phone and ten minutes.
If you do only those four things well, you will be ahead of most of the roofing companies in your market. None of them require an agency.
What is genuinely hard
Google Ads at roofing click prices is not a weekend project. Clicks run $20 to $60 and leads $150 to $400, so an untrained hand can spend $4,000 learning what a match type is. The same is true of Local Services Ads dispute management, which quietly returns real money to companies that work it and nothing to companies that do not.
A 20-page site that loads fast, ranks and converts is a specific skill. So is Meta creative that produces inspections rather than likes, and so is the technical side of AI search visibility.
Roughly: do the profile, the reviews, the phone and the posting yourself. Get help with ads, the website and the structural SEO work, or accept that they will not get done.
What fair pricing looks like
Ranges from the US market as of 2026, for a single-metro roofing company. These are management fees; ad spend is separate and paid to Google or Meta by you.
- Google Ads management: $800 to $2,500 a month, or 10% to 20% of ad spend. Below $800 nobody is actually looking at the account weekly.
- Meta ads management: $600 to $1,800 a month.
- Local SEO and Google profile management: $500 to $1,500 a month.
- Website build: $2,500 to $8,000 for a real 15 to 30 page site, or $150 to $400 a month bundled with hosting and updates.
- Full service, everything under one roof: $2,500 to $6,000 a month.
- Exclusive leads from a lead vendor: $150 to $400 each. Shared leads $60 to $120.
A roofing company doing $2 million should expect to spend somewhere between 5% and 10% of revenue on marketing including ad spend. Storm-heavy companies run lower in a good hail year and much higher in a quiet one.
Red flags specific to roofing
"Exclusive territory" with a long contract. Territory exclusivity is a sales device. What matters is whether the leads convert, and a territory clause does not make them convert.
Guaranteed lead counts with no quality standard. Fifty leads a month is easy to produce if nobody checks whether they are homeowners with roofs. Ask what happens when a lead is a renter, a wrong number, or 90 miles away.
They own your accounts. If the Google Ads account, the Meta account, the domain, the hosting or the tracking number is in their name, you cannot leave without starting over. That is deliberate. Everything goes in your name, always.
Deductible language in the ad copy. If a marketer writes ads that suggest you will cover, waive or absorb a homeowner's deductible, they do not know this trade and they are exposing your license. The rules are in the Google Ads guide.
Twelve-month contracts with a 90-day ramp. That is nine months of accountability sold as twelve.
Reporting that leads with impressions and clicks. In roofing the only numbers are leads, set inspections, signed contracts and cost per signed contract. If a report does not contain those, it is designed not to.
Volume shops that run the same account for forty roofers. Ask how many roofing clients they have in your metro and whether any of them are bidding on the same keywords you are.
The questions to ask before you sign
- Whose name is on the ad accounts, the domain, the hosting, the phone number and the tracking?
- What is the notice period to cancel, and what do I keep?
- Show me a report from a roofing client with the client name blacked out. What was cost per signed contract?
- Who actually touches my account each week and what is their name?
- What is the minimum ad spend for this to work in my market, and what do you expect cost per lead to be?
- What do you do differently for storm response versus retail replacement?
- What happens in month one if the leads are bad?
- Can I start small and expand?
That last question tells you the most. A confident operator will let you start on one service. A shop that insists on the full bundle from day one is protecting its own numbers, not yours.
Why we do a trial
Our own answer to all of the above is a free 14-day trial of any single service, no card and no contract. The reasoning is straightforward. Roofing owners have usually been burned before, and asking someone to pay for three months of faith is asking for something we have not earned.
One honest caveat, because it applies to this trade specifically. Fourteen days is shorter than a roofing sales cycle. You will not see signed contracts in two weeks unless you get lucky. What you will see is leads arriving, inspections getting set, and how a campaign is actually being run day to day, which is the part nobody shows you before you sign. We say that up front and judge the trial on those measures.
Frequently asked
Should I hire an in-house marketing person instead? At about $4 million in revenue it starts making sense, usually as a coordinator who runs the reviews, the content, the photos and the social, with specialists contracted for ads. Below that, a full-time hire is an expensive way to buy part-time skills.
Is it bad to use several vendors? It is fine if one person owns the numbers. It goes wrong when the ads company blames the website company and nobody owns cost per signed contract.
How long before I should expect results? Paid ads produce leads in days and readable data in 45 days. Local SEO and profile work move in 60 to 90 days. A website rebuild shows up in conversion rate immediately and in rankings over a few months.
Pick the one service that is costing you the most and try it for two weeks at no cost through the free 14-day trial. If it does not produce, you have lost a setup call. The benchmark report and the FAQ will tell you where you stand before you even do that. Text or call (385) 832-6175.