Lead generation · roofing
Roofing leads come from three places: people who find you themselves, platforms that sell you an enquiry they also sell to other roofers, and a lead engine you own, usually paid social ads landing on your own site. Each has a real cost, and the cheapest-looking one is rarely the cheapest.
Knox Growth is a marketing team in Hove that builds lead engines for construction and trade businesses, roofers among them, and this page sets out the three options plainly so you can choose with the numbers in front of you.
Ask a roofer where the work comes from and the honest answer is usually “word of mouth, and then it goes quiet in January”. That is the problem roofing leads are meant to solve, and it is worth separating the sources before spending anything.
The best leads you will ever get and the ones you cannot schedule. A storm fills the phone for a fortnight; a dry spring empties it. Everything below exists to smooth that out, not replace it.
Somebody with a leak searches for a roofer in their town and rings whoever appears in the map results and looks real. This is slow to build and keeps working once built, and it is covered properly in marketing for roofing companies.
Checkatrade, Bark, MyBuilder, Rated People and the rest. You pay per enquiry or per month, and the same enquiry goes to several roofers at once. Fast, and the economics are looked at below.
Ads, usually on Facebook and Instagram, that show the right homeowner your work and ask them to enquire. You pay the platform for the attention and you keep the enquiry. This is what we build, and how it works is in Meta ads for trades.
The decision is not which one is best. It is which mix gives you a diary you can rely on in the months the phone goes quiet on its own.
Start with the job, not the lead. A roofing lead is worth the average job value, multiplied by the proportion of enquiries you win, multiplied by the margin. If a typical job is worth a few thousand pounds, you win one in four quotes, and a reasonable margin is left after labour and materials, then a single enquiry is worth a few hundred pounds to you before you have paid anything to get it.
That number is your ceiling. Any source of roofing leads that costs less than it, consistently, is worth running. Any source that costs more is costing you money however busy it makes you feel. The arithmetic takes ten minutes and we have written it up step by step in what a trade lead should cost, with three real figures from a live trade account, £4.84, £10.85 and £53.13 per lead across three different services, to show how wide the honest range is. Those three are not roofing figures and we do not pretend they are; they show that the cost of a lead depends on the job it is for, which is exactly why you need your own ceiling before anyone quotes you a price.
What a roofing lead should cost, then, is less than it is worth, by enough margin that a bad month does not hurt. What it does cost is the subject of the next two sections.
A shared platform lead looks cheap because the price per enquiry is small and visible. It works out expensive for three reasons that are not on the invoice.
First, it is shared. The same homeowner’s enquiry goes to three, four or five roofers within minutes. Your real cost is not the price of the lead but the price divided by your chance of winning it, and that chance is lower when four other firms are ringing the same person. A lead you win one time in five costs five times its sticker price.
Second, it is a race. Platforms reward the fastest responder, so the roofer on a roof at the time loses to the one sitting in a van with a phone. You are paying for enquiries you were never in a position to answer.
Third, the customer is price-shopping by design. They were told they would get several quotes, so they compare on price, and the job goes to whoever quoted lowest rather than whoever would do it best. Margins on platform work are thinner for that reason alone.
What the lead actually cost you
None of this means never use a platform. It means count the real cost: the sticker price, divided by your win rate, with the lower margin on the jobs you do win. For many roofers that honest figure is above the ceiling worked out in the section before, and they only find out when they do the sum.
Roofing lead generation you own means an advert that shows a homeowner in your area a real roof you have finished, says plainly what you do and where, and asks them to send their details to you and nobody else. That is the whole mechanism. The craft is in four things.
A roofing ad lives or dies on the picture. A finished roof, photographed from the ground on a clear day, with the house visible, out-performs any amount of clever copy. We ask for your last ten finished roofs before we write a word.
The ad asks for an enquiry, not a click. A homeowner fills in a short form on Facebook or on your site, you get a name, a number and the job, and nobody else does.
The lead goes cold in an inbox. The engine includes what happens in the first hour: an automatic text, a call-back, a second attempt the next day. Most roofing leads that are “rubbish” were simply never rung quickly.
Roofing has a season and most firms start advertising too late. The engine is switched on before the quiet months, so there is work in the diary when the weather turns, not a scramble when it has already gone quiet. The seasonal argument, and why winter is the month to start rather than skip, is on marketing for roofing companies.
What you pay is the ad spend, which goes to the platform, and the fee for running it. You see both, separately, every month. The cost per lead is reported as a figure, not a feeling, and if it rises above your ceiling the ads are paused rather than defended.
A guarantee only means something if it is specific. Ours is written on one page and it says three things: fifteen leads a month, a winter fee of eight hundred pounds, and you do not pay until the leads have landed. That is the Winter Pipeline offer, built for roofers and garden room firms who want the diary filled before the quiet months rather than after them. Everything else about it, what counts as a lead, what you need to have ready, and what happens if the number is not reached, is on that page in full, and nothing here adds to it or softens it.
What a guarantee does not mean, from us or anyone, is a promise about rankings, about Google, or about being recommended by an AI assistant when somebody asks it for a roofer. Nobody can sell those. A guarantee that can be checked against a number you see is the only kind worth signing.
It depends on your area, your budget and your photographs, and anyone who gives you a number before seeing all three is guessing. The Winter Pipeline offer states its number because it is built around a fixed budget and a tested method; outside that offer we tell you what a live account has done and let you judge.
They are as good as the follow-up. The enquiries are real homeowners with real roofs; the ones that go nowhere are usually the ones rung two days later. Treat the first hour after the enquiry as part of the job and the quality changes.
Not on day one. Run both, count the real cost of each for three months, and let the numbers decide. Many roofers keep a platform for the emergency call-outs and use their own engine for the larger planned jobs.
You need a page that proves you are real: your photographs, your reviews, your number. If the current site does that, ads can land on it. If it does not, that is the first fix, and it is usually a day’s work rather than a rebuild.
Yes. A two-person firm with good photographs and a phone that gets answered beats a large one with stock images and a voicemail. The engine is sized to the diary you can actually fill.
Send us where your last ten roofing enquiries came from, what each one cost you, and how many turned into jobs. We will work out your real cost per lead by source, tell you which one is above your ceiling, and say what we would do first. Half an hour, no charge, and you keep the sheet.
What we do across every channel as a construction marketing agency is on the hub page.
