What kind of experience do property owners get when they come across your roofing brand online?
Is your business more concerned with roofing sales or how clients make their way to your company to book jobs?
As a roofer, understanding your ideal clients to help enhance your services starts by creating a roofing client journey map built for your company’s success.
Nowadays, it isn’t enough to build a stunning roofing website and wait for property owners to find your business. It is essential to take proactive action to get your roofing services or products in front of potential customers.
You may have heard of a client journey map, but wondering how your roofing business can benefit from it? But when done correctly, a user journey or client journey map can help to enhance your roofing brand’s client reputation and experience.
Think of a user journey map as a way of getting inside the client’s mind, know their perception and understand how they interact with your roofing business from the start to when they finally schedule for a job.
Keep reading to learn what a customer journey map is, why it is essential and how to create a client journey map for your roofing business.
What is a Roofing Client Journey?
A user journey or client journey refers to a prospect or client experience from when they first hear about your brand until they get an email thanking them for booking jobs with your company. Simply put, it is the entire client’s experience in attempting to hire your company for roofing services or products.
So, what is a client journey map?
A client journey map is the visual representation of your client journey when interacting with your roofing brand. With the aid of a client journey map, you can get a sense of your target audience’s pain points and needs.
Benefits of Mapping out Your Roofing Client Journey
Customer journey mapping is essential since it is a strategic approach to understanding your client’s expectations and optimizing their experience. Here are some reasons why a customer journey map is necessary for your roofing company:
- Customer Journey Map Helps You to Stay Focused on Customers
Client journey mapping helps roofing contractors be educated and better understand how customers perceive your roofing services or products, values, and intentions, and how they interact with your business at various touchpoints.
When you bring in your biases and perspectives on how things should be done, a client journey map brings in real-time evidence and helps you understand what’s happening on the ground.
This makes sure that every team member in your roofing company is on the same page on what requires to be done, and they concentrate on creating fantastic client experiences and meeting customer needs.
- Deeper Customer Insights Lead to a High ROI
To build a compelling client journey, you should first understand your customer. This implies you know what they want, how they behave, and, more essentially, what they don’t like about your roofing services. This is a crucial part of running your roofing business but is typically missed by roofers who want to build a perfect journey for them (rather than the customer).
The way a property owner interacts with a roofing business or brand through various channels is known as the touchpoints. These are points of interaction and contact that businesses or homeowners have with your roofing company.
Customer journey maps help discover such touchpoints and where maximum struggles and friction occur, assisting you to enhance such touchpoints and optimize every channel based on high-quality, real-time data.
The more meaningful interactions you have with your clients, the higher your chances of getting loyal customers who will market your roofing company to your network.
- Customer Journey Mapping Gives Your Business a Competitive Advantage
The process of mapping out your client’s journey offers your roofing company a competitive advantage.
Your roofing crew should discuss your client’s experiences, empathize with their pain points and thus enhance their service.
This already is essential, but in the future, this will be a deciding factor why property owners prefer your roofing services over other roofers.
- Helps Your Roofing Business Implement a Proactive Customer Service
A client journey map is synonymous with a road map to your client’s experience. It will help you identify moments when property owners will be delighted and instances where they might be faced with struggles or friction.
Understanding this ahead of time helps you to develop your client service strategy appropriately and intervene at times that increase your roofing brand value to the property owner.
Superior customer service also makes your roofing brand look more reliable to your client’s base. For instance, if it’s wintertime and you are anticipating a surge in demand for roofing services, you can email your customer base letting them know that your team is prepared to help them in case of storm or hail damage.
- Customer Journey Mapping Can Help Create a New Target Client Base
As a roofer, if you don’t understand the client journey properly, you also don’t know the psychographics and demographics of your clients. Of course, it can be a waste of marketing dollars attempting to market your roofing company to a broad audience who will not later be interested in your products or services.
Researching your typical clients’ pain points and needs and describing their journey will give a perspective of property owners attempting to attain an objective with your roofing company. Thus, you can market your roofing services aggressively to that target audience.
- A Customer Journey Map Can Help Refocus Your Roofing Brand with an Internet Marketing Perspective
Instead of attempting to identify your potential clients through conventional marketing, you can have property owners discover your company with the help of internet marketing.
Traditional marketing involves hacks that are not well targeted at uninterested or generalized audiences and aim to interrupt clients from their daily chores.
The 5 Stages of a Customer Buying Journey
Roofing contractors who understand their client buying journey and concentrate on improving their sales funnel stages always outshine their competitors in the market.
After all, your roofing company is nothing without your clients. So, as a roofing business owner, you should strive to perfect customer experience from the initial interaction going forward.
Nowadays, more than 60% of your customer’s journey is completed online.
Surprisingly, many roofers tend to neglect the client journey altogether, which is a grave mistake, especially regarding their internet marketing efforts. The customer journey helps your business understand your target market, giving your team a vital insight when creating a roofing marketing strategy.
Roofing leads nurtured with targeted content produce more sales of over 20%
Without further ado, here are the main stages of a customer journey that you need to know:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
- Retention
- Advocacy
Stage #1: Awareness
This is the initial stage of your buying journey. Your prospects realize that they have a roofing problem or need and are researching information while actively searching for solutions to attempt and resolve the issue. Consider the awareness stage of your client journey as their first impression in your roofing business.
It’s essential to offer value to your potential clients during this first stage to establish rapport and trust with them. If you are not delivering value in the awareness stage, none of the other steps in the buying journey will matter. After all, how can property owners schedule jobs with you if they don’t know whether you exist in the first place?
Let’s face it: Research shows that over 80% of buyers perform research online before calling your roofing business for service.
During this stage, your role as a roofer is to show prospects that you understand their need or problem and offer resources and information that will assist them in navigating their pain points.
Some examples of content to offer during the awareness stage include:
- How-Tos
- Checklists
- Ebooks
- Industry statistics
- How-To Videos
Since you understand that your prospect is searching for information during this stage, that’s what you want to offer in a simple and digestible format for property owners.
Don’t let your initial impression with your clients be like a guessing game. Nothing gives your prospect a lousy start than visiting your roofing website and being left wondering:
What services do you offer?
Where do I need to start?
That’s why you need to partner with Blackstorm Roofing Marketing to build a responsive, user-friendly roofing website that will provide relevant and helpful information to your prospects/clients.
Stage #2: Evaluation/ Consideration Stage
This is the second stage in your customer’s buying journey. By now, your potential clients have conducted their first research and have several roofing contractors they can select from. But, the research stage is not yet completed. They have listed their options down, but they will continue to look for more details.
During this stage, they will compare your roofing services with other roofers in the same market.
Here they will make cost comparisons, check out competitors, read online reviews, and learn more about your roofing services to see if that’s what they are searching for. Understanding that your client will be comparing your business with other roofers during the consideration stage, you must position your business in a way that stands out from the crowd.
As a roofer, you need to ask yourself the following essential questions:
i)Is my roofing service understandable and clear?
ii) Is your roofing brand easier to find on the internet?
iii) Are the benefits of your roofing services clear?
iv) Is my price offering competitive compared to what other roofers offer in the marketplace?
v) What makes your roofing services more competitive in the marketplace?
Most potential clients will contact you for more details by calling the phone number on your roofing website, filling out the forms, or engaging your business via social media platforms. If this is the case, don’t leave them hanging.
This is your chance to step in and be the solution they seek to cure their problem or need. Besides, it is also during this stage that potential clients will want to know more about your pricing and what they would save if they schedule a job with your roofing company.
During the consideration/ evaluation stage, your role is to prove to the property owners that you care and make sure that they have all the details they require to transit to the next level in their buying journey.
Stage #3: Decision
This is where your prospective client is ready to choose from their options and schedule for a job. By now, the potential customer has conducted all the research required to make an informed decision on which roofing services will perfectly meet their needs or resolve their problem. It is at this third stage where customer reviews are essential.
Showcasing roofing case studies is very beneficial at this level and will help to clear the confusion in your prospect’s mind; why should they hire you? Social proof that your roofing services will do what they purport is crucial during this stage.
Request testimonials/ reviews from past clients and put them on your roofing website and other platforms where your potential customers will be visiting to get more details about you, your roofing company, and your brand, in general.
Stage # 4: Retention Stage
Congratulations! If your roofing client has come up to this level, then it implies you are doing many things correctly, from marketing, service to ordering materials. But it isn’t over yet. This is the most crucial stage in your customer’s buying journey. Why? It is much cheaper and easier to retain an existing client than acquiring a new one. During this stage, you should be following up with a potential client to give their review or feedback about the roofing services you offered to them.
Stage #5: Advocacy
This is the last stage of your client buying journey and one that takes effort to achieve. It is where your roofing client becomes an ambassador/ advocate for your brand. They talk great things about your roofing services; refer family and friends to your roofing business, and market your company aggressively through word-of-mouth recommendations.
Steps of Creating a Great Customer Journey Map in 2021 & Beyond
Step #1: Understand Your Target Market
In order to promote your roofing services effectively, you have first to understand who you are advertising to. The target market is a broad generalization of the ideal customer for your roofing company.
It is the kind of property owner that is likely to schedule a job with your roofing company.
For instance, if you operate a roof installation company, your target audience will be somehow different from a contractor who deals with leaky pipes.
As a roofer, determining your target market revolves around knowing the exact problem you solve. This assists you in having a clear perception of your ideal client.
- Who will benefit from your roofing services?
- Who experiences the challenges/ problems that you solve?
These are kinds of property owners that can be part of your target audience/market.
Once you understand who your target market is, you can develop ways of reaching out and segmenting them into groups.
Pinpointing your target audience can be an uphill assignment, mainly if you know all the various aspects that make up demographics within your preferred market.
Here are some factors to consider when defining your target roofing market:
a) Where your potential buyers are situated; your company only offers roofing services within a specific area (like a county, city, or state), which reduces your target audience and changes your advertising strategies. As a roofing contractor, you don’t want to waste marketing dollars displaying ads to property owners living in Tennessee when your company only operates in Florida. It would be best if you focused only on your target markets.
b) How old are the prospects you want to target?
You need to understand the age groups of people you target with your roofing services or products. For example, when Taylor Swift launches a new album, she isn’t focused on 60-year-olds with her ads. They aren’t interested in the album that was released. Thus understand whether you are targeting Millennials or seniors with your roofing services.
c) What is your target audience interested in?
When segmenting your target market, kindly concentrate on the ideal client, not generalizing demographics that might be interested in your roofing services.
Once you know who your target audience is, you can break them down into various buyer personas to assist your business in narrowing down multiple groups within your target audience/demographics.
Step #2: Highlight Your Buyer Personas
So, now you know who your ideal client is in general. However, that won’t be every property owner. Every roofing company has different kinds of clients.
Sticking with our previous example of a roofing business example- their client would include business owners, homeowners, office buildings, apartments, and typically anyone with a roofing problem.
Buyer personas are crucial for thoroughly understanding your client base and developing advertising messages specific to their problems. Listing down customer personas of your ideal types of clients helps to know what you are doing right and what could be enhanced upon.
Once you know the different buyer personas you are dealing with and crafting roofing marketing messages specifically for your audience. Each buyer persona has a different experience working with your roofing business; just ensure that it is a positive experience.
Step# 3: Customer Journey maps
Talking of the experience your previous client had with your roofing company, what does that consist of? What is the journey of each client that uses your roofing services like? At what point do they interact with your roofing company? Where are they redirected after they submit information or schedule a consultation?
Each interaction that your roofing company has with the client is a part of the client’s journey.
Think about your latest client. List down each step they took to schedule a job with your roofing business, from where they found your company, filling out their details on your roofing website, or getting a follow-up email or call later.
Mapping out the process that a property owner goes through to use your roofing services can be beneficial. In essence, the client journey is your service. Sure, you may install a new roof on their home, but the homeowner remembers more than the services offered. They judge your company depending on the quality of work and remember how partnering with you made them feel. It impacts directly on the future of your company.
Frequently Asked Questions on Customer Journey Mapping
How did the property owner find your roofing business?
Roofing clients may find your business through Google search, online directories, printed advertisements, and external links. There are numerous ways your roofing company could be located if you are doing everything right to get your business in front of them. At Blackstorm Roofing Marketing, we offer Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services that can help prospects find your roofing company online.
How did the client reach out?
Once a client finds your company and is interested in your roofing services, they later contact your business via one of your communication points or touchpoints. These are platforms you open to clients, including your roofing website, email, phone, the social media network, or contact form.
Let Blackstorm Roofing Marketing Experts Help You!
The only barrier standing between your business and potential clients: It might be your roofing website design. Simple tweaks to your landing page or homepage might be all you require for skyrocketing your conversion rates.
It has worked for hundreds of roofing contractors we have worked with. Let our experts try it on your roofing website, search rankings, online reputation management, and social media adverts.
If you need help marketing your roofing company, schedule a free strategy session online with one of our growth coaches to create a fantastic experience in every stage of your customer journey today.
