How much should a roofer spend on marketing?
Work backwards from what a won job is worth rather than forwards from a percentage. If your average roofing job is £4,000 at 25% margin, a £147 monthly spend needs to produce roughly one extra job a year to break even. Judge it on cost per won job, not per lead.
Why percentage rules don't work here
The standard advice is to spend some percentage of turnover. It's popular because it's easy to say and it fits every business, which is also why it tells you nothing.
Roofing breaks it in both directions. Job values swing from a £180 repair to a £12,000 re-roof, and demand arrives in bursts rather than evenly. A percentage of last year's turnover has no relationship to what this January is worth.
The calculation that does work
- Take your average job value across the last twelve months, split by job type if repairs and re-roofs are both significant.
- Apply your actual margin, not turnover.
- That's what one extra won job contributes.
- Divide your annual marketing cost by that figure. The result is how many extra jobs the spend has to produce to break even.
- If the answer is more than a handful of jobs a year, be sceptical. If it's one or two, the risk is small.
What most people get wrong
Judging marketing on cost per lead. Ten enquiries that three other roofers are also quoting on is a worse month than two that came straight to you. Only the won jobs count, and only the ones you'd have taken.
The second error is stopping in the quiet months. Roofing marketing works ahead of demand, not during it. Cutting spend in a slow August is what causes a slow January.
Related questions
Is SEO or Google Ads better for roofing?
Ads buy immediate visibility and stop the day you stop paying. Search work builds slowly and decays slowly. Most roofers with a capacity gap now and a plan for next year end up running both for a while.
What if I'm already full?
Then spend nothing. The honest answer for a roofer turning work away is to raise prices before buying more enquiries.
Should I budget more before winter?
Bring it forward rather than increasing it. Visibility built in late summer is what catches the first storms; money spent during a storm arrives too late to rank.
Want the numbers run on your business?
Tell us your average job value and where you work. We'll do the break-even maths with your figures and say plainly whether it stacks up.