Print & Livery for Roofers
Print exists to work the street you are already standing on
Roofing sells down a road, not across a town
A full roof re-tile is £5,090. Fascias, soffits and guttering, £1,830. A flat roof in EPDM, £1,790. A repair, £505. A survey, £175.
Roofs on a street are the same age. They were built at the same time, tiled with the same materials, and they fail within a few years of each other. When one house on a road gets re-roofed, several neighbours are already at the point of thinking about theirs — and every one of them watches the whole job from start to finish.
There is no better-qualified audience in your business and it is standing on the pavement for free.
The trouble is that your job is eight metres up and lasts a fortnight, and the only thing identifying who is doing it is a van that comes and goes. A large share of that street will never learn your name.
Print is how you fix that, and for a roofer it is almost entirely about working the immediate area of a live job rather than advertising across a town.
The three things that do the work
A scaffold banner. The scaffold is up for a fortnight and it is the most prominent structure on the road. A PVC mesh banner is roughly £40 to £80 for three metres, fits with cable ties in five minutes, and is visible from both ends of the street. Most roofers never put one up, and the scaffolder’s own banner is often the only name on the structure.
A street leaflet, delivered while the job is live. Not a generic flyer. A specific one: we are re-roofing number 42 this fortnight, here is what was wrong, here is what it cost, we will look at yours while we are here. Five hundred A5 leaflets is around £45 to £70, and distributing forty of them yourself takes twenty minutes. It is the highest-converting print any roofer produces, precisely because it is timed and local.
A survey report, printed. You are asking for £5,090 on trust. A printed report with photographs from the roof, handed over or posted, is a fundamentally different object from a text message with a number in it.
The supporting items
Vehicle livery. Cut vinyl at £350 to £700, and for a roofer the van is usually parked on the road at the job all day, which is where it does its work.
Workwear with the name on the back, because you are visible on a roof and on a pavement in front of an audience.
A-boards or a small board at the property, where scaffold is not being used.
Cards for the neighbours who come and ask. They do come and ask, on nearly every job, and most roofers have nothing to hand over.
The ratio
A re-tile is £5,090. Our Noticed package is £49 a month — £588 a year. One re-tile covers more than eight years.
The banner arithmetic is the clearest on this site. Two banners at £60 each, reused across every job for two or three years, against a job value of £5,090. One additional re-roof from a neighbour over the life of those banners returns roughly forty times the outlay, and neighbours are where a large share of roofing work already comes from.
What we’d actually produce
Two or three mesh banners, sized for a standard scaffold run, reusable, with fixings.
A street leaflet template that can be personalised per job in a few minutes, so it goes out while the scaffold is still up rather than a month later.
A printed survey report format with room for roof photographs, which is the document that converts.
Van livery specified for a stationary vehicle parked outside a house all day.
Workwear and cards, so the person who walks up to ask has something to take away.
What good looks like at twelve months
- A banner on every scaffolded job, going up on day one
- A street drop on each significant job, done while the work is visible
- Printed survey reports instead of quotes by message
- Neighbours enquiring during jobs rather than months afterwards
- A van that identifies the firm doing the work everyone on the road is watching
The mistakes we see most
Leaving the scaffold blank. It is the largest advertising surface you will ever be handed and it is standing there either way.
Generic leaflets. “Local roofer, free quotes” through five thousand doors converts poorly. Forty doors about the job they can see converts extremely well.
Quoting by text. The £5,090 decision is made by two people at a table, and a printed report is what they discuss.
Nothing to hand a neighbour. Somebody asking about the job in person is the warmest enquiry you get all month.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. Banners produced and in the van, so the next scaffolded job carries one.
Weeks 5–8. The street leaflet template and the printed survey report format, which between them do most of the converting.
Weeks 9–12. Van livery and workwear, plus cards so nobody who asks leaves empty-handed.
At ninety days the measure is whether every scaffolded job this quarter had your name on the scaffold and forty leaflets through the doors around it.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Jobs carry their address and dates, so the street drop is a task attached to the work rather than something remembered afterwards.
Survey findings and roof photographs sit against the property, which is what the printed report is assembled from — the same material, in a form that can be handed over.
And because enquiries record their source, work arriving from the street around a live job is measurable, which is what tells you how many banners and leaflets to run.
The storm pack, printed and ready before the weather
There is one printed item worth preparing in advance, and it earns its keep in about two days a year.
After serious wind you are on roofs across a town within forty-eight hours, mostly doing temporary work while the customer is anxious and thinking about their insurer. What they need at that moment is a document, and what they usually get is a verbal explanation on a driveway.
A storm pack is a short printed folder handed over at the first visit. What was found. What has been made safe today and what is still outstanding. Dated photographs from the roof. What insurers generally treat as storm damage and what they generally decline. What to photograph before anything else is touched. What a full repair would involve and roughly what it costs.
Two things follow. The customer has something to put in front of their insurer, which makes you the roofer who helped rather than the one who quoted. And the pack contains your name, your address and your company details on every page of a document that goes to a loss adjuster.
A run of fifty folders is a modest outlay and they sit in the wagon until the weather turns. The whole value is that they exist before the storm rather than being designed during the week you most need them, which is also the week you have no time to design anything.
Questions roofers ask
Can I put a banner on somebody else’s scaffold? With the customer’s agreement, which is almost always given, and by arrangement with the scaffolder. It is normal practice.
Do leaflets still work? Generic ones, poorly. A leaflet about the roof forty metres away that they have been watching for a week works very well.
Is a printed report worth the effort? It is the difference between a quote that gets compared on price and one that gets read.
What about doorstep canvassing? Different thing entirely, and the association is not one you want. A leaflet through the door does the same job without it.
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