CMO Perspectives: Bruce Leffler Of Best Roofer Marketing On Where to Assign Your Marketing Budget and Why
An Interview With Kieran Powell
You can’t just “DO” social media. An effective strategy is designed around the algorithms.
In an age where marketing landscapes are rapidly evolving and consumer behaviors are constantly shifting, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) play a pivotal role in steering their organizations’ marketing strategies towards success. With a plethora of channels, platforms, and techniques at their disposal, the decision on where to allocate the marketing budget is more critical than ever. We’re seeking to explore questions like: What factors influence their decisions? How do they balance between digital and traditional marketing channels? What role does data play in their decision-making process? And importantly, why they choose to invest in certain areas over others? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Bruce Leffler.
Bruce Leffler had a longstanding corporate career dating back to the beginning of the digital age before he decided to launch his digital marketing agency. Working at global brands like Bellsouth, AT&T, AOL & Web.com taught him the good, the bad, and the ugly of digital marketing for businesses of all types. His career achievements catapulted him to the top of sales and sales leadership boards nationally at the corporations as mentioned earlier. He’s currenly the Chief Growth Officer at Lume Sales & Marketing Agency, along with child-brand Best Roofer Marketing — both leaders in digital and video marketing for the home services and roofing industries. Their mission is to help contractors across the U.S. “Be The Best, Period.”
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Yes, I started my childhood like many, as an early entrepreneur, running a successful lawn care business by age 12. I have always enjoyed the thrill of the catch; learning early on my competitive nature was extremely complementary in the world of sales. My professional corporate journey started as a high school Sophomore where I landed a call center gig at UPS. I never realized that when I was ascending the corporate ladder, that was exactly what I was doing. It appeared I was just chasing titles and a higher income, but truth be told, in reflecting, I was chasing knowledge and opportunity.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Early in my digital advertising career at Bellsouth / AT&T, I learned the meaning of “smoking the hopium.” That’s right, you’re just “hoping” that the customer signs the deal, but they either aren’t qualified or are feeding you lines to appease you with no real intention of buying your product or services. Having a solid sales mentor early on, let me fully comprehend what it means to disqualify fast and have a healthy pipeline. This has led to countless awards because it’s a trait that most sales professionals never care to figure out, let alone master.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Yes, running digital marketing agencies is now becoming easier and easier for me and my leadership team. With almost 20 years in the industry myself, and over 80+ combined years of expertise on my team, it has allowed me to pursue my true passion, sales coaching. I had the privilege to co-found the Best Hustler Academy, which is an online sales & marketing training platform dedicated to the roofing industry. We also host live monthly calls twice monthly, do 1:1 coaching, and have nearly 100 DIY videos on sales, marketing, mindset, scripts, principles, and much more.
This has led to speaking engagements in front of hundreds of contractors at a time, across various roofing and home services expos, private events, suppliers, and more. We see an endless need for knowledge and millions of hungry contractors who genuinely want to learn how to become experts. This is solving a huge problem that exists at a national scale, directly impacting our overall economy.
What is that problem, you ask? Poor sales and marketing training for the trades. Now that we have proven the model for the roofing industry, it’s easily scalable for other home services contractors that have daily sales interactions with homeowners and businesses in every corner of our country.
Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the central focus of our discussion. Can you share an experience where a unique or unconventional budget allocation led to unexpected success in your marketing campaign?
Yes, it was with a national pharmacy software management company. We created and deployed a unique strategy with programmatic advertising, targeting all independently owned pharmacies nationwide. With our technology, strategy, and programmatic tweaks, we were able to exclude targeting patrons of the pharmacies and only send our message to “employees” as quantified by 4+ hours in each location for 2+ consecutive weekdays. This resulted in a 120% year-over-year increase in inbound leads, inquiring about the products and services of our client.
How do you balance investing in emerging marketing trends versus traditional, proven strategies in your budget decisions? Can you give us an example?
At our agencies, we prioritize growth and employ proven strategies for lead generation to bolster our client’s financial goals. Alongside utilizing established methods, we consistently explore integrating AI solutions to enhance operational efficiencies. This involves diligent monitoring to ensure that artificial intelligence remains aligned with the latest search engine algorithms and avoids any counter-productive outcomes.
In what ways has data-driven decision-making influenced your approach to allocating marketing budgets, and can you provide an example of this in action?
Yes, we are a data-driven agency and continuously analyze, interpret and pivot where applicable, solely based on data and what is in the best interest of our clients. A common adjustment we make to marketing budgets is going to focus around Google advertising, specifically PPC (pay-per-click).
We will recommend and adjust budgets both up and down, based on what the data tells us. We use an analogy to justify this. Imagine we are at a track meet, and everyone is on the line with a different starting point, because that is how the races start off.
That’s what marketing for small businesses in America is like. You see, there are so many variables to go into a campaign, customer’s can look identical on the outside (same employee count, revenue, etc.) but on the inside (their market, population, competition, etc.) they are all starting at different points and have unique challenges to overcome.
In one market, we can see a $5M roofing company absolutely exceeding our benchmark KPIs and in another, an identically sized company with a mirrored strategy will get wildly different results, predicated solely on all of the factors listed above and more.
To that end, we tell customers we need to turn their budgets up, and in many cases down, based on what the data is telling us.
How do you evaluate the ROI of different marketing channels and decide where to invest more or cut back?
This is a great question and one that strikes home with us, as the premier growth agency for home services contractors nationwide. We built a mission around it. We call it the Billion Dollar Impact. What uniquely sets us apart is this mission, whereby we state we will only partner with 100 companies at a time and commit to helping them sell $10,000,000 each. How we quantify this is unique compared to other agencies in our space. Here is how it works:
- We track and record every call we generate for our clients.
- Our in-house team listens to and audits every call, assigning a value based on the customer’s actual sales numbers for the type of product or solution that was inquired about on the initial call.
- We meet with clients monthly to review the actual sales and sales numbers, compare them with their CRM actuals.
- We make pivots where applicable based on actual trendlines within the customer’s business.
Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things To Keep in Mind When Deciding Where to Assign Your Marketing Budget, and Why?”
1 . Understand the difference between creative and directional marketing and associated costs.
In college, Marketing 101 will educate you on the difference between creative and directional marketing, why each matter, and when to deploy them. “Creative Marketing” is essentially branding. Some examples are social media, billboards, TV, local networking, and more. Think of it like this, you are going out into the community and saying “We are here, please keep us in mind if you ever need our services”.
“Directional Marketing” is different. This is generally more expensive but comes with ready-to-buy customers. A good example of directional marketing is Google. Let’s say you come home to water on the floor of your foyer, you look up and see water intrusion coming in from your ceiling. You have a problem and the fast path to a solution is simple. Pull out your phone, type in “roofer near me” and call the first, second, or third ad that comes up until someone says they will be out same-day with a tarp to help guide you through the insurance claim.
See, nobody in this “directional” scenario would ever sit down on their couch and start scrolling Facebook in hopes the algorithm serves them the same roofing ad they saw 30 days ago. They don’t care so much about who the company is in this scenario but how fast a reputable company can put a stop to the problem.
These leads do cost more but often are much easier to close because they are often problem-centric and not passively calling just to get a roof quote, to satisfy their curiosity even though no problem exists.
2 . You can’t just “DO” social media. An effective strategy is designed around the algorithms.
Many business owners choose to take a stab at social media marketing and advertising on their own, with zero knowledge of what they are actually doing. Meta makes it easy to put in your credit card and start “boosting” posts or running ads. The challenge is, that it is a very complex beast and we recommend having a trusted agency partner or in-house expert to assist. Each social media platform has an established list of likes and dislikes, as it pertains to their algorithms and maximizing these outlets. The average business owner is likely not as privy to viewership allocation between static posts, video posts, reels, and stories, and how each is uniquely different in their own right.
3 . Invest in video, video, video. It’s going to outlive all of us.
We had the privilege of acquiring a media company in 2023 and bringing their video and photography services in-house to support our current and future client base better. Through Q1 of 2024, this has been our hottest-selling item. Business owners are finally waking up to the necessary adoption of video across their marketing initiatives. With many DIY or freemium apps now at everyone’s fingertips, the art of creating attractive video spots that convert is becoming evermore attainable.
Adding video to our customer campaigns has resulted in a noticeable increase in leads delivered from their social media channels, as well as countless compliments and positive feedback from people within their respective communities.
A roofing client in Louisville, KY, recently called us to advise that they have received dozens of compliments on the videos we created for their website and social media. The owner, and I quote, “People we would have never expected to are seeing us and calling us saying they saw our videos online.”
4 . Be prepared to “inspect what you expect”. Do you have an in-house Marketing Manager or above to collaborate with your 3rd party providers?
In-house marketing managers often fear 3rd party agencies because of the perception they are being replaced. Agencies often fear teams with in-house marketing manages or directors because they understand there will be an increased level of accountability they may not like.
Having personally consulted over 3,500+ small, medium and enterprise businesses over the last 18+ years, I can attest that agencies that partner with marketing staff and staff open to truly partnering with agencies get the best results.
This professional relationship should be considered a partnership instead of a battle of egos. Locking arms and moving forward with the same mission will always yield the fastest results. In-house marketing personnel is often far more responsive to the needs of agencies, which is an added bonus. It is hard to track down a company’s owner for something minor like a headshot or password. When there is dedicated staff to assist the agency, things tend to move much quicker and in a positive direction.
5 . Marketing is only as good as the sales team behind it. We believe a portion of every marketing budget should be dedicated to sales & process training. Repeatable processes are how you scale. Let’s use the case of a roofing company; if we record a call where a homeowner is asking for a new roof replacement because they have water intrusion, that’s a great call. If it doesn’t close in our 30 day review call, we ask why, and it usually comes down to two things, neither of which is price.
Deterrent #1 is the sales team fumbling the ball somewhere in the initial or early client engagements.
Deterrent #2 is operations needed a process focused on creating a dynamic customer experience.
Companies that continuously reinforce best practices and repeatable processes are known to scale significantly faster than companies that treat every new opportunity as a unique engagement.
Could you discuss a challenging budget decision you faced, how you navigated it, and its impact on your overall marketing strategy?
Yes, in our industry we face it all of the time. I’d prefer to respond from a consultant’s perspective because this is more of a widely known problem. Since our agencies represent over 100 companies, we know that some businesses experience drastic seasonal issues that disrupt a consistent cash flow.
In short, we are continuously educating the market that when times get tough, you should ramp up your marketing, yet it is often the first thing business owners want to cut back on or cancel altogether.
This is usually the beginning of the end for many SMBs. What they fail to realize is that when making financial decisions based on your company’s P&L sheet, marketing should never go away. As market demand shrinks, larger companies are willing to pay more for every engagement since there are less of them. If you completely cut off your brand’s awareness in the marketplace to save a few thousand dollars a month, you are essentially saying, I am going out of business because I am no longer competing and prioritizing attracting new customers.
Sure, things can be trimmed back or certain elements of your campaign paused. Absolutely. However, there are many other line items within a company that can be removed first if the owner(s) or team members are willing to make some small sacrifices.
It could be going out to lunch every Friday or corporate quarterly bonuses… There are a myriad of things you can trim back that are not your visibility and competitiveness to win new customers.
Keep that in mind: marketing should be the last thing you eliminate, not the first.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
1% charitable giveback for the entire roofing industry. Pick a charity of your choosing, but really commit to counting your blessings and doing good in the communities you live and serve.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
https://www.instagram.com/bestroofer.marketing/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw9jvDiWplBIc8k0IShnWow
https://www.facebook.com/bestroofermarketing/
https://www.tiktok.com/@bestroofermarketing
https://www.linkedin.com/company/best-roofer-marketing/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About The Interviewer: Kieran Powell is the EVP of Channel V Media a New York City Public Relations agency with a global network of agency partners in over 30 countries. Kieran has advised more than 150 companies in the Technology, B2B, Retail and Financial sectors. Prior to taking over business operations at Channel V Media, Kieran held roles at Merrill Lynch, PwC and Ernst & Young. Get in touch with Kieran to discuss how marketing and public relations can be leveraged to achieve concrete business goals.
CMO Perspectives: Bruce Leffler Of Best Roofer Marketing On Where to Assign Your Marketing Budget… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.