Justin Puetz didn’t have a big marketing budget when he started Puetz Construction in southeastern Minnesota. He didn’t have a videographer, a content team, or a polished strategy. What he had was a phone, a willingness to look a little ridiculous in public, and the discipline to show up every single day.
This year, he’s already surpassed his entire previous year’s revenue in the first five months, and his sales are up 10x. His story is one of the best examples of digital marketing tips for roofers put into real practice.
In a recent episode of the Nailed It podcast, Justin sat down with Elizabeth Lytle, Head of Community at Contractor Dynamics, to break down exactly how he did it. What follows are some of the most important lessons every roofing company owner needs to hear.
Nobody goes on Facebook to buy a roof. That’s not the point.
Roofing owners say it all the time. Nobody scrolls Facebook looking for a roofer. So why bother?
Justin’s answer is simple. People spend three to four hours a day on their phones. A huge chunk of that is on social media. In most local markets, almost no roofing company is showing up consistently with real content.
Most roofing owners dismiss social media because they don’t see an immediate return. But the best digital marketing tips for roofers aren’t about instant conversion. They’re about staying in your market’s peripheral vision long enough that when the day comes someone needs a roof, your name is the only one they think of.
Justin calls it building a digital resume or a virtual handshake. People who have never met him feel like they know him before they ever make the call.
This is what we call Five Mile Famous – one of the most durable competitive advantages a roofing company can build.
Start ugly. Start now. Build the muscle.
Justin’s first content was all unedited Instagram stories. Autocaptions that misspelled his own company name. Sixty-second clips shot in the field between jobs. No crew, no editing software, no plan.
He posted anyway. Every day.
This is one of the most underrated digital marketing tips for roofers: start before you’re ready. The first videos will be bad. Post them anyway.
They’ll sink to the bottom of your feed and nobody will ever find them. But the experience you get shooting them will build you a skill you cannot buy. Your on-camera confidence. Your eye for what works. Your ability to frame a job site moment into something a homeowner will actually want to watch.
The muscle analogy matters here. You don’t skip the gym because you’re not strong yet. You show up and lift until you are.
Content works the same way. The roofing companies that are dominating their local markets on socials right now were awkward on camera two years ago. They just didn’t quit.
One specific move Justin recommends for getting started: grab a DJI Mic 2, open Instagram’s free Edits app, and shoot. No expensive gear. No editing suite. Just real people, real job sites, and a little bit of nerve.
Authentic beats polished, every single time.
There is more AI-generated content flooding the internet than ever before. Fake faces, fake job sites, and fake roofs on fake houses. Homeowners can tell even when they can’t name it.
What cuts through is authenticity. A crew chief with mud on his boots explaining why proper ventilation matters. A quick selfie video in front of a job that just got done. An owner in a tuxedo at a home show with baby chickens in the booth. This kind of content builds trust in a way no produced brand video ever will.
Justin wore a full tuxedo for three days at a home show. People asked him why, and he said he dressed to impress. It got a lot of attention.
The age of raw, authentic content is here. For roofing companies willing to show who they actually are online, it’s one of the most powerful content marketing techniques right now.
How to scale content without losing your brand
When Puetz Construction got big enough to hire help, Justin didn’t go around looking for a traditional marketing manager. He hired a content creator named Tyler with one core qualification: the ability to edit fast.
Most videographers, Justin will tell you, want to make highlight reels and turn four days of production into one polished video. Justin doesn’t have time for that and neither does your market.
Volume, consistency, and speed win. One good video posted today beats one perfect video posted next week every time.
Justin’s process with Tyler is straightforward. He shows up to the job site with a rough idea of the video already in his head. He gives Tyler the shot list. Tyler shoots, edits on his phone, adds captions, and posts. The whole thing moves fast because it’s supposed to.
The one other important piece Justin credits for making this work is Contractor Dynamics. We trained Tyler on the marketing fundamentals: how to run ads, how to manage a Google Business Profile, how to use AI tools, and how to read data. That freed Justin to stay in his role as the visionary while Tyler handled the execution with real marketing knowledge behind him.
Turn every roof you install into a neighborhood marketing machine.
Every job site Puetz Construction works is a branded billboard. Yard signs front and back. Wrapped trucks parked in full view. A branded dump trailer. On one recent commercial project, they hung a five by fifteen foot banner on the building. The city loved it.
Justin’s take on yard signs is that it only costs five dollars, so put one up. Every neighbor who drives past that job site is a potential customer. You already earned that visibility by doing the work. Don’t leave it on the table.
For markets where yard signs aren’t allowed, Justin parks a truck and leaves door hangers. He knocks and introduces himself not to pitch, but to make sure nobody’s yard gets damaged and to hand over a number. That’s not soliciting. That’s being a neighbor.
Google reviews are your most underbuilt asset.
Puetz Construction has been in business for nine years. They’ve been actively collecting Google reviews for three. They’re currently sitting at over 335 five-star reviews and are second in their market. Justin tracks competitor review counts in a spreadsheet. He knows exactly when he’ll pass the leader at his current pace. It’s about a year and a half out.
Here’s the math he shared that every roofing owner should write down. To cancel out a single one-star review so it doesn’t show in your rating, you will need 79 five-star reviews. That’s how fast a bad review can drag you down if you’re not building volume. That’s why collecting reviews consistently isn’t optional. It’s infrastructure.
The other reason this matters is pricing power. A 5 star with ten reviews means nothing. A 5 star with 335 reviews tells every homeowner doing their due diligence that this roofing company has done this hundreds of times and every single one of those customers was happy enough to say so publicly.
This kind of reputation lets you charge what you need to charge to run a real business, hire real people, and deliver a real experience. It repels the homeowners looking for the lowest price and attracts the ones looking for the best contractor. That’s roofing business reputation management done right.
The system behind the growth: EOS
Justin runs Puetz Construction on the Entrepreneurial Operating System. He was skeptical at first. He read Rocket Fuel, skimmed the chapters, and didn’t retain much. But he committed to implementing it anyway.
Two and a half years later, he doesn’t know his clients by name anymore. His integrator owns the operations. His project manager owns the production. His sales team owns the pipeline. Justin owns the vision.
For roofing company owners who feel like every decision runs through them, like nothing moves without their direct involvement, like growth keeps creating chaos instead of momentum, EOS is worth a hard look. It’s not a magic system. It’s a structure that forces clarity on who owns what, makes accountability visible, and creates space for the owner to actually work on the business instead of drowning in it.
The book Justin recommends to start your EOS journey: Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters.
The Bottom Line
Justin Puetz built a roofing company that dominates its local market not by outspending the competition but by outshowing them. More content and more consistency on every platform. A team with the right people in the right seats. A sales process built around a real experience. And a relentless focus on reputation.
This strategy is not complicated. They came from executing the kind of digital marketing tips for roofers that most owners hear and never act on. It requires showing up when it’s inconvenient, posting when you’d rather not, and building systems that keep growing even when you’re not in the room.
Ready to see the system behind results like Justin’s? Book a Marketing Demo and we’ll show you exactly how it works. If you’re ready to go deeper and want your team trained to run it all in-house, explore our Consulting Program and let’s build it together.
