Morgul Marketing

    St. Louis, MO

    Roofing content for brick buildings and the streets a hail line missed

    An independent city that is legally not part of the county beside it is an arrangement almost nowhere else in the country has, and locals hear it in the first sentence you write. It is one of three facts that shape a roofing feed here. The second is the brick, unusually consistent across the City and the inner suburbs, which turns a lot of roof calls into masonry calls. The third is hail, which crosses a stripe a few miles wide, hits some streets hard and leaves the next block wondering what happened. None of that appears in a national roofing content plan.

    A local hears City or County before they hear anything else

    The City of St. Louis is not part of St. Louis County, people here treat them as different places, and a company that blurs them sounds like it is from somewhere else.

    Write St. Louis and a reader learns nothing about whether you come to their street. Write the City, the County, St. Charles County or the Metro East and they know immediately, because those are the words they use themselves.

    The signal runs well past geography. Somebody who has just read a franchise page saying greater St. Louis will notice a caption that says Maplewood, and will draw a conclusion about who is actually driving here.

    Say where the shop is and say how far you go, in the profile and in plain words. A homeowner in Florissant and one in Kirkwood are both inside the County and are nowhere near each other, and neither assumes you cover both.

    The same discipline helps across the river. The Metro East is a second state, and a reader in Belleville or Edwardsville treats a Missouri-side feed as somebody else's company until work from their side shows up in it.

    A leak on a brick two-family is half a masonry job

    The housing stock here is brick to a degree almost no other American metro matches, and on those buildings the water often gets in above the roof rather than through it.

    On a two-family in Tower Grove, Soulard or Dogtown the roof is low-slope behind a parapet, and the parapet is masonry. Failed coping, open mortar joints and tuckpointing last done a generation ago put water into the same ceiling a bad membrane would.

    The boundary between two trades is the most useful thing a roofing account can publish in this city. Show the parapet from above, show where the roof turns up and meets brick, and say which half is yours.

    Saying a job is not yours is the strongest move available here. Owners have been told by three companies that they need a roof, and the first one to say the coping is the problem gets remembered, and usually gets the roof anyway.

    It also sets up the referral in both directions. Masons in this city meet the same failure from the other side, and a feed that has been honest about the line between the trades is the one they point people at.

    Ice in a built-in gutter is the January story nobody here has filmed

    Freeze and thaw works on a brick parapet and a built-in gutter in a way the owner only ever experiences from the inside, as a stain spreading on a plaster wall.

    A built-in gutter running behind a parapet was never designed to hold ice. Water backs up where the roof meets a century of brick, freezes overnight, moves the joint slightly, and does it again the next night.

    The owner sees a wet patch on plaster in an upstairs room in February and calls somebody about the wall. Nobody has connected the outside half of that story to the inside half in public, which leaves it open.

    Film the outside half while it is happening. Ice at the eave, the gutter line, frost sitting on the coping, a downspout that is not moving anything at all. It is one of the few roofing subjects here with a genuine audience in the middle of winter.

    Be honest about what an owner should leave alone. A flat roof behind a parapet in a cold snap is not a place for somebody with a hammer and a ladder, and saying so is more useful than any tip.

    The edge of the stripe runs down the middle of a street, and both sides are in your comments

    A hail line has a ragged edge, and the neighbors sitting just outside it ask the hardest question your comment section will get.

    A line can put dumpsters on every block in Kirkwood and leave the next few streets with nothing anybody can see. Both sets of owners end up in the same thread, and the ones the line appeared to miss are asking whether that means anything.

    Say what is true rather than what is comfortable. The edge of a hail line is not a straight boundary, one house being hit tells you little about the house beside it, and nobody settles it from a photograph taken in a driveway. Then say what does settle it, which is somebody on the roof.

    The brick half of the metro cannot even guess, because a low-slope roof behind a parapet offers the ground nothing at all. Publishing the parapet version of that answer separates you in a single reply, since a crew working the stripe carries the shingle version and nothing else.

    Cadence, permission, who carries the camera and what to do with paid money work the same here as anywhere, and we cover those once on our roofing social media page at /industries/roofing/social-media.

    Questions we actually get

    Should we write St. Louis or the name of the municipality?
    Both, in that order, and the municipality is the part doing the work. A reader in Webster Groves is not sure a company saying greater St. Louis will drive there, and a reader in the City hears the same phrase as suburban. Name the place in the caption, name the County or the City in the profile, and be specific about how far west and how far across the river you go. Vagueness reads as a call center.
    Somebody in Ballwin asked whether the hail that hit Kirkwood hit them too. What do we say?
    That the edge of a line is ragged, that a neighbor being hit says little about their own house, and that it takes somebody on the roof to settle it. Then say what a look actually involves and who ought to do it. Refusing to guess in public is worth more than a guess, because the whole block is reading, and the company that would not pretend is the one they call when they do want it checked.
    The leak turned out to be tuckpointing. Do we post that?
    Post it. It is the most credible thing a roofing account in this city can publish, because every owner of a brick building has been told a story about their roof that did not fix anything. Show the parapet, show the open joint, say the roof was not the problem, and say who does that work instead. You lose that job and win the next three on the block.
    There is nothing to see on a low-slope roof behind a parapet. How do we film it?
    From the top of the parapet looking in, and from the ladder looking along the coping. The frame that works is the junction rather than the field: where the membrane turns up, where the built-in gutter runs, where the brick meets the roof. A wide shot of a flat roof is a gray rectangle. A tight shot of a failed joint with water sitting behind it explains a price.
    Our shop is in the County but a lot of our work is in the City. What do we say in the profile?
    Say where the shop is, because a local will work it out anyway and being coy about it costs you. Then say which places you serve, specifically enough to be useful: the City, the inner suburbs by name, how far into St. Charles County, whether you cross the Mississippi. An address in the County and an address in the City read as two different companies here, and the fix is not hiding the address, it is answering the question the address raises.

    What is different here

    Florida has tightened what a roofing contractor may say to a homeowner about an insurance claim, and the rules around soliciting claim work carry real consequences for the client rather than the agency. Design wind speed and product approval also vary by county, so a re-roof specification is a local document. Marketing built around storm claims needs legal review before it runs.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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