HVAC Marketing – Top 8 Strategies to Grow Your Company

HVAC marketing focuses on companies in the heating, air conditioning, and ventilation sphere. Digital marketing is the ideal complement to your HVAC marketing plan and can give you the edge that your company needs.

Why do HVAC businesses need digital marketing?

HVAC marketing works best with digital marketing strategies as you can separate your business from your competitors to boost your audience and sales. Some digital marketing elements that you may use include SEO, email marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing.

In this exploratory guide, we’ll examine 8 digital marketing facets that belong to any good HVAC marketing plan. Your company can then strategize how to grow!

How to Create a Successful HVAC Marketing Plan

1. Build a Mobile-Friendly Website

What kind of website currently represents your HVAC company?

A website is more than a chance to introduce current and potential customers to your long list of HVAC services. It’s also an opportunity to make a good first impression on leads who are curious about what you do.

You know the saying. You only have one chance to make a good impression, so the first part of your HVAC marketing plan must be to prioritize a mobile-friendly website design. 

According to review resource Review42, 70 percent of website traffic is from mobile devices, namely smartphones. 

Further, 80 percent of the sites that rank the best all have mobile-friendly elements. This will matter more when we talk about SEO, which we will very shortly. 

A mobile-friendly site is one in which all the elements work seamlessly together on a smaller screen as they would on a desktop computer. 

You may have to work with a graphic designer or a web developer to get your site ready for mobile users, but the results will be worth it.

After all, Review42 says that most consumers–61 percent–don’t return to a site that isn’t mobile-friendly. Your HVAC site could stop losing traffic.

If you’re struggling with other areas of your HVAC website design, we have a handy post full of inspirational designs for you to review and emulate.

2. Use SEO

Search engine optimization or SEO is integral for any company to succeed and thus is another must-have component of your HVAC marketing plan. 

SEO, if you’re not familiar, determines where the HVAC website that you worked so hard on will rank when someone searches for HVAC companies online. 

For your purposes, we’d recommend using local SEO strategies.

Local SEO grows your SEO standing in your neighborhood, which is why it’s such a natural part of your HVAC marketing strategy. 

According to HubSpot, most Google searchers–46 percent in all–want local information. Thus, you’re appealing to almost half of Google searchers when you use local SEO tactics.

Here are some of the tactics that we recommend you utilize per our post above.

• Create a Google Business Profile and fill it out completely if you haven’t already.
• Consider a backlinking partnership with other local businesses.
• Provide your contact information on your website so your HVAC company might appear on local business listings online.
• Make local-centric content. 
• Obtain more customer reviews (more on this in a little bit!).

3. Pay for Digital Advertising

The next part of your HVAC marketing plan is digital advertising. 

Even if you only hope to become known on a local level, you still can’t forego advertising. This is your chance to reach new markets and potentially grow your customer base, which will in turn grow your revenue.

On our blog, we recommended digital advertising platforms such as native or display ads, LinkedIn advertising, Instagram advertising, Facebook advertising, and Google Ads. 

Let’s explain some of these advertising methods in more detail now.

• Native or display ads: Display ads, which are also known as native ads, pop up everywhere on the Internet. You may see them on social media, when checking your email, or when using a website. The ads blend in well so first-time viewers may be more receptive to the message in the ad because they might not realize it’s an ad. 
• Social media ads: Speaking of social media, these days, every social platform has its own paid advertising method. You choose which audience segments you want to see the message, create the ad based on various types, run the ad, and review analytics all within the social media ad manager. 
• Google AdWords: Google AdWords is a great tool for local search. You can bid for long-tail keywords, which resonate more with local audiences, and then create highly targeted ad campaigns.

Our two top pointers for digital advertising as part of HVAC marketing are this. 

First, you must create an advertising budget. Canadian resource BDC states that B2C companies (like your HVAC business) spend five to 10 percent of their revenue on ads while B2B companies spend only two to five percent.

Our second piece of advice is to segment your audience. Unless you split your audience into smaller groups based on demographics, geographics, and psychographics, then you’re wasting advertising dollars on groups that might not care what your message is. 

4. Acquire Testimonials and Reviews

Video testimonial software Boast.io states that more than 90 percent of today’s customers will read a review before they buy something. 

That goes for products and services alike, so if your HVAC company doesn’t have very many reviews or even no reviews, that’s the next part of your HVAC marketing plan to focus on. 

Ideally, you want full-bodied testimonials that share how your HVAC services benefitted area customers. When leads and customers read these testimonials and reviews, their trust in your company will increase. 

How does your HVAC company begin acquiring reviews? In our post about medspa reviews, we shared some excellent pointers that we’ll recap now.

• Focus on high-quality service: Reviews can kind of write themselves, especially if you’re providing excellent service. Your customers will want to share their experience with others, so they’ll feel inclined to leave a review.
• Ask: Yes, sometimes it really is as simple as asking your customers to leave you a review. Make it easy for them to review your HVAC company by linking them to the appropriate source.
• Incentivize: If your customers still aren’t biting, then incentivize them to leave reviews with discount codes. You could even create an exclusive contest that only reviewers can enter. Make sure you choose a fabulous prize. 

5. Create a Content Marketing Plan

No HVAC marketing plan is complete without a content marketing strategy. 

With content marketing, you can convert more leads into customers, improve customer loyalty, and increase your SEO and thus your ranking. 

In our post about content marketing services, we recommend incorporating the following elements into your content marketing plan:

• Blogs
• Podcasts
• User-generated content
• Webinars
• Videos
• Infographics
• Case studies
• Whitepapers
• eBooks

No matter which type of content you produce, be it written content or video, it has to be valuable. 

Valuable content is informative and educational. It teaches the reader something they didn’t know, but it’s not presented in a dry format. It’s exciting and engaging. 

When writing content, that means short paragraphs, bullet points to break up the text, and images, such as what you see on this blog. 

If you produce videos or podcasts, then watch your recording times. Video resource Vidyard says a two-minute video is a perfect length. 

Maybe you can go five minutes, but when you’re just starting out with HVAC content marketing, don’t go longer than five minutes.

Another key to content marketing success is consistency. You should create an editorial calendar and follow that. Produce more content than you need so that even on those weeks when it’s a holiday or you’re sick, your content production doesn’t suffer one iota.

6. Deploy an Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing is powerful stuff! You can grow your audience, help convert leads to customers, nurture current customers for more loyalty and engagement, and build your sales. 

Plus, it’s a cost-effective part of your HVAC marketing strategy.

We wrote an informative guide on email marketing for service businesses that details an action plan for beginning with content marketing.

Here’s a brief rundown of that plan.

First, you need a goal. Does your HVAC company want more sales for the quarter? New leads? Better customer retention?

Once you determine your goal, you must segment your audience according to which groups are conducive to achieving those goals. 

Next, you want to focus on expanding your email list. This is where content marketing comes from. You can take a few chapters from that HVAC eBook you wrote or gather some infographics and offer those as lead magnets. 

From there, you determine the kind of email content you’ll send (newsletters, tips, etc.) and the frequency. Your HVAC company can send emails daily, weekly, or monthly as well as somewhere in between.

You don’t want to send emails so seldomly that your customers forget about you, but emailing too often could cause your audience to unsubscribe.

7. Use Social Media Marketing (Including YouTube)

Social media is an invaluable tool for increasing brand interaction, finding new potential customers, helping your content reach new eyes, improving your reputation, and connecting with your audience. 

As part of your HVAC marketing plan, you must be ready to develop a strong social media presence. 

Just as posting content regularly is important in your content marketing strategy, you must be active on social media as well.

Having an active social media presence doesn’t exclusively mean posting, posting, posting. You want to engage with your audience, responding to comments and messages. 

One social media platform that you should especially focus on for HVAC marketing is YouTube. That’s right, you or someone else in your company will have to get in front of a camera and make videos. 

Did you know that as many as 88 percent of marketers are already using videos? So says Wyzowl. If your HVAC company isn’t, then you risk being left behind. 

Video marketing is a unique opportunity to pull the curtain back on your HVAC company. You can do employee profiles or show a behind-the-scenes glimpse into what the average day in the life of an HVAC worker looks like.

You can also use video to educate and inform. Perhaps you do a video tutorial showing your audience how to do basic at-home HVAC maintenance.

8. Build a Referral Network

Whether you’re a dentist or an HVAC tech, there’s no denying that referrals are a powerful way to build a business. That’s why they’re our last recommended part of your HVAC marketing strategy. 

Retail TouchPoints, a retail insights service, notes that more than 85 percent of consumers trust referrals. 

After all, when their friend or family member suggests a product or service, it seems much more genuine than a company doing the same.

How do you generate the kind of referral network that builds your audience and adds strong leads to your sales funnel?

You want to start with your most loyal, long-term customers. They can be a part of your pilot referral program. Then, gradually trickle it down to the less-long-term but still viable customers, and so on.

The best referral programs have awesome incentives. Those incentives should build so that the more referrals your customers offer, the better the benefits they’re receiving. 

Conclusion

These 8 strategies as part of an HVAC marketing plan use digital marketing methods that have long since been proven effective. 

Whether your HVAC company is new to the marketplace, or you’ve been around for a while but you’re not making a meaningful impact, these methods are the first steps to growing your business. If you need more personalized help with your digital marketing strategy, you can count on the pros at Mediaboom. We’re a local digital marketing agency that offers content marketing, SEO, content production, social media marketing, email marketing, web development, and digital advertising services.