The world of HVAC is a competitive one, and that’s why it’s vital to have a good advertising plan laid out that gets you ahead of the competition and in front of the right customers. Not only that, but you might find yourself stuck with a lot of junk leads that don’t go anywhere and just fill your inbox. With a good ad campaign and a seamless advertising plan, you can eliminate those bad leads and start seeing legitimate, qualified leads coming your way. So how can you get started? Well, we’ve come up with a few advertising tips to help.
Spruce Up Your Website
First things first: you need to make sure that your website is in the best shape it can be. When you’re leading people to your site from ads, you want them to land on a website that looks nice and professional and is easy to read and navigate. In this day and age, a bad website can be the sole reason someone chooses not to go with your services. A good website can boost your credibility and show that your business is legit and know what you’re doing.
Hiring an agency to build out your website, so it looks aesthetically pleasing can be a good start. If you choose to design it internally, WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and other website building tools have plenty of templates and tools to guide you through a website build. But a website needs more than to just look pretty. You should also always include the following to ensure your website is easily navigatable and helps users quickly determine whether they will work with you.
- Include an “About” page that talks about your HVAC company and your staff. Including staff bios, a snippet about your culture, your mission statement, and some other personal details can give a human aspect to your business. People love to work with companies they can trust and relate to.
- Users should be able to easily find and click “Contact Us” on whatever page they are on. Putting your contact information in clear view on each page makes it that much easier for a prospective customer to give you a call or email you.
- In addition to contact information, lead-capture forms allow customers to give more information such as name, address, email info, and details on the services they’re looking for. These lead capture forms allow your HVAC company to get as much info about a customer as you can in order to reach out and get their business.
- Clearly displaying all HVAC services you offer on your website can also entice customers to contact you. They should be able to click once and get the information they need. Check out this site for a guide on how to build your ideal HVAC website design.
Chat Feature
If you want to increase your customer service efforts and make it even easier for customers to reach out, try implementing a chat feature on your website. If you have the staff and the time to quickly respond to instant messages on your site, a chat feature can be a great way to handle the outreach. You can determine which hours the chat window is available on your site, and when it is, visitors to your site have the option to chat live with a customer service agent in the lower corner of the webpage.
This can offer a lot of relief to customers wanting information quickly and have been on the hunt for the best HVAC company for a while. They can get the answers they need immediately rather than waiting for a call or email back. And some people don’t want to spend the time physically speaking with a company as they’re doing their research. Chatting via instant message can alleviate any nerves or pressure they may feel on the phone as well.
Showcase Testimonials and Reviews
When people are looking for home services like HVAC, electrical, plumbing, etc., they rely heavily on reviews and the experiences of others to find reputable companies to hire. Your HVAC company would be remiss if you did not include real-life testimonials as part of your marketing efforts.
One cool way to incorporate testimonials is by making a video of your customers telling about their great experience and compiling a few into a nice branded video for your website. If people visit your site or your social media page and the first thing they see is real customers speaking about their experience, it has a much higher chance of enticing them to contact you.
Referral Programs
In addition to testimonials and reviews, offering perks and benefits to employees or customers for referrals is another great way to get the word out of your services. Piggybacking off of the trusted word of mouth efforts can be a huge contributor to leads. Get both your staff involved as well as clients. Incentives for employees could be a $500 bonus for every referral you bring in. Customers could receive deals on future HVAC services if they refer a new customer. It’s fun, enhancing, and effective.
Direct Mail
As more and more companies move away from direct mail and towards email marketing efforts, direct mail has remained one of the proven marketing methods for HVAC and other home service companies. As of February of 2020, statistics showed that 73% of American consumers actually prefer direct mail advertising because they can go back and read it whenever they want to. It’s marketing on their own time rather than emails and texts or banner ads that they feel pressured to look into right away.
Putting together a nice branded HVAC postcard can be a highly effective way to reach your local audience. And it is relatively cheap and makes it just as easy for leads to roll in if you include your phone number and email address for contact info. For the postcards, keep the design simple and to the point. Use your branded colors with an eye-catching headline and list of specials or services on one side and your contact details on the other side.
Seasonal Advertising
For HVAC companies who service two big seasons per year, it’s critical to nail down your seasonal advertising. You will want to push your heating services for the cold months and your air conditioning services for the warm months. But it’s vital to start your campaigns at the right time. If you’re looking to promote your heating services for winter, don’t start the campaign in November.
You will want to start your marketing campaigns at least 6-8 weeks before people actually are facing any sort of weather change. This is so that your campaign can pick up speed, and also, people start thinking about these kinds of repairs and replacements long before they need it. If someone’s A/C went out last Summer, they wouldn’t wait until mid-June to get it fixed. Seasonal advertising campaigns can contribute some of the biggest benefits to your revenue and should be a top priority.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
You are probably familiar with the sponsored ads that populate at the top of Google searches or those banner ads that show up when browsing websites. This is pay-per-click advertising. These ads show up in these locations, and when someone clicks on them, the company running the ads pays a fee. This type of marketing is very advantageous for service companies like HVAC.
However, it’s most beneficial when used with other types of advertising and when you have a beautiful website, as we stated above. When people click on your PPC ad, they will end up on your website, where they will decide whether or not to work with you. Your website will be the final stamp on that outreach.
Also, PPC can be beneficial because you only pay when people click on the ad (hence the name), but that can also mean many clicks happen that you pay for that don’t end up as leads. So you can set a budget for your ads to run and ensuring you have all of the other good stuff in place (website, marketing efforts, good reputation). PPC can work very well to bring in leads.
Boost Follow-Up Ads
Follow-up ads, or retargeting ads, work kind of similar to PPC, but you can actually follow prospects who land on your website but never actually convert to a lead. Statistics show that consumers are 70% more likely to convert if they see and follow a retargeting ad.
Sometimes consumers will visit your site to look around but don’t need your services quite yet. But that exposure to the retargeting campaigns keeps you in the back of their mind when the time does come for them to contact you.
Target Specific Geographic Locations
HVAC companies work locally, so geographical targeting is critical to getting people from nearby cities you service to find you. Competition is thick amongst local contractors, so boosting outreach to specific geographic locations is huge. Say you are an HVAC company located in the heart of Minneapolis, but your service area is within a 20-mile radius. That includes dozens of suburbs that you should be targeting as well as Minneapolis.
You can do this by building out city-specific landing pages. These pages will become landing pages when people search “Bloomington HVAC company,” “Fridley HVAC company,” “HVAC company near me,” etc. They won’t show up on your main webpage, but people will be able to navigate to those pages from Google and find you super easily. Plus, with the proper SEO, those landing pages can climb to the top results of Google.
Keep it Consistent
And most importantly of all, keep it consistent. The last thing you want to do is spend a ton of money on a couple of marketing campaigns, watch them be a little successful, but then don’t continue marketing your HVAC company the rest of the year. Consistency is what will keep the leads coming and your company growing. This is why it’s vital to have a solid marketing budget with detailed marketing spend laid out and utilize multiple marketing channels so you can hit all avenues of the market.
Marketing your own HVAC company can be a lot of hard work. That’s where we come in. Hook Agency works with dozens of contractors and helps them gain leads and show up higher on Google. Check out our HVAC SEO services to add to your marketing efforts.
