When it comes to selecting home services, people want to choose companies they trust. When inviting people to their homes, people are incredibly careful, and rightly so. HVAC marketing helps to assure the customers about your business’s credibility and reliability. Home is a personal space and whoever is invited inside is usually someone that people think is highly reliable and trustworthy. As a home service provider, the HVAC industry needs to put serious thought into how they can prove their reliability to their customers. The following HVAC marketing strategies will help you improve your credibility and build trust among your potential customers.
1. Create your online Visibility
Before letting anyone inside their homes, people do a background check. For HVAC businesses this check will come in the form of a thorough online search.
This means that for every HVAC marketing strategy, the base is creating an online presence. This can be achieved in a variety of ways. The first and foremost is creating a website that potential customers can come and browse through.
The next thing people check is if your business is recommended by other people. In other words, people check for your business’s reviews. Here, you need to make sure that you have a presence on major review platforms that people generally go to check reviews. We will discuss more about review collection in the latter portion of this article.
2. Claiming your Google My Business profile
Eighty-four percent of all searches focus on discovery (BrightLocal, 2019). This means that people do not do specific brand searches as much as a generalised search. The searches might look like, ‘the best HVAC business’, or ‘HVAC business near me’.
When people do such a google search, having a Google My Business listing will greatly improve the chances of your business’s visibility on the search results.
If you optimise your google my business profile to include all relevant and essential information about your business and also use relevant keywords in your listing, the chances of your business showing up will increase.
This brings us to our next point which is improving local SEO.
3. Focus on Local SEO
As a business, you surely want customers that are close to your location to make your business their number one choice! To achieve this you need to make sure that your business is turning up in their search results. This is where Local SEO will help you.
To improve your business’s local SEO you need to keep a couple of things in mind.:
a) Use relevant keywords all over significant places. For example, if you are an HVAC business in Sacramento, then creating a couple of landing pages with the keyword best HVAC business in Sacramento, or writing blogs around the same keyword will definitely help. You also need to ensure that you use a good mix of related keywords and not just one single keyword.
b) Gather reviews across different listing platforms. The more reviews you have across the internet the more it increases your business’s credibility. Establishing a review management strategy is also essential for local SEO.
c) As discussed in the point above, focus on optimising your google my business profile listing. A well-described google my business profile will make it to the elite 3 google map snack pack.
What is Google Snack Pack?
The snack pack also known as “local pack” or” Google 3 pack” is the box that appears at or near the top of a local Google search. It contains the top three local businesses relevant to the query along with the most important information for those businesses.
So if your business appears in the google pack results, it means that google recommends it. This will undoubtedly drive more customers to your business.
4. Collect Reviews
Like we discussed in the points above, reviews hold a major role in building trust and credibility in the customer’s mind. You need to show your customers that you are not shying away from showing what people have to say about your business. This means that you need to have a presence on major review platforms and review platforms that are specific to the HVAC business. For HVAC marketing, review platforms such as Google, Yelp, Google My Business, Angie’s List, Home Advisor, Facebook, and even the Better Business Bureau are important.
Did you know: 72% of customers say they use Google reviews to find businesses
Hence, it goes without saying that collecting reviews on these platform is really essential for HVAC marketing. One might think, how can one collect and monitor reviews across all these different platforms? This is where Emitrr can help you.
With Emitrr you will be able to send text review requests to your customers. This text can contain a link to any of the review platforms you wish. This will help you collect reviews across various platforms. Apart from review collection Emitrr can also help you monitor and respond to reviews under one dashboard. Learn more here.
5. Maintain a Social Media Presence
In the 21st century, not having a social media presence is going to be immensely harmful to your brand. Social media is where people go to validate a business. An updated social media profile shows the customer that the business is legit and active.
Fun Fact: 68% of consumers agree that social media enables them to interact with brands and companies.
People are greatly active on social media and prefer to interact with brands over their social media handles. If you do not have a presence on social media, this means you are losing customer engagement and interaction. It’s important that your HVAC marketing efforts for social media are planned in such a way that shows that you encourage and are available to communicate with your customers on social media as well.
Narrowing down which social media platforms you must create an account on may seem daunting. Just remember, you need to see where your target audience is most active. Another point to consider is checking which platforms have fared well for your competitors.
A good rule of thumb is to start with a Facebook Business Page.
The good news is your Facebook and Instagram profiles can be connected so you wouldn’t need to post your content twice. You can use Facebook Planner to schedule posts on both Instagram and Facebook. It also provides the best time to schedule posts weekly.
6. Consider Paid Advertising
Ranking organically for a keyword may take some time and let’s face it, is not an easy task. Does that mean you should sit back and wait till you show up on the top results? Of course not, the more time you spend waiting, the more customers your rival business is going to take away from you.
This is where you should start considering paid advertising for HVAC marketing. Paid advertising or Pay-per-click(PPC) advertising will help generate more HVAC leads and bring traffic to your website. Pay per click is literally that, you only pay for the number of clicks your website is getting. You can target the keywords that are relevant to your HVAC business and try and rank for them using PPC campaigns.
If you do a quick google search for ‘HVAC business in Sacremento’ you will see the following results :
As you can see the top results are paid ads. To appear on top of any search result for your keyword of interest it has become absolutely imperative that you invest in paid ads along with the organic results. It will attract more eyeballs and hence bring better traffic to your business.
7. Do not forget Google Follow Up Ads
Mostly everyone is aware of google ads but seldom thinks to take Google follow-up ads into consideration. Why do we need google follow-up ads?
Even though your business turned up at the top of search results, it still might be possible that the user clicked on your website but failed to fill out your lead capture form. What do you do in such a case? Is your lead lost forever? The answer is, that it doesn’t have to be.
With google follow-up ads or remarketing or retargeting, you can make sure that your banner ad is ‘popped up’ on the user’s screen on various platforms. This will ensure that your business remains on the top of their mind. Whenever a need arises for your services, Voila! Your business will be the first one that the user thinks about.
Fun Fact – A CMO.com study showed that Google follow-up ads can improve response by up to 400%!
8. Do not forget referral marketing
According to Nielsen research, 83% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? We trust our friends and family the most when it comes to receiving recommendations. To make these recommendations more pronounced you need to incentivize them for your existing customers. If they have an incentive for referring more customers to your business, provided that you provide stellar service, they will surely do so. Some examples of incentives referrals include :
– Offering x% discount on the next service
– Coupons for favorite restaurants or gift cards etc
9. Get your business on relevant listing platforms
Earlier, relevant listings for HVAC businesses could be found on the yellow pages, or in the form of print ads, or ads on television and radio. While some of these methods still hold importance, it is imperative to embrace digital directories as well. Some of the HVAC directories where your business listing should definitely be on, include :
a) Google my Business (As discussed in point 2)
b) Yelp
c) HomeAdvisor
d) Nextdoor
e) Angi
10. Improve Customer Experience
The most potent form of HVAC marketing is always a job well done. When you focus on the customer experience, an array of good things will follow. The customer now satisfied with the job will remember you whenever a need arises for your service, will leave you good reviews online when prompted, and also refer your business to their friends and family, hence helping you build a good word of mouth referral strategy.
The customer journey encompasses everything from the customer visiting your webpage to booking an appointment, getting a quote, and finally getting the job done. All these steps when paid attention to can help improve the customer experience.
FAQs
HVAC marketing refers to implementing strategies such as digital outreach, traditional advertisement, and more to build brand awareness and trust to attract potential customers.
Every year, approximately 20% of HVAC business owners fail across the year, with 70% of new HVAC owners failing in the first year of operation.
Some of the best strategies to grow your HVAC business includes:
1. Using HVAC marketing strategies
2. Creating an HVAC referral program
3. Offering the best customer service
4. Hiring great staff
5. And keeping your employees happy
Conclusion
Establishing an HVAC marketing strategy is important for every HVAC business. From building an online presence to investing in paid advertising methods, all these help to solidify HVAC marketing. As discussed above, HVAC businesses especially need to prove their reliability and credibility because providing HVAC services means being let into people’s homes, so whatever your marketing strategy is make sure it relies this message of trust and reliability.
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