There are many ways to use your working capital to grow your HVAC business, and one is to run an HVAC digital marketing campaign to attract new clients or even to move into a new service area. You may choose to hire an HVAC marketing agency to promote your business or create content on your own, but either way, you need a marketing strategy that will help you achieve your goals.
At Select Funding, our HVAC clients often use the money we provide for digital content marketing, including social media marketing. Since we know it can be challenging to come up with new and compelling ways to promote your business, here are six of our favorite ideas for HVAC digital marketing.
How Can Digital Marketing Help HVAC Contractors?
Let’s start by looking at some of the reasons that digital marketing is necessary and beneficial for HVAC contractors.
HVAC Digital Marketing Statistics
One of the best ways to understand why digital marketing is essential for HVAC companies is to look at statistics. The numbers tell the story:
- 62% of consumers who need an HVAC contractor do an online search before they choose a provider.
- 84% of consumers who search online for HVAC companies say that they didn’t go into the search with a company in mind.
- Searches for HVAC services increase by approximately 20% from year to year.
67% of all homes in the United States have air conditioning and that number is expected to increase. - Altogether, Americans spend $10 billion every year on HVAC systems repair.
What these numbers reveal is that many consumers don’t have a specific HVAC company in mind when they search online for someone to repair their HVAC system. There is a growing need for skilled HVAC technicians and people rely on the internet to find someone who can deliver the services they require.
Benefits of Digital Marketing for HVAC Companies
The benefits of digital marketing make an investment in it worthwhile. Here are some of the ways that digital marketing can help your small HVAC business:
- It’s easy to target the specific audience you want to reach with content that will engage them and help them learn about your business.
- Digital marketing helps your company become more visible online, making it easier for people in your service area to find you.
- Using digital marketing can help you build a memorable and consistent brand that represents your company and its values.
- Digital marketing is affordable and you can reach more potential customers online than you would be able to with offline marketing.
- With digital marketing, you can generate a continuous string of leads that you can then convert into paying customers.
- It’s easy to track the results of digital marketing campaigns–and you can use your metrics to refine your marketing campaigns to make them as effective as possible.
Digital marketing is affordable and effective, and whether you hire a digital marketing agency and pay for marketing services or decide to handle your marketing in house, you can acquire new customers and grow your business.
How Does SEO Help HVAC Contractors?
Before we reveal our favorite ideas for HVAC digital marketing, we should say a word about search engine optimization, or SEO.
SEO is the practice of helping search engines properly categorize and index your company’s website and other online information about your company to improve your Google search rank and help prospective customers find you online.
While it can be quite technical, in its simplest form SEO is the use of specific search terms called keywords, and other technical markers, to make sure that when someone in your service area searches for an HVAC provider, they find you.
Any effective digital marketing strategy must include SEO. For local service providers, local SEO is essential. You should incorporate local search terms on your website and in your social media posts.
SEO can help your company earn a spot at the top of Google’s search results. The top three organic search results on Google get a whopping 68.7% of clicks, so it’s hugely important to use SEO to improve your search rankings.
Effective SEO includes your website as well as any online listings for your company. You should check to make sure that your NAP (name, address, phone number) listings are identical to avoid confusion.
6 Digital Marketing Ideas for HVAC Companies
Now that you understand the importance of HVAC digital marketing and SEO, here are six digital marketing ideas that can help you attract more leads and grow your business.
#1: Update Your HVAC Website
The single most important thing you can do to improve your search engine rankings is to update and optimize your HVAC website. While a website update isn’t the same as a marketing campaign, it is the foundation of all your digital marketing efforts.
There are plenty of templates you can use to create a nice-looking website, but this is one area where you may want to hire a digital marketing agency to make sure that your website looks great, is easy to navigate, and is properly optimized with the best keywords for your area.
#2: Focus Your Social Media Marketing
One of the mistakes that a lot of small companies make is trying to do too much on social media. Instead of trying to be active everywhere, choose your favorite social media platform—or your two favorites—and focus your attention there.
For HVAC companies, we recommend Facebook as the best starting point, since that’s the site where people are most likely to look for local service providers. You’ll need to make sure that your Facebook business page is up to date with correct information, including your business hours, address, phone number, email address, services, and other relevant data.
#3: Incorporate Video Marketing
Video marketing is one of the most popular and most effective marketing formats, so it makes sense to use it to promote your HVAC company. You can post videos on your website, on YouTube, or on your social media pages.
Here are some specific ideas to try:
- Live Q&A videos where you take questions from your followers and answer them.
- Practical videos showing how to clean out an air conditioning filter or some other routine maintenance task.
- Technician introductions. (People will be letting your technicians into their homes, and introducing them in videos can help to build trust.)
- Explainer videos telling your audience what you do and how your work helps to keep their homes comfortable and safe.
- Video testimonials.
Any of these ideas can help you to connect with your target audience, build trust, and get them to hire you the next time they need an HVAC contractor.
#4: Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing has been around a long time and it sometimes gets overlooked as part of a robust digital marketing campaign because it doesn’t seem as exciting or new as social media posts or videos.
The truth is that email marketing has a higher return on investment (ROI) than many other formats. You can build an email list by creating an HVAC checklist or something similar to give to visitors to your website in exchange for their email address.
Email marketing can be used to nurture leads, providing them with information about your company and why they should hire you instead of your competitors. It can also help you spread the word about new services you’re providing or new areas where your services are available.
#5: Social Media HVAC Advertising
Advertising online isn’t free but it can be quite cost effective, particularly if you focus on social media advertising. Facebook has an easy-to-use marketing tool where you can create ads, choose a target audience, and set a budget to help you control your costs.
If you decide to include social media advertising in your marketing strategy, make sure to include a compelling image in your ad and a headline that will grab people’s attention. Many businesses prefer to include videos, since these will play automatically as people scroll through their feeds.
The most important thing to do is to look at your results and metrics and adjust your advertising if you’re not getting the results you want.
#6: Remarketing
Have you ever visited a website and left without buying anything? If you have, you’ve probably been targeted by a remarketing campaign that either showed you an ad or sent you an email reminding you about items you left in a cart or encouraging you to call to book an appointment.
Remarketing is easy to do. All you need is a pixel—a digital marker—embedded on your website. The pixel will track visitors to your website and target them with ads you create that are specific to their behavior. Retargeting ads are about 10 times as effective as banner ads, so that makes them a good investment.
Get Small Business Financing to Fuel Your HVAC Digital Marketing
Digital marketing can do a lot to help your small HVAC business attract new leads and convert them into paying customers. The six ideas that we have listed here can help you get started–and our financing can help you pay for it!
Do you need working capital to invest in marketing your HVAC company? Select Funding can provide it! Click here to read about our HVAC business financing options and begin the application process today
