The Definitive Guide To Building Your HVAC Marketing Plan (2023 Updated)

Having a HVAC marketing plan can be the key for success in your business. Marketing is a strategic decision that will help your business stick around for the long haul and allow your business to grow. There are hundreds of options for marketing and it can be overwhelming but a successful marketing plan can actually be very beneficial.

While not every marketing or advertising company will be a good fit for you, you just need to decide on a plan that is going to compliment your business and find the marketing firm that is going to help you.

When you think about marketing, you need to consider what type of marketing will suit your business. Do you want more tradition methods or will you dive in to digital marketing? Key question to ask here is “how will my customers find me” and that will help answer “where you need to be”.

Without a marketing plan in your company, you may find that your current customers dry up over night and you haven’t got any jobs on the horizon. You don’t want to leave it too late to expand your client base and target more customers.

Service Manager Juggling Marketing Plan

With marketing you introduce the chance for potential growth and expansion in your business and without a marketing plan you may be leaving future work/customers to fate.

5 Tips You Should Know About HVAC Marketing

We’re going to run through some concepts around how you can build a marketing plan for your HVAC business and consider some of the pitfalls and traps that are easy to fall into.

Simply, marketing is about systems and a long term goal. A one-off hit that you cant repeat isn’t marketing, you need to establish a repetitive plan. You build a marketing base for getting a bigger client base, getting more references and expanding your business. You don’t just have to settle on one marketing software or campaign either, stacking your marketing systems is ideal.

Building a marketing plan is a very strategic task and to undertake this you will need to first define who your target customer is and how you can get them. Below is a couple of ideas for targeting your audience and finding those good customers who are going to help you expand and grow.

Tip 1: Get super targeted on your Customer Avatar

To expand your customer base you first need to consider who your customer avatar is? Who are the people that you need to target? What are their needs and wants? What are their challenges? How can you make their lives better? Knowing the answer to this can be the difference in your business chasing a 3% profit margin or 30% profit margin. If you know who your customer avatar is you can better suit your marketing to find them.

Download our PDF to help find your customer avatar.

It’s all about your customers

When you have an idea of the Avatar you can then develop the Value Creation Journey that will help you find the needs, wants, frustrations and aspirations of your ideal customer.

Download our Journey spreadsheet to get you started in thinking about your customer and how you can target them..

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RkpU6UE5EaNddePBKzDaTtzSQ64EGwRT4LoTm3xFm7c/edit#gid=0

Tip 2: Ask yourself: “Where are those leads hiding?”

For your HVAC marketing plan you want to be able to discover where your customer avatar is hiding. Will you best target your customer’s through a billboard ad on the highway, a Facebook ad, organic search on the internet or through an email campaign?

Building your leads is a long term goal with the aim of expanding your customer base for those down times when your current customers dry up. You always want to be sourcing new avenues and leads for potential customers as the bigger your client base is, the more secure your business is.

How to Improve Your HVAC Website

If a customer drove up to your shop or office and found the site to be littered with garbage, old signs and a rude receptionist – what would you think? Well the same concept can be applied to a company’s website. If a customer googles a company and finds their website is hard to navigate, filled with incorrect information or they don’t even have a website, the customer will loose trust. A well designed website creates a sense of professionalism and accountability for a business.

Customer Reviews

Past customers are a great way to generate ongoing work and also spread news about your business to potential customers. Asking customers to leave a review for your website can be a great (and free) way to improve the look of your business. Customers will trust reviews as an honest opinion about your business and can be just as effective as word of mouth recommendations.

Not only does this look good for new customers but it can also boost your company’s SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) so you appear more often under search results.

Sometimes constructive criticism can be what you need to make changes, consider if your HVAC business has the right tools to succeed.

Check out How to Start a Successful HVAC Business for more.

Is Customer service factored into your HVAC Marketing plan?

For any Commercial HVAC business the key to growth is through being great at what you do. The main measure of this will sit with your customers. If you have technicians on site with a rude attitude, leaving sites in a mess, over charging for your work, or not show up for appointments, word is going to eventually get around and you’ll run out of customers.

By providing great customer service you provide a service that leaves a good impression and they will be more likely to recommend you to a friend or write you a good review as mentioned above.

You need to remember that your competitors will have the same ideas you might have, you always need to consider how to stand out from the crowd in terms of customer service. You want to be able to provide top shelf customer service by being efficient, more professional and more systemised than your competitors.

SEO in your HVAC business

While you might have a great company with lots on offer, in the digital world you could be almost non-existent to a potential client doing a simple google search for “HVAC Technicians in my area”.

When you consider designing your HVAC marketing strategy you need to make sure you consider things like SEO. This may seem foreign and completely unrelated to any HVAC work but the importance of your digital footprint can either make or break your marketing campaign.

SEO can be tricky when algorithms change constantly so adjusting your SEO marketing strategies is a constant upkeep. Just as with anything now in life, if you don’t know anything about SEO or search results, you can hire someone to help you. SEO optimisation is a long term goal and will need ongoing work to keep you popping up on top of the searches, this could be anywhere from three to six months wait.

Paid Advertising For HVAC Companies

Sometimes to make a difference you need to spend a little to make a little. By incorporating a paid advertising campaign into your HVAC company you can increase the number of people who see your ads. You can consider paid advertising platforms like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Bing, LinkedIn, Angie’s List and more.

Paid Advertising may not be within your budget, there are plenty of options out there for every business. There are also options inside paid advertising where you only pay per click so you only pay once the potential client reaches your website. The results from paid advertising can be instant unlike using SEO.

Marketing Strategies and Social Media

Honing into your marketing campaign you should also consider social media as a useful platform for expanding your client base. Facebook is one of the most popular platforms and has a very large potential for expansion. Twitter can be a little harder to break into for some people and Instagram can be great if you have lots of property or product images to display. It will take a little testing in each platform to find what works best for your company.

Social media is where your clients are hiding, if you can find the right platform to reach your target customers you can funnel a larger quantity of people to your website. Marketing is all about increasing the awareness of your business. While using social media as a marketing tool might not give you the same leads as paid advertising might, it is still useful to incorporate into your campaign. Social media will help boost accountability for your business and can divert more traffic for your HVAC company.

Social media is also a way to communicate with an audience where they can see regular posts that are relevant for the pain they are experiencing or the services they are looking for. Seeing a Facebook Ad pop up for spring campaign for duct cleaning can reach an audience right at the time they are thinking about it.

Have you thought about an email campaign for your HVAC company?

An email plan can be useful for any HVAC company, it can be a tool that you can use to constantly build on and improve. You can send out new leads to potential or existing customers with new deals or promotions. Check out our blog post on HVAC Apps for tools such as MailChimp.

Emails can help you pick up work in your off seasons and send out reminders to customers for service work. Email marketing can be even more effective then other methods. You can transform email marketing into a catchy reminder or newsletter for your customers. It’s also a great reminder to your clients that your out there so the next time they need work they will think of your first.

Like we mentioned earlier, the best way to structure a HVAC marketing plan is to layer your marketing ideas, having all these options can work to your benefit and reach a wider spectrum of people.

Tip 3: Keep the high/low season in mind

Keeping your revenue healthy can be hard. When you have periods of no work in parts of the year and other times you are flat out, it can be hard to keep a balanced workload.

One of the biggest challenges of HVAC field service work is the inconsistency of the high and low seasons. Boosting your cash flow can be a big step towards growing your business.

When you start to build your HVAC marketing plan you need to think about balancing your workload across all seasons of the year. By using a Job management software you can begin to turn around these down time to do more of your service work.

The Revenue Growth System used by FieldInsight is a great example of this. This could mean targeting your marketing campaign to helping you even in your busy period and bringing some of the work back in your quiet season.

For success in growing your business you want to consider using an email circuit on a regular basis as a part of your marketing strategy.

Tip 4: Build a system to store your customer’s information

It never looks good to a customer when you can’t find their information, it looks sloppy and unprofessional. It can be extremely frustrating when using outdated systems or paper based systems for organising your data. When you have a good CRM with all of your clients, you increase the opportunity for repeat business and also increase the chance of them recommending you to potential customers.

You need a good system for all your important customer data. Imagine how easy it would be if all of your data was available at your fingertips and searchable by any information like phone number, job notes or suburb. No more getting technicians ringing up the customer on the way to a job because they don’t have the address for the site or forgetting to get their email address and not being able to sent the invoice after the job. Essentially, you want to give your customers the best experience when handling their equipment so you need the best asset management software on the market so you know that your customer data is in good hands.

A key concept to good CRM management is having a consistent procedure or playbook for your technicians out in the field. If you have a mandatory field that they need to capture, like address, surname, phone number, email address or so on, you will have the information you need every time.

Building a checklist takes a lot of the headache out of the problem. You can also add some key questions you are asked to make it faster for the technician and more consistent for the customers.

Tip 5: Consider automation

Talking about your HVAC marketing plan is great, but you need to consider how you are going to go about making this plan a reality.

Are you going to spend hours, manually entering data yourself to keep up with the forever changing HVAC market? We all know how hard and time consuming running a successful HVAC company especially in today’s age is – where digital marketing can seem hard to break in to and be costly.

The answer to repetitive data entry and doing the same thing over and over again? Automation.

FieldInsight is a great automated software that can help you go faster, better and support your continuous improvement as a business. As with all things, when expanding your business you need to take small steps and start from small. Before you know it, your customer base will expand, your workflow becomes balanced and you have new customers ringing you up.

Building blocks

You may start your HVAC marketing plan with a few posts on social media, then update your website or send out an email series and so on. By layering your marketing plan, you can increase your online traffic and increase workflow.

Marketing at it’s simplest is about utilising systems to your benefit and repeating the results to get the outcome you desire. Whether that means getting in more new customers or balancing your on/off seasons that is up to you, but one thing is certain is that marketing will increase your profitability. This is where automation comes into the equation, you need a good foundation for any business to be able to grow from and with automation, growing becomes a lot easier.

Why you should consider an end-to-end job management software?

Commercial HVAC Software could be the key you are looking for in your HVAC marketing plan. The benefits of using an E2E system like job management solution are endless and can make your life a whole lot easier.

An inclusive automated software like FieldInsight will not only help your HVAC business with marketing. FieldInsight will systemise your business by bringing together the parts of your business like office, field, sales and more, all into the one easy to access place.

FieldInsight will incorporate all the moving parts of your HVAC business. Using an automated software will save you hours of manual time and unneeded stress. FieldInsight will work to fit into your business to help you grow and become more efficient. No more late night office hours or weekends spent doing paperwork or sending out emails.

With FieldInsight you can turn this into easy clicks. Just imagine how much you could accomplish if you had an automated software in your business?