HVAC Marketing: Everything Your Business Needs in 2024

HVAC industry marketing can be a difficult task with all of your local competition. Learn five tips and strategies to gain more customers and boost your HVAC business.

Finding new customers is the lifeblood of your business, but it can be tough to find them in your local area. Competition can make it even more challenging. You may have a website, but you need to ensure you receive local customers. Your website is only as good as the kinds of leads it produces. For instance, if it routinely drives traffic from people outside of your service area, then it’s not doing you any favors.

This article aims to provide you with options and a marketing plan to help you find local customers in need of your services. We’ll walk you through the best HVAC marketing strategy you should use. Best of all, most of it can be easily implemented in a few days and doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg. It all starts with a digital marketing plan. Don’t break out into a cold sweat. It’s not as complicated as it sounds. Consider our HVAC marketing ideas below and you could possibly see the results as soon as next month.

Understanding HVAC Marketing

HVAC marketing should lead to business growth. You can devote your time and energy to attracting new customers, retaining existing ones, and meeting sales goals. Data-driven marketing strategies are the secret sauce and can help HVAC companies reach and target their customer base more effectively.

By hitting the mark with your HVAC marketing plan, you can use your resources more wisely, leading to more sales and a more attractive return on investment for your HVAC company. What’s more, a well-oiled marketing machine allows HVAC companies to yield more reviews and testimonials. Trust is currency today, so these customer-generated assets can help convince more people that your HVAC services are the best ones for the job.

How to Start Creating Your HVAC Marketing Plan

Everything worth doing starts with a plan, and that’s true in business, too. A marketing plan should do the following for your HVAC company:

Set Goals and Metrics

How will you know you succeeded in improving how you generate leads or reaching out with local SEO? You might measure your marketing plan’s results in terms of the number of inquiries on your website or incoming calls. From here you need to track progress and be consistent in how you capture information.

Understand Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Every business has something different to offer. Yours could be that you’re a third-generation business. Or, maybe you have niche knowledge your competitor lacks. Determine what makes you special and own it in your marketing.

Identify Your Ideal Customer

Just as each company boosts a USP, it also has its own target customer base. Maybe yours is a homeowner in a certain zip code who’s in their 40s with expendable income. Understanding who you’re trying to reach can help you refine your message — and make it more likely to land.

5 HVAC Marketing Strategies

Today’s average newspaper readership has dropped drastically in the last ten years. Why? People are getting their news, entertainment, and information on the internet. That’s where your customers are; meet them where they are!

While the internet gets a lot of shade these days for stirring social discord, it’s also undoubtedly what brings us together. Here’s a great article from the Pew Research Center that explains how the internet plays a role in our lives. Basically, our society is ultra-connected and we have online communities to thank. Many people are glued to their screens, which makes targeting them even easier than a decade ago.

1. Get Your Business Listed on Google

Google is the number one search engine used by mobile phone users. Very few people use the Yellow Pages anymore because they’ve got the world at their fingertips with their cell phones.

Google Local Service Ads make it quick and easy to be found when people use talk-to-text features on their phones and say something like, “Siri, find me an HVAC technician in my area.” If they are using an Android phone, they’ll just say, “Hey Google, find me an HVAC tech in my area.” The results will be the same – the businesses listed with Google Local Service Ads will pop right up.

How do you get listed? Go here. Google has made it incredibly easy and even provides a phone number so you can talk to a real person to walk you through it. Google allows you to set your budget based on the leads you’d like to receive each month. This way, you never spend more than you want to, and your Google representative will explain to you how it works when you target your ads locally. You’ll be able to track your ads to see how many times they are viewed and how many people click on them to reach you. This helps you learn how to word your ads to invite more people to click through and reach you.

2. Use Social Media Platforms Like Facebook

You can target locally by using proven HVAC marketing strategies. For example, Facebook advertising is set up very similarly to Google advertising but directed toward the people who use that platform.

You’re able to track your ads and determine results with social media ads. It’s a good idea to use geofencing where you want the ads to be seen. This ensures the right audience is seeing what you want in the right location. Here are some statistics on Geofencing in marketing. Check out Facebook IQ’s Topics and Trends Report for 2020 and learn how to use Facebook ads to your advantage.

Don’t be intimidated by this undertaking. Geofencing works with GPS technology to ensure that ads are shown only to the people in your local area. It uses RFID technology in some cases, as well. This ensures that only people within specific geographic boundaries–which you determine yourself–can see your advertising. That means you aren’t spending money to show an ad to someone 200 miles away, wasting time, effort, and budget.

3. Build a Website for Your Business

When it comes to determining how to advertise your HVAC business, don’t overthink it. Start with the basics. Create a website if you don’t have one. If you do have one, stop neglecting its upkeep. This is a huge mistake that many businesses make. Too often, businesses put a website up like a placeholder with some contact information—and never do anything else with it. Use local SEO by ensuring that when someone searches “HVAC business near me,” your business is the first one that pops up in their search results.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will help you get your website ranked on search engines like Google or Bing. If you’ve got the site with the best information, most keywords appropriately used, and regularly updated information, your page will rank higher in search results.

The example in the photo below shows how traffic is tracked on an optimized website. They also used a newsletter to drive traffic to their site. Look at the spike in traffic that was created! Orbit Media is one of many companies that work with their clients, building optimized websites that become funnels to catch leads and bring them right to you.

Using blogs and newsletters is a way to gain new customers, and they are essential elements of any HVAC marketing plan. Don’t forget to install a web chat feature so potential customers can reach out to you and get answers right away. Podium is the best tool for this, as they also offer a free Webchat feature. Read up on the benefits and use this tool to nurture leads!

4. Check Mapping Tool Advertising Like Waze

Waze is a GPS driving app that gives turn-by-turn directions for travelers. What makes Waze different from other applications is that it encourages users to provide input by marking construction, accidents, potholes, and other distractions – even going so far as to tell others where police have been spotted.

Waze has on-map advertising for your local business that will show a clickable icon over the top of your business location whenever someone drives by it. This may seem insignificant, but it forms a subliminal message to call you when trouble arises for those who might see it every day on the way to work.

People are prompted to stop, and with a quick click on the map, they will be led to your business and its contact information. It’s a handy tool that is quite popular with millennials. It’s incredibly affordable to advertise your business as a pin on the map.

5. Don’t Overlook iPhone Users on Apple Maps

This is another go-to way to make your HVAC company visible locally. Approximately 100 million iPhone users are driving around out there on any given day. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to get in front of them at the right time.

One advantage is the app is growing and changing all the time, so this is a great place to ensure that you can market your HVAC services to local customers— and it’s free. Ensure that you are listed because it’s free to do so and will only take you a few minutes. For detailed instructions, check out this piece from Entrepreneur Magazine.

This is another form of geolocation marketing, and it’s one of the fastest-growing trends in marketing. If you didn’t read the link above, it’s worth the time to see why it has higher returns than most other forms of marketing today.

How to Market My HVAC Business: 4 Tips & Ideas

Success in HVAC marketing happens by design. The most effective business leaders in the industry swear by the following:

Partner With Local Businesses

Sponsoring charity events and even aligning with complementary businesses can help to position you as community-minded. People do business with people and customers might look at you more favorably if they see you putting in face time.

Target Seasonal Needs

Spring and fall are opportune times to target people with your marketing strategy because a lot of homeowners are thinking about summer and winter comfort, respectively. You could send a postcard reminding them to get their units serviced so they don’t risk a breakdown in the middle of a heatwave or snowstorm.

Offer Loyalty Programs

Repeat customers are worth their weight in gold, as it’s costly to accrue new ones. For this reason, you might implement a loyalty program. Maybe they get $10 off a seasonal service in exchange for providing an email or phone number.

Showcase Successful Projects

Prospective customers might take what you say at face value, but they might be inclined to be wooed by before-and-afters and customer testimonials. Be sure to freshen up your files every few months so you can present current information.

Build Your HVAC Marketing Plan With Podium

You should now have a better understanding of some of the best ways to boost your traffic. Some of these tactics are free, and others are low-cost. If you’re spending money on the phone book or an ad in the local paper, you’re wasting your money. Instead, invest your money in proven ways to attract new customers.

Overwhelmed by the things you’ll need to keep track of? Don’t stress when you have resources to help you achieve your goals. You’ve got Podium’s free tools to build your HVAC marketing plan in your back pocket that you can use. They’ve even got review tools to prompt folks to leave you an excellent review by sending them a text message. All they have to do is click the link and rave about your service. You’ll build a long list of 5-star reviews in no time, which drives more traffic to your website. Your phone will start to ring with qualified leads. That’s your HVAC marketing plan hard at work!

That’s not the only way Podium can help small business owners like yourself. Podium can keep you organized and on task so your business runs smoothly. For example, Podium makes it easy to keep your messages all in the same place. You can even use it to keep in touch with your technicians out in the field. Send your tech an assignment as soon as a customer reaches out. Using the same inbox, forward their information to your tech for convenience and track the status of jobs. All you need is their phone number and address. You can confirm with the client that someone from your team is on the way.