For your HVAC business to succeed, one of the things you need to have is a game plan to reach out to new people and turn them into customers. In short, you need to develop decent HVAC marketing strategies for your company.
With solid HVAC marketing, you can:
- Simplify the daily execution of your company’s marketing tasks
- Ensure all your marketing efforts contribute to meeting your company’s goals
- Remove all distractions so you can stay competitive in your industry
- Make a better, more lasting impression on your target audience
So if you want your HVAC business to thrive online and in real life, then you have to come up with a good marketing strategy for it.
Now while developing HVAC marketing strategies, it’s vital that you avoid making mistakes along the way. Some of the most common ones include the following:
Not Setting SMART Goals
Goals serve as the backbone of any effective marketing strategy. Without them, your campaigns will be riddled with distractions, delays, and truckloads of other problems. What’s more, it will lead to your team losing focus and motivation, too.
In short, your HVAC marketing strategies won’t be able to help your HVAC business grow without goals. So best make sure you set some before making one. And as any skilled strategist will tell you, you need to make sure these objectives are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-based).
With the right SMART goals, you can help your team stay clarified on the company’s objectives, spot areas of improvement, and execute marketing campaigns more successfully. But more importantly, they will improve your business’ ability to engage with its customers, potentially boosting revenue in the process.
If this is your first time creating HVAC marketing strategies, then best stick with the five SMART goals for the first year:
- Release a new HVAC product or service
- Boost your business’ website interaction
- Ramp up your social media efforts
- Maintain or improve customer satisfaction
- Try HVAC direct mail marketing
Neglecting Market and Marketing Research
Making assumptions about your market, customers, competitors, and systems can spell doom for your HVAC business, wasting your precious time, money, and effort. So better avoid doing that by conducting proper, intensive market and marketing research. This way, you can efficiently dedicate your resources in the right places.
Now the first thing you need to know about market and marketing research is that they’re two different things. Market research involves identifying a specific group within your target audience. Then you’ll focus your efforts exclusively on them to understand their behavior and motivation. Through it, you can improve communication with your current and potential customers, identify opportunities to win more customers, and lower your marketing strategy’s risks.
On the other hand, marketing research evaluates the entire marketing process of a company. It examines not just your target market, but also your business model. Through it, you’ll be able to identify what’s working in your business model and what isn’t. And it will enable you to assess the Four Ps of marketing for your HVAC business.
By skipping market research, you’ll waste your efforts on making HVAC products and services that your target audience don’t want. And by neglecting marketing research, you won’t be able to continuously improve your campaigns. So make it a point to do both everytime you’re building new marketing strategies
Focusing on Tactics Instead of Strategies
A lot of business owners and even some marketing executives tend to focus too much on tactics when implementing marketing strategies. Don’t make the same mistake and follow suit. Otherwise, you’ll end up wasting your efforts and missing the bigger picture. Say you want a new website for example. If you don’t know how doing so can help meet your business objectives, then better think twice before including the task in your strategy.
For your HVAC marketing strategies to succeed, you need the right combination of tactics and strategies. That is, you must come up with an overall strategy that includes the tactics that can actually help you achieve your specific goals.
Additionally, you need to know the difference between tactics and strategies. Strategy involves the overarching plan or approach that will help you achieve the main objectives your organization is working towards. It basically helps set the tone for all your company’s activities and tactics.
Meanwhile, tactics are the specific tasks included in the strategy for it to succeed. While it can help you get things done, it won’t help your HVAC brand reach new heights if employed without an overall game plan.
As a business owner or marketing team leader, you need to focus on the overall marketing strategy rather than the tactics. So best delegate those to your teammates and direct your attention on the bigger picture instead.
Targeting Too Broad of An Audience
Many business owners also believe that casting a wide net is a great way to reach more customers and expand their marketing efforts. But here’s the thing: most of your HVAC company’s revenue will come only from a specific group of people. By attempting to target an audience that’s too broad, you might end up neglecting this group. What’s worse, doing so will prevent you from developing a better understanding of your target customers’ interest, behavior patterns, and pain points.
So do yourself a favor and avoid targeting too broad of an audience. Instead, you should focus on a specific group within your target audience at a given time. And the best way to do just that is through developing customer personas.
Basically, a customer persona is a semi-fictional “person” that represents some of the key traits of your HVAC business’ target audience. These traits can be obtained through a combination of web analytics and user research. Through customer personas, you’ll have insight into your potential customers’ mindset as they search for HVAC products or services. This allows you to understand them better, as well as provide the best solutions to their problems.
By creating customer personas, you’ll be able to target specific groups of people based on their needs, interests, and other factors. This will ultimately enable you to calibrate your marketing strategy, allowing it to produce maximum results.
Defining and Tracking the Wrong KPIs
There are multiple reasons why you need to track KPIs (key performance indicators). For one thing, it allows you to see if the campaign is helping your HVAC company achieve its goals. By tracking certain KPIs, you can also sense danger more easily, allowing you to steer your business away from it. But more importantly, it will help you monitor your present customers (alongside the revenue they produce), your ability to gain new ones, and the cost needed to acquire them. So best make it a priority to track them while implementing your marketing strategies.
That being said, not all KPIs are created equal. So as you pick the right KPIs to monitor, you should weed out the bad ones along the way. Otherwise, your strategy will end up not achieving any of your business goals. Luckily, identifying bad KPIs can be done in five ways:
- Check if the KPIs can actually help achieve a business objective
- Check if the KPI has multiple definitions
- Check if the KPI can be backed with reliable data
- Check if the KPI is clear or vague
- Check if the KPI can be visualized
Once you’ve gotten rid of these bad KPIs from your marketing strategies, replace them with better ones, including:
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Return on Investment (ROI)
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
- Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
- Conversion Rate
Relying on Dirty Data
Now-a-days, we live in a world with a hyper competitive economy. To survive (let alone thrive) in it, your business’ HVAC marketing strategies must be data-driven. Your marketing team must be able to collect data, and then analyze the hell out of it to anticipate future or emerging consumer behavior.
However, you must also make sure that the data you’ve gathered is clean. That’s because dirty data will reduce your marketing strategy’s effectiveness. Aside from preventing your marketing team from making accurate, well-informed decisions, it will lead to unnecessary spending and lower productivity, too.
Thankfully, detecting dirty data is fairly easy. All you need to do is analyze the information, then check if it’s:
- Inaccurate or incorrect
- Outdated
- Incomplete
- Insecure
- Inconsistent
Additionally, you should check if the source is hosting duplicate data. And check if they are resorting to data hoarding.
To make sure you don’t encounter any dirty data again (or at least minimize it), you can try the following steps:
- Analyze the current data you have. Keep the clean and reliable ones while getting rid of the rest.
- Create data collection rules and constraints that will help your team avoid dirty data.
- Stay vigilant against dirty data even after you’ve made sure your database is 100% clean.
- Automate your data cleaning process so you can focus your time and energy on more important stuff.
Ignoring Your Audience’s Pain Points
Chances are, you’ve probably heard about the term “pain points” before. In case you don’t know what it means, it simply refers to a specific problem your prospects are currently facing. In fact, there are two types of pain points. There are internal pain points, problems that are present in already-existing industries. Then there are external pain points that your audience must constantly deal with. Either way, you must make sure your HVAC marketing strategies are calibrated to address these pain points.
Sadly, a lot of HVAC businesses fail to do just that. That is, they put too much emphasis on their products’ or services’ features, neglecting to tell how it can help solve their audiences’ problems. If you want your game plan to do better, then you should avoid their example. Instead, help your potential clients understand how it can improve their lives, detailing the journey from “before” to “after”.
To gain insight into your audience’s pain points, you can try conducting qualitative research. This allows you to know what your potential customers like, dislike, need, want, fear, etc. Qualitative research involves giving out feedback surveys, collecting reviews or testimonials, and recording conversations with your support agents (With their permission, of course!). Once you’ve gathered this data, you can pair it with other KPIs to gain a clearer understanding of your audience’s pain points.
At the same time, you should try conducting competitor research, too. Gather as much info as you can about the marketing strategies your competitors use, as well as the tweaks and changes they make to their products or services. This will help you know any pain points they noticed, enabling you to integrate it within your own marketing game plan.
Having a Dismissive Attitude Towards SEO
Finally, aside from being data-driven, your HVAC marketing strategies must have a solid SEO game plan integrated within it. With most of your potential customers looking for HVAC products or services online, you need to make sure your website appears on the top spots of Google and other search engines. And the only way you can get those is by relying on the best SEO practices.
Unfortunately, a lot of HVAC businesses today don’t seem to understand that. Instead, they still cling to the belief that making their website look attractive and staying active on social media is enough. But while these can help attract a few new customers, it’s still not enough if you want more people to become aware of your HVAC brand.
So if you haven’t yet, make SEO part of your overall HVAC marketing strategy. At the very least, it should aim to gain the following:
- High-performing keywords
- Attractive and relevant content
- High-quality backlinks
- Mobile friendliness
- Optimized photos, videos, and other media
If you don’t have your own SEO team, then you can simply outsource it. Thankfully, there are many agencies and experts who specialize in HVAC marketing.
Don’t Make These Marketing Mistakes
Marketing mistakes like the ones mentioned above won’t just cost your HVAC business potential customers; it will also lead to unnecessary expenses and lost revenue and other expenses. So do everything to avoid them while making your HVAC marketing strategies.
