Influencer marketing has become increasingly important in this digital age. With their ability to promote any product or service in social media and other media outlets, they can easily help you reach your target audience. So if you’re running an HVAC business and you want it to explore new horizons, better make influencers an integral part of your HVAC marketing plans.
That being said, working with influencers comes with both benefits and risks. So before you team up with one, best weigh these pros and cons first. For your convenience, some of these are listed below.
Pros of Working With Influencers
Long-Term Win-Win Partnerships
For any relationship to last, you need the right partner. The same is true when including influencers on your HVAC marketing plans. Team up with the right one, and you’ll reap countless rewards that will benefit both parties long-term.
So even if you’re just hiring one for a one-off campaign, don’t treat influencers like short-term partners. Instead, strive to build and cultivate positive relationships with them. In time, this will lead to your HVAC brand’s long-term success, while the influencer enjoys numerous perks by working with your business.
Saved Time and Money
Compared to other forms of advertising, working with influencers is much more affordable. In fact, their rates usually depend on how large their following is (Though there are other factors, too!). Anyway, by teaming up with an influencer, you could keep your HVAC advertising costs down to a certain degree.
What’s more, collaborating with influencers allows you to save time when building a following for your HVAC brand. Not only do they already have a ready audience, but they’ll also take care of most of the content. To top it off, influencers will help promote your HVAC business daily, as they interact with their fans practically everyday.
Unlimited Sharing Potential
Speaking of which, since influencers interact with their followers on a daily basis, getting people to share their content on social media is basically like a walk in the park. With them working with you, they’ll be able to encourage their audience to like and share your HVAC ads, posts, and other content, too.
In short, the potential for your HVAC content to go viral will go up the roof. And the more shares and interactions your HVAC brand enjoys, the better its chances of getting noticed by search engines like Google. This will eventually lead to higher rankings in SERPs, which will improve your overall online visibility.
Improved SEO
Which brings us to SEO. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, there are several reasons why influencer marketing is good for SEO. For one thing, influencers can help you build lasting relationships with other HVAC businesses. But more importantly, they can help boost your HVAC brand’s credibility and trust (more on this below). This will help you gain clout which you can use to earn high-quality backlinks (which boosts your SEO rankings in turn).
By making influencers part of your HVAC marketing plans, you could potentially improve your business’ SEO. As stated above, this will eventually lead to higher rankings on SERPs and increased online visibility, both of which are crucial for your HVAC company’s success.
Better Content Strategy
To keep your target audience excited about your HVAC brand, you need to constantly produce fresh and entertaining content. Even under the best circumstances, doing this is quite challenging. And one way or another, you’ll run out of great ideas to talk about, leaving you feeling stuck and burnt out.
This is where influencers come in. by working with them, you’ll basically hand over the reins of your content strategy to them. Depending on how great they are at content creation, you could end up with better content for your HVAC brand than ever before.
Enhanced Credibility And Trust
Brand credibility and trust are very important for several reasons. Without it, you won’t be able to get people to buy your products or services no matter how good it is. And even if they end up buying, it will be nearly impossible for you to retain them in the long run.
Now as it happens, people have a great deal of trust in influencers (more so even than celebrities in fact). That’s because for them, these online personalities are more authentic and relatable. Plus, many of them are up-front when promoting any brand. So if you want your HVAC company to gain some clout, best have it advertised by influencers.
Increased Brand Awareness And Reach
Because people trust them so much, most influencers today enjoy millions of viewers. On Instagram alone, the top influencers enjoy 20 to 50 million followers. With such a large audience to tap into, it would be an unwise business decision if you don’t work with them.
So get influencers to recommend your HVAC business to their followers. Aside from delivering better results than heavy-handed promotions and sales campaigns, they can significantly increase people’s awareness of your brand. Doing so will also increase your brand’s scope as it will allow you to reach out to a wider audience.
Guided Purchase Decisions
Additionally, influencers have this uncanny ability to sway a consumer when purchasing a product or service. Take Youtube personalities for example. According to Think With Google, six out of ten viewers base their purchase decisions on their favorite content creator’s recommendations.
In other words, working with influencers will help you indirectly guide your customers’ purchase decisions. Keep in mind that this will depend on the influencer you choose to work with. Obviously, if the influencer promoting your HVAC brand is someone they respect and trust, people will more likely choose it over others.
Increased Sales and Profits
Ultimately, working with influencers will lead to boosted sales and profits for your HVAC business. Oberlo even went so far as to claim that companies could earn as much as $18 for every $1 they invest on influencers. Depending on the brand, this number will probably be higher.
This is why you shouldn’t underestimate the power of influencers. With their help, you’ll be able to see a massive spike in your sales.
Suitable for Any HVAC Business
Last but not least, influencer marketing is suitable for any type of business, even your HVAC company. As experts in many fields, they can easily promote your products or services. You can even employ different influencer marketing strategies to collaborate with influencers more effectively.
For example, if you’re a smaller HVAC business, you can use a low-cost but optimized strategy to expand your operations. Alternatively, if you’re a bigger company, you can rely on a more comprehensive plan to work not only with influencers, but also with other celebrities.
Cons of Working With Influencers
Risk of Picking the Wrong Influencer
Hiring an influencer is no easy task. In fact, a CMSWire article says up to 61% of marketers struggle with picking the right person for their campaigns.
So if you’re planning to hire influencers for your HVAC marketing plans, best be aware that it will take time and effort. You need to get to know your candidates, evaluating them as thoroughly as you can. Otherwise, you might end up working with the wrong ones, which could prove disastrous to your HVAC brand and business.
Risk of Fake Engagement
As mentioned above, an influencer’s rates usually depend on how large their following is. The things about using this as a statistic is that not every followers and comments are real (i.e., they’re fabricated).
These days, it’s easy for any social media user to purchase fake followers, comments, and what-not. And sadly, many influencers rely on them in an effort to seem more authoritative and trustworthy. So watch out if the online personality you plan to work with has fake followers or not. That way, you can avoid damaging your HVAC brand’s reputation with fake reviews, comments, and more.
Risk of Negative Publicity
Working with any influencer or celebrity will always come with the risk of bad publicity. This could happen in two ways. The first one involves the quality of your HVAC products or services. If it’s substandard, then no amount of marketing or hyping up will make the influencer or their followers like it.
On the other hand, the second one involves the influencers themselves. If the one you decide to work with winds up in some controversial issue, then your HVAC brand might risk getting bashed alongside them.
Hefty Influencer Fees
Another downside about including influencers in your HVAC marketing plans is cost. Aware that you want to piggyback on their reputation and target their audience, a lot of them charge hefty fees for their endorsements. In some cases, their rates are so high that it’s cheaper to work with celebrities or traditional advertisements instead.
However, bear in mind that an influencer’s fees will vary depending on the size of their following, as well as their overall status and prominence. For instance, influencers who are just starting out their careers are significantly less expensive to hire.
High Demand for Influencers
As influencer marketing increasingly becomes more popular, more and more businesses are tapping into it to gain an edge over their competition. As a result, the influencer industry has become saturated with collaboration requests. Some businesses are even known to reach out to hundreds of influencers daily, hoping one of them will say yes.
Anyway, this high demand for influencers will make it somewhat hard for you to hire one for your HVAC marketing strategy. So if you’re planning to work with one, better make a great pitch that can catch their attention.
Increasingly Stricter Guidelines
During its early days, influencer marketing didn’t have any rules, giving businesses lots of freedom when employing it in their marketing game plan. But as it becomes more popular, new rules have been introduced and enforced along the way.
To successfully pull influencer marketing for your own HVAC brand, you need to familiarize yourself with these rules beforehand. Otherwise, you risk driving influencers and customers away, not to mention breaking any federal guidelines that are currently in place.
Tendency Towards Standardization
Content is the main backbone of any marketing campaign. So as mentioned above, you have to continually produce fresh and entertaining content for your target audience. But while you can delegate this task to influencers, you also run the risk of making your content feel “standardized”.
This is largely due to the so-called “professionalization” of influencers. Due to this phenomenon, many influencers have somewhat lost their ability to appear authentic to their viewers, with their content becoming no less different from the standard ads made by big businesses. This reduces the influencer’s ability to effectively promote any brand, so better keep this in mind as you hire one.
Difficult-to-Track Progress
To make the right marketing decisions, not to mention adjust your HVAC marketing strategy midway, you need to be able to analyze your progress. Unfortunately, monitoring and tracking an influencer marketing campaign’s progress is extremely hard due to lack of relevant tools and software. This makes it more difficult for you to check if the influencer is actually doing their job, which is to get people to choose your HVAC brand.
Thankfully, despite the shortage of influencer marketing tools and software, you can still monitor and track certain metrics that will help you check if the campaign is working or not. These include:
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Cost per acquisition (CPA)
- Brand awareness and sentiment
- Website visitors
- Sales
Influencers are Not Perfect
Finally, influencers are human, too, meaning they’ll make mistakes as much as any other person will. So don’t expect them to be perfect all the time, even while promoting your HVAC products or services.
That being said, being too perfect will make the influencer look less authentic and relatable. This will put many people off from supporting them (and your HVAC brand by extension). So as long as they can promote your business properly and professionally, best cut them some slack and give them creative freedom.
Get Influencers to Promote Your HVAC Business
Having influencers on your HVAC marketing plans is a great way to make it more successful. But before anything else, you need to know the benefits and risks that come with working with one. So read the pros and cons listed above first.
