The Newbie’s Guide to HVAC Marketing

Many HVAC business owners don’t realize the importance of investing in marketing to grow their business. Instead, most of them rely on word-of-mouth and traditional advertising to attract new customers. However, those aren’t enough if you want to stand out in this highly competitive market.

Whether you’ve just started your career or already established a small company, you need a good HVAC marketing plan to grow your operations. In this article, we’ve outlined everything you need to know about the basics of HVAC marketing.

What is HVAC Marketing?

Before anything else, let’s talk about what HVAC marketing is and how it works. To put it simply, HVAC marketing is the art of using high-quality messaging to pique the interests of your target audience.

The right strategy can help your prospective clients understand how your HVAC brand can meet their needs better than others. This will ultimately lead to properly showcased value, strong brand loyalty, and increased sales.

What HVAC Marketing Can Do for You

By having a great HVAC marketing strategy for your business, you could potentially enjoy the following benefits:

Get to Know Your Target Audience Better

Through good HVAC marketing, you can gain certain data and metrics that will help you learn more about your target audience. You’ll be able to tailor your strategies and ads to meet their needs and address pain points better.

This information will also help you group your target audience into well-defined segments. This makes it easier for you to personalize your ads and marketing communications for each segment, maximizing results.

Improve Engagement During the Buying Process

HVAC marketing will also allow you to track and analyze your client’s buying process, so you can improve customer engagement and influence your prospects’ buying decisions.

What’s more, you’ll also be able to influence their decisions even after they’ve purchased your HVAC products and services. Consumers tend to evaluate their decisions after buying something. If they had a positive experience during the buying process, they will likely remain loyal to your brand.

Cultivate a Positive Emotional Connection to Your HVAC Brand

HVAC marketing is all about building and cultivating your target audience’s emotional connection to your brand. So even if they don’t end up buying your products or services, their brains will still trigger an emotional response whenever they encounter your ads and content online.

Always strive to create and nurture positive emotions (happiness, comfort, confidence, etc.) in your HVAC brand. That way, it will work in your favor when prospective clients are still trying to decide between your business and others.

Boost Website Traffic and Online Presence

By having a good HVAC marketing game plan in place, you’ll be able to generate targeted traffic to your website. This will allow more people to see what you have to offer, potentially increasing leads and sales.

At the same time, marketing techniques like SEO, SEM, and PPC will also help you build a better online presence for your HVAC brand. When done right, your website will eventually have a high standing in search engines like Google and Bing, as well as higher DR or DA scores in Ahrefs and Moz.

Track and Measure Results More Easily

HVAC marketing enables you to track and measure your strategy’s overall performance, so you can adjust it accordingly. With digital marketing tools like Ahrefs, Google Analytics, and Facebook Ads, you can easily track your KPIs.

For example, you can monitor your posts or ads after it gets published so you can see how many clicks and views they’re receiving and what-not. In case any of them are underperforming, you can try split testing them. It’s when you create a different version of the post or ad by replacing their images or content. Then you compare it with the previous version to see which one delivers better results.

Great HVAC Marketing Ideas to Try Out

So now that you know what you can get from having an HVAC marketing gameplan, here are some great ideas you can try:

Facebook Ads

With nearly 2.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a great place to promote your HVAC business, build a community of loyal customers, and ultimately boost your traffic and profit. So don’t forget to include Facebook-friendly air conditioning advertising in your overall HVAC marketing strategy.

One way to make your Facebook ads more engaging is by using GIFs. They can easily capture your target audience’s attention and they’re easier to make than video ads. It can cut straight to the heart of your message, allowing you to showcase your HVAC brand as quickly as possible.

Alternatively, you can try Facebook Instant Experiences. Formerly known as Canvas, it’s a Facebook ad format that loads and appears on your phone’s entire screen once you tap on it. As Facebook puts it, Facebook Instant Experiences offers “a full-screen ad experience built for bringing brands and products to life on mobile.” The best thing about it is its flexibility; from engaging video ads to product catalogs, you can use pretty much any medium to promote your HVAC business.

Funny Video Ads

Video advertising offers several advantages. For one, it can convey your HVAC brand’s message better than any other format. But more importantly, people tend to consume videos on the internet more than other types of content. With around 54% of consumers wanting video content from brands or businesses they support, this is a chance you shouldn’t pass on.

To make your video ads more effective, your message needs to strongly resonate with your prospective customers. It also needs to be engaging and memorable at the same time. A great way to accomplish both is by using humor.

Take BGH Air Conditioners’ “Dads in Briefs” video ads series for example. Through their use of humor, they were able to effectively promote their air conditioners to consumers and explain why they need to buy them.

Educational Videos

Aside from posting funny ads, you can also educate your customers and answer FAQs through videos.

Keep your videos fresh and your audience engaged by varying the type of content you upload. For example, you can make behind-the-scenes videos of your team or a how-to video about HVAC systems. For more ideas, look at what your audience usually asks on social media or search engines, as well as other forums like Quora.

Make your videos accessible to every user by including subtitles or captions so everyone can follow along. This extra effort will surely make a difference to your customers. It also shows your initiative and consideration as a brand.

Don’t forget to optimize your videos on different platforms, such as YouTube or Facebook. For example, on YouTube, you’d want to insert keywords naturally in the video title, rename your video file using the keyword, and optimize your video description. For Facebook videos, you can use captions, tag other pages, and respond to comments.

Direct Mail Marketing

Direct mail marketing involves sending perishable products, printed content, and other physical items to your prospective clients and subscribers. When done right, it can help you cultivate a more meaningful relationship with your target audience.

For starters, you can consider sending brochures or postcards and add in a little gift as well. Both can give your HVAC company a personality, as well as establish its authority, though postcards are somewhat more suitable for target marketing. Or you can send printed catalogs that visually show off your products and services. Aside from complementing your HVAC marketing strategy, it can also nurture positive emotional connections to your brand quite effectively.

But if you really want to take it up a notch, try sending them a video mail. Video mailers work pretty much like the traditional mailer except for one thing. Instead of sending prospective clients letters, printed brochures, and what-not, you give them embedded, customized video messages. Through it, you can potentially enjoy the following:

• Increase landing page conversions by 86%
• Increase time spent on your website by 88%
• Boost qualified leads per year by 83%
• Boost organic search engine traffic by 157%
• Improve brand engagement by 53%
• Improve chances of getting your HVAC product or service chosen by 84%

Ambient Ads

Anyone can promote their HVAC companies on billboards and in public places. But if you want your ads to truly stand out, then you can try making ambient ads instead.

Ambient advertising involves placing your ads on unusual objects or in unusual places where people don’t expect them to appear. For example, take a look at this Bigelow Organic Tea ad. Made by Joseph Delhommer, it basically turns flower pots into tea cups. By placing their brand near real flowers, Bigelow is essentially telling everyone that their tea is made only from all-natural, organic ingredients. By using the tea bag flavor that matches the type of flower in the pot, they made it clear that the tea comes in many varieties.

As you probably noticed, ambient advertising involves creating visual and interactive promotions and then putting them in unexpected places to surprise and encourage prospective clients. In other words, the ads incorporate their surroundings to maximize audience impact. This allows them to stand out better than traditional printed advertisements, which catches people’s attention.

Additionally, ambient ads use their surroundings to better convey the purpose of the product or service, virtually letting people know why they need to buy it. The best part is, not a lot of HVAC companies use ambient ads, so yours could be the first!

A Few Last Things to Know About HVAC Marketing

Through the ideas above, you can add a gimmick to your HVAC marketing strategy, making it more effective and memorable. However, other factors can help make your campaigns more successful as well. So before you go add them to your master plan, better read about these things below:

Understand the 7 P’s of Marketing

Traditionally, marketing only revolves around the 4P’s: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. But according to a CIM article, three more P’s now also come into play as marketing became more and more sophisticated. These additional P’s are People, Process, and Physical evidence.

To properly pull off HVAC marketing, you have to base your overall strategy on these 7 P’s. That way, your HVAC brand can be as customer-centric as possible, prioritizing your clients above all.

Encourage Cross-Functional Team Collaboration

A successful HVAC marketing campaign isn’t just built by one person or team. It’s the result of the efforts exerted by individual teams or representatives from different departments in your HVAC company, all working together to achieve a common goal.

So make it a point to encourage cross-functional team collaboration in your workplace. You’ll not only build a fantastic HVAC marketing game plan, but you’ll also revitalize your entire company, fostering a more collaborative culture where everyone can benefit.

Track the Right Marketing Metrics

As the head of your HVAC company, it’s your responsibility to monitor your HVAC marketing strategy’s performance regularly. To make this easier for you, you need to track the right marketing metrics.

That being said, it’s important to note that while some metrics can help you monitor your marketing campaigns and measure your ROI, others will just waste your time. Take bounce rates for example. While useful when checking your web pages, it won’t help you out much when monitoring your marketing campaign’s performance. Be sure to identify which metrics are important for your strategy.

Keep Exploring New Marketing Techniques

Many of the marketing techniques used today can help you take your HVAC company to greater heights. However, there will come a time when newer marketing hacks and strategies will outperform them.

So always be on the lookout for these newer marketing techniques. Then try introducing them to your HVAC marketing strategy so you can reap its benefits.

Introduce HVAC Marketing to Your Business

With so many HVAC companies and professionals out there, promoting your own HVAC brand can be daunting. Through HVAC marketing, you’ll be able to level the playing field, enabling your business to stand a chance in such a competitive industry.