5 Brilliant HVAC Marketing Strategies

Let’s be honest: You have a lot—a lot —of competitors. According to the most recent data available , there are nearly 100,000 HVAC companies in the U.S. alone. I know math is boring, but humor me for just a moment: If those 100K businesses were evenly spaced across the country, every 38 square miles would have its very own HVAC shop.

But they’re not evenly spaced, are they? You know they’re not because you’ve seen your competitors’ billboards and their service vans and their bright orange can koozies at the annual home show. Your local market is crowded.

So how’s your business going to stand out? Here are five brilliant marketing ideas you can start implementing today:

Listen, you can spend gobs of money on advertising trying to build awareness of your company. But if you want to build interest, you’ll have to be remarkable.

“Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not slapping on marketing as a last-minute add-on, but understanding that if your offering itself isn’t remarkable, it’s invisible.” – Seth Godin

• Be known for the best customer service in the industry—from the person who answers the phone to the person who repairs the compressor.
  
• Break through customers’ skepticism by developing a reputation as the most honest HVAC company in town. (And, of course, the only way to develop that reputation is to be it . )
  
• Offer the most value of any shop around. That doesn’t mean you have to be the least expensive; in fact, many homeowners may shy away from the cheapest quote. Offering value is about going beyond getting the job done; it’s about giving your customers a loyalty-worthy experience.
  
• Be generous with your time and expertise even before someone is your paid customer. (I’ll say more about this in a bit.)

I make the best chocolate chip cookies you’ll ever taste in your whole life. They’re better than your grandma’s. They have the perfect crisp-to-goo ratio, and I use only quality ingredients. As a matter of fact, I’m an expert at baking chocolate chip cookies.

You don’t believe me, do you? Of course you don’t. But you’d come closer to believing me if three of your friends had tried my cookies and gushed about them to you, right? Right.

Here’s the point: You can use all the right words on your website about expertise and honesty and fairness, but until someone else is saying those things, you’re just giving yourself a pep talk in a mirror.

So, follow up every service call with a customer service check via phone or email. Publish those comments on your website. Ask your customers to give you a review on Facebook and Google. Remember: Referrals convert at a ratio of 1:1. Google and Facebook reviews count as referrals. And they’re free. (We actually provide a great tool for our clients to use that makes it easy for their customers to leave those reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, or anywhere else that’s important.)

I just recommended asking for Google reviews, and you can’t do that if you’re not on Google to begin with. If you’ve not already set yourself up on Google My Business , do it today. There’s no better way to gain local referrals and engage with current and future customers than Google. This is step one of any good HVAC marketing plan.

It’s one thing to be on Google. It’s another thing for people to find you through Google. To accomplish that, you’ll need to make sure your website plays nicely with the search engine giant. (Yes, giant : More than 4 billion searches happen on Google every day.)

So, let’s do an experiment. Open a new tab in your browser, bring up Google, and type “HVAC” and the name of your town into the search bar. Did your company land in the first five results? How about the first five pages of results?

If you’re not among the first results Google spits back, you have some work to do. That work’s a bit complicated and involves things like mobile optimization, keywords, content marketing, and more. If you don’t know your SEO from your PPC, we can help .

Remember that old cliché, “People don’t care what you know until they know you care”? It’s a cliché because it’s true. In today’s market, businesses don’t get customers. We earn them.

By providing helpful information to prospective customers before even one dollar exchanges hands, they’ll experience your company as helpful, knowledgeable, and giving. Who wouldn’t want to engage with a company like that?

Share preventive maintenance tips on your Facebook page. Set up email automations to remind your customers when they’re due for service—not in a sales pitchy way, but in a “Hey, don’t forget!” way. Create a short eBook on how to choose your next air conditioning unit. Think like a customer, and answer their questions and concerns in a relatable way.

Trying to stand out in today’s media-saturated world is tough. But we’re really good at making it happen. If you’re ready to grow your business, let’s talk!