Top 5 Marketing Ideas For HVAC Companies
January 8, 2018
Scrolling through the internet and researching different blogs, forums, and agency sites, the amount of information related to marketing ideas can be overwhelming. If you’re looking for ideas related to HVAC companies, you already know it’s hard to find specific information. To help, the team at VIG has put together our top 5 marketing ideas we recommend for HVAC companies.
Whether you’re new to the industry or the best in the business, these top tips can help even seasoned professionals improve the effectiveness of their marketing materials and gain more awareness in their market overall. Take a look!
Great Content
Believe it or not, one of the best marketing ideas any business can use relates to content on their website. Take a moment and think of your website through the eyes of your customers. Does your website feature the necessary content they need to learn more info about what HVAC services you offer? Are your service descriptions clear and to the point? Do you have a resource page with a blog or FAQs for customers to find answers to common questions?
If your answer is an indecisive yes, then it might be time to take a fresh look at the pages you have posted. Understanding what your customers need and providing them with relevant information is one of the most important tips we can give you and cannot be stressed enough. Through providing everything your customers need and nothing they don’t, your website can be used as a marketing tool to help drive leads and bolster sales in the future.
Simply put, sites with useful content tailored to visitor’s needs receive more web traffic. This increase in traffic usually translates to more completed contact forms and service calls for a business. It may seem like an expensive investment now but done well it can help build brand awareness in your market and improve the effectiveness of your other marketing initiatives.
Manage Your Brand
When it comes to putting together content for your website, advertisements, and other marketing materials, you need to make a conscious effort to manage your brand. What this means is that everything from your social media accounts to sales literature to even your email campaigns needs to portray a clear and consistent image.
In the world of marketing, brands take almost a human-like form. They have a distinct voice, identity, preferences, and areas they excel and fail. When marketing for your HVAC company, you need to understand what your true brand identity looks like to your customers and how you want to portray it in the future.
Your logos on LinkedIn should match those of your brochures. If the content on your website is written with homeowners in mind, your social media should not be trying to reach commercial contractors. The worst thing you can do is confuse your customers and leave them with a foggy understanding of who you are, what you do, and what you have to offer.
Play to Your Strengths
When it comes to marketing and sales, you need to understand your strengths and weaknesses. Many practitioners will perform a full S.W.O.T. (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, & Threats) analysis to determine where their company stands in relation to competitors. To start, I would recommend having an honest conversation with your management team to discuss your strengths and where you can make improvements in the eyes of your customers.
If you have phenomenal customer service, maybe you could add a few testimonials from recent clients on to your website or encourage your customers to leave you a review on Angie’s List. If your customers are often concerned about your prices maybe you could reassure them by highlighting your outstanding value for their hard-earned dollars. Knowing where your company excels and what drives customers to seek your services is one of the most important components of successful marketing.
From developing a sound understanding of where you are in the eyes of your customers, you can begin to develop a detailed plan for how you want to improve and promote your brand in the future. Whether you are the best in the business or just starting out, it never hurts to think of how you build upon your weaknesses and show off your strengths.
Provide Valuable Resources
In basic terms, marketing can be defined as a series of initiatives that involve communicating and delivering value in an attempt to capture value in return. The keywords here are communicating and delivering value. Many marketing professionals look at value as the tangible products/services you provide to your customers and the money you receive in return.
However, the concept of value isn’t as concrete as the example above. Delivering value extends far beyond a simple exchange and includes how you build credibility with your customers.
The concept of credibility can be built through several methods and can take months and even years to do well. One of the most common ways we’ve seen companies build credibility in their market and keep customers coming back time and time again is through providing access to free valuable resources.
Whether it’s videos on your website featuring tips and tricks like how to properly care for your HVAC unit to blogs about ways to save money on your heating bill, providing valuable resources that help customers solve their everyday problems is a solid strategy for building your credibility in your industry and capturing customer lifetime value.
By providing resources like how to save money on your heating bill, you are giving customers an additional reason to visit your website and spend time looking through content. The more your customers visit your website and realize you are knowledgeable about your field and willing to help them solve their problems, the easier it will be to convert them to lifetime customers and ambassadors of your brand.
Develop a Schedule
The last tip highlighted in this blog is something we go over with almost all of our clients. Whether you prefer social media as your go-to marketing medium or rely on online ads or billboards, it’s important to have a solid strategy and content schedule for your different communication channels.
For mediums like social media and blogs, in particular, we usually recommend that our clients have a continual schedule of posts to ensure top of mind awareness in their market. Having a set schedule of what you’re going to post when your going to post, and where the material will be posted will help you more effectively manage your marketing efforts.
Whether you post a blog on your website once bi-weekly and have a company newsletter monthly, sitting down and putting together a schedule will make executing your marketing efforts easier and less overwhelming. Finding a strategy that works for you is important and no universal strategy works for every company. You need to set a realistic schedule that you and your team can stick to and try different methods to see what will work best for your company long-term.