Here’s the situation: You’re a contractor looking to grow your HVAC business, but you don’t know how to with digital marketing. You rely on word-of-mouth marketing, but that only gets you so far. The people who say they’ll call you for business end up ghosting you or, even worse, going with your competitor. If you can relate, fear not — it’s a situation that occurs more often than not, and it comes down to one thing: a lack of a marketing engine.
Good marketing is an idea that transcends word-of-mouth. So what is it? Well, let’s take a look at what good marketing is not. It is not a one-man job. It is not a universal solution. And it most certainly is not an overnight process.
What a good marketing engine is, however, is an all-encompassing growth plan that requires a concerted effort from a team of experts that band together for your business’s best interests. Taking stock of your clientele, locale, and workflow to create a strategic plan of attack are crucial elements to good marketing. These are just some of the components that a good marketing plan entails, which will ultimately reap massive financial rewards for you and your business.
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Organic and Paid Lead Generation, Lead Capture, and Lead Nurturing
Good marketing starts with lead generation, which is the method of how you are getting your potential customers. In order to grow your HVAC business, understanding the sales funnel process is important. Not only does this process first entail generating prospective clients, but it also includes capturing and then nurturing them into paid HVAC customers.
To generate new customers and grow your HVAC business, there are several ways you can go about this.
- You can invest a set amount of money into strategic paid ads (which we will discuss shortly).
- Use organic methods that you can use to farm potential leads — including direct website visits, utilizing Search Engine Optimized (SEO) keywords to rank higher on Google to generate traffic, and curated posting on social media.
After generating those leads, you need to focus on capturing them, which all comes down to communication. Utilize this point of contact to chat either through email, phone, or an automated email drip campaign. If contacting through email, consider using an email tracking platform that offers key insights (whether an email was opened or not, amount of clicks, or website revisit).
In visiting your website, make sure to utilize timed forms and dedicated service landing pages to encourage email list sign-ups and further communication. You could then use retargeted advertising, a paid form of advertising, to target customers who haven’t taken action.
The goal is to easily grab your new prospects information and keep your HVAC business top of mind and maintain the interaction and relationship you’ve built with prospective clients.
Paid Ads Grow Your HVAC Business
You’ve heard the old saying before: “It takes money to make money.” And in certain cases, that is true — such as in the case of paid ads.
Online Paid Advertising is a great way to gain traction and grow your HVAC business. However, this is something that should be approached with caution. While you may (or may not) have the budget to pour into paid ads, aimlessly jumping into spending could be costly.
Factors to establish while pursuing paid ads are your target audience (age, location, education, income, and more), why you’re catering to said target audience, and how you can bring them to most value opposed to your competitors.
The platform you advertise on, too, is key. If your HVAC business is looking to increase your Service division, Google Ads might be a good choice because customers will be searching for HVAC Service, or emergency service. Facebook/Instagram (B2C) and LinkedIn (B2B) are good platforms to get in front of people before they even begin to search for you.
It’s important to note that paid ads are not “set it and forget it.” Remaining proactive and keeping track of the key performance indicators (KPIs) will help bring about new leads and potentially offer substantial conversion — a necessity to grow your HVAC business.
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How Call Tracking Helps
Call tracking is another useful strategy to grow your HVAC business. It’s a process that involves pulling data from marketing phone calls to better understand prospect behavior. You can track where a call comes from – through your website, paid ad, or other marketing strategies. This is not to be confused with monitoring for call quality.
Through specific software, call tracking instead analyzes keywords, ads, and web pages that helped drive a prospective phone call. This data is useful when crafting marketing strategies, social media content, blogs, and advertisements — as you have a firm grasp on what works and what doesn’t on prospective clients.
If we asked you how many calls you receive through your website currently, you probably wouldn’t know. Would you?
Understanding these metrics will help your business drive conversion and increase sales and ROI. It will also dial back the lead to the source of where they came from, providing you with useful information to answer the age old question, “Is my website working?”
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How Calls to Action Wrap Good Marketing Up
You can write all the compelling copy and you can script the most effective speech in the world, but how do you get people to act when presented with an opportunity? Incorporating a Call to Action is what does the trick.
So what exactly is a Call to Action? A Call to Action is a directive issued at the end of a marketing campaign that makes a reader take initiative. Why? Because they are provocative and tap into the reader’s emotions. Choices that factor into an effective Call to Action include adding figures (“Act now and you can save 25%!”), playing up to their emotions of missing out with a “Limited Time Offer,” or promising them results (“See scalable growth in just 6 weeks!”).
Including a Call to Action on your website homepage, paid ads, at the end of an email, or even video can grow your HVAC business, boost your conversion rates and, in turn, translate to dollars for you and your contracting business. Consider including one at the end of your website today if you don’t already have one.
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Take User Experience (UX) Into Account
In the social media age, what’s the first thing people do when they hear of a business? That’s right — they look them up on the Internet and go to their website. Having an online presence is indeed important, but making sure that presence is appealing for your target audience is also crucial. That’s why User Experience (UX) is important — not only for your desktop viewers, but also for your mobile ones too.
When taking UX into consideration, you’re factoring in how a user interacts with your services on your website and how it meets their needs. Take, for example, your current HVAC website. What is your target audience looking for? How can you offer value to them? Think broad: fast load times and offering information that they need. Do they need Preventive Maintenance, or HVAC Service? Maybe they’re interested in an Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Solution from you.
Another aspect of UX is the User Interface (UI). You’ll need a properly designed UI for both desktop and mobile sites, as they are both completely separate entities. Maneuverability, clickable links that lead to the right destination, and appropriate plugins (like a pop-up contact form) are all good paths to take. If you’re an HVAC company, some aspects to include are services you offer, installation/upgrade specials, and contact information for your business.
Doing this not only will grow your HVAC business, but also bridge the communication gap between you and leads — who can eventually turn into long-time customers.
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Email Automation Seals the Deal
To tie up the tenets of good marketing, you should consider email automation. An effective way to grow your HVAC business, email automation is a process that blasts out pre-written emails to an established client base of your choosing. A process that eliminates redundancy, email automation can save you plenty of time to focus on other tasks.
Automation can help you chase down leads through cold-emailing prospects. Furthermore, you can set up emails to go out based on certain consumer actions — such as welcoming them to your mailing list upon sign up, alerting them about an upcoming sale, or simply just increasing brand awareness. This gives you a leg up in understanding how clients and prospects react to your messaging, and what you can ultimately do to seal the deal.
Email automation all ties together with the other precepts of good marketing, especially when you cap it off with a Call to Action. And like paid ads, there are tools available for those to begin automating emails and tracking data surrounding consumer behavior, analytics, and responses to your campaign.
The Return of Good Marketing
In reality, while all of these are great methods of lead generation, it’s just not feasible for one person to do on their own. In fact, good marketing requires not one person, but a team of dedicated professionals who are ready, willing, and able to generate those leads and seal the deal for you.
At ONE18MEDIA, we boast a team with robust marketing capabilities — from copywriting to social media to web development — which are all lead-focused to grow your HVAC business. With our years of experience working in the HVAC industry — with top HVAC clients in NYC — we bring an unparalleled and proven track record of success for all businesses. To learn more about how we can help, please visit our website and schedule a strategy call to let us help your contracting business today.