To successfully market your HVAC service, you’ll need to create a marketing plan. A marketing plan, or marketing strategy, outlines your HVAC business’s plans for how you’ll reach your target audience and convert them into customers. It also details how you’ll retain current customers and help your business achieve its other goals (e.g. increase revenue).
With an effective marketing strategy, you’ll be able to improve brand awareness, increase your number of website visitors, bring in more qualified prospects, retain your existing customers, and ultimately grow your HVAC business.
In this blog post, we’ll provide steps that you can work through to create an effective marketing strategy that makes your local service stand out. Before we dive in, remember to keep a couple of things in mind:
While creating a marketing plan for your HVAC business, think about your point of difference from other local businesses working in the HVAC industry. This will help you establish and maintain a competitive advantage through your marketing plan.
Keep your target audience and loyal customers in mind throughout the process — this outside-in perspective allows you to make decisions that will positively impact your customers and make them want to continue doing business with you in the future.
HVAC Marketing Plan Template
A straightforward way to ensure you’re creating and implementing an effective strategy for your local business is to use a marketing plan template. Most strategies will follow a marketing plan template that’s similar to the following:
Creating Your HVAC Marketing Plan
Now that you have a template to work off of, read through the following steps to create your business’s HVAC marketing plan.
1. Set goals for your HVAC marketing plan.
The first step in creating your marketing plan is to set your goals. There’s no right or wrong answer — simply choose the goals that are right for your local HVAC service.
Here are some common examples of marketing goals for your consideration.
- Improve brand awareness and credibility.
- Increase traffic to your website.
- Retain current customers and improve brand loyalty.
- Increase overall revenue.
- Bring in more qualified prospects.
- Increase engagement on social media.
- Establish the business as an industry thought leader.
- Increase the number of blog subscribers.
2. Document your HVAC marketing mix.
You may have heard of a marketing mix before — it often refers to the “four Ps of Marketing” (product, price, place, and promotion). Here’s how to establish your marketing mix using the four Ps.
- Product: Start by thinking about your product — or in this case, your HVAC service. Identify the challenges your target audience and current customers face. What is it that you can do to resolve these challenges for those individuals? What sets your solutions apart from those of your competitors?
- Price: Then consider pricing. How much do your HVAC services cost? Think about how much you need to be making to stay in business and how much your target audience will realistically pay for your service.
- Place: Next, determine how you’ll make your service available. Which places will prospects have the ability to access your HVAC services and make appointments with you? For example, maybe they can access your services through your website and social media profiles.
- Promotion: Lastly, determine where and how you’ll promote your service. That’ll come shortly in step five below.
3. Establish your marketing message.
Now it’s time to establish your marketing message. How are you going to reach and resonate with your audience in a way that makes them want to become your customers and/or conduct more business with you in the future? Here are some steps you might follow while creating your marketing message.
- Identify your target audience. Use and/or create your buyer personas to make this step simple and ensure you’re accurately defining your target buyers.
- Identify the main HVAC challenges your personas experience and need help resolving.
- Introduce your HVAC home services business as the solution to those HVAC challenges.
- Explain your point of difference and the unique identifier that sets you apart from the competition and makes you the clear choice for your target audience.
4. Choose your marketing channels.
Now that you have your marketing message established, you’ll want to think about which channel or channels that message and your marketing assets should be shared on.
It’s no secret that there’s a very large selection of marketing channels you can use today — so many that it might actually be overwhelming to determine where you can most effectively market to your target audience.
Examples of Marketing Channels for Your HVAC Business
Here are five examples of commonly used marketing channels that you might market your HVAC business through. Don’t feel obligated to use all of these channels — rather, focus on channels that you 1) know your audience spends time on, 2) believe will help your business achieve its overarching goals, and 3) are able to put time and effort into maintaining over time.
1. Search-engine-optimized Website
A well-functioning and search-engine-optimized (SEO) website can actually do a lot of marketing work for you. With a website that has a straightforward user experience (UX) and is optimized for search engines, your site will be more likely to appear in the Google results for keywords that relate to your business as your target audience is searching for them.
Additionally, local SEO tactics will help your business appear in locations that are physically close to where you conduct business — meaning, you’ll appear in the search results as prospective clients in your area search for HVAC services like yours. To help you optimize your website for the right keywords and phrases, use an SEO service like Semrush or Ahrefs. And to help with local SEO specifically, check out how Google can help. Speaking of how Google can contribute to your HVAC marketing plan, let’s talk about a tool called a Google Business Profile next.
2. Google Business Profile
With a Google Business Profile, you’ll be able to market your business for free on the world’s most popular search engine. Create a profile for your HVAC service on Google so prospects and customers can quickly get the information they’re looking for, including your contact details, hours, answers to FAQs, photos of your work, and more. This is also a simple way for you to obtain and respond to Google Reviews — this is beneficial because customer reviews (specifically, online reviews) are critical to the success of any small and/or local business. To help improve your HVAC SEO efforts, a Google Business Profile will also provide insight into which keywords people are searching to find your business.
3. Blog
Although it requires a bit of time to establish and maintain a home services blog, it can be an extremely powerful marketing channel. Blogging is a type of content marketing that can help you boost your rankings on search engines, establish the business as a thought leader, reach new target audience members, boost brand awareness, and build lasting relationships with your current customer base.
Blogs are a great place to share your knowledge, educate your audience, and show prospects and current customers that you understand exactly how to resolve their HVAC challenges, as well as support their DIY efforts when it makes sense for them to try and problem-solve their own.
4. Paid Ads
Try using a mix of different types of ads to determine what works best for your target audience. You can also look at how your competitors are advertising to a similar audience to yours. For example, you may advertise your HVAC services via pay-per-click or PPC ads. Or, use Google Ads to get your services in front of your audience via the Internet and YouTube. Google also offers tools for local service ads — this gives you an opportunity to connect with individuals who are searching for a service like yours within your pre-determined service area.
5. Social Media
Social media marketing — one of the most common and effective forms of digital marketing — entails using social media platforms to establish your brand presence, drive traffic to your website, foster strong relationships with your customers and target audience, increase sales, and establish your business as an expert in the field.
Start by determining which social media platform(s) your audience and current customers spend the most time on. Consider which platforms you think would be most effective for sharing your work and knowledge (e.g. Instagram may be a good platform to share how-to videos and pictures of your completed work).
When it comes to HVAC social media marketing, you may also want to take advantage of some of the paid advertising features certain platforms offer. For instance, Facebook Ads allow you to target specific audience members based on criteria you select, such as their location and age, so you’re able to get your business in front of the right people at the right time.
5. Measure your results.
The last step in your HVAV marketing plan is to measure your results. Determine what’s working and what isn’t. Have you met the marketing goals you set in step one? Use the analytics tools in your platforms to establish benchmarks for understanding future growth and opportunity areas. For instance, measure organic traffic to your website through Google Analytics. Use Facebook’s Page Insights to understand the success of your social media marketing efforts. You might also use a home services marketing tool, such as Scorpion, which comes with reporting capabilities in addition to features that can help you manage all aspects of your HVAC marketing plan.
Moving forward, as you test out new marketing messages and channels and even run HVAC marketing campaigns, you’ll have a basis for what success looks like, and you’ll know when it’s time to iterate on or evolve your marketing plan.
Begin Using an HVAC Marketing Plan Template
With an HVAC marketing plan — and by using a template as a guide — you’ll be able to improve brand awareness, bring in qualified prospective customers in your service area, retain more existing customers, and increase your revenue.
Need help? At Scorpion we have been helping HVAC businesses just like yours with their marketing for a long time. We will build you a great website, create content that gets you to show up on Google search, and improve your brand so customers keep coming back.
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