Your Ultimate Guide to HVAC Digital Marketing

You can spend all the time in the world building the best HVAC team and designing the most comprehensive list of HVAC services to offer your customers, but none of it matters if no one knows you exist. No matter your size, a solid marketing strategy makes all the difference in building brand awareness, attracting your customers and keeping them coming back for more.

Many HVAC business owners lean on their vehicle wraps, billboards, and TV or radio ads to support their marketing. But digital marketing services are an untapped gold mine of opportunity if you can put all the pieces together.

Why You Should Care About Your HVAC Digital Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy is your starting place. It outlines how you generate new leads for your HVAC business. But more than that, it's how you connect with prospective customers and turn them into new customers. Digital marketing services build brand awareness with prospective customers for your HVAC business and convince them you’re the right business for the job.

In its most basic form, your digital marketing strategy includes four unique sections: definition of your target audience, a competitive marketing analysis, your overall marketing goals, and the channels you plan to use to talk about the local services you offer. All this information together helps you talk about your HVAC business in a way that resonates with your perfect customer, helps you survive shoulder season woes, and differentiates your HVAC services from the competition.

Top Ways to Market Your HVAC Business Online

There are a million and one ways to market your HVAC company online. Despite this, there are still some common building blocks you can use to build a strategy that shows off your team, HVAC services, and culture.

1. Design a user-friendly HVAC website for your business

Designing a user-friendly website means focusing on a few key areas so that users easily find the information they’re looking for on your HVAC website. It also makes sure that a user’s experience on your website is consistent whether they’re on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device.
 

What Is User Experience?

User experience is how marketers and web designers talk about the functionality of websites and how easy it is for people to use them. User experiences are an extension of your brand and leave users with certain feelings and perceptions about your small business before they ever have a conversation with you.

A great user experience predicts the questions potential customers have, answers them, and provides avenues for them to learn more. That starts with service pages that set the right expectations for your future customers without using flowery language or industry jargon. But it also gives users many opportunities to connect with your team using web forms, contact pages, call-to-action buttons, and AI-powered chatbots.

2. Optimize Your Website With an HVAC SEO Strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) is how you help search engines like Google and Bing understand your website’s purpose. Local SEO takes it a step further and focuses your HVAC SEO strategy to the communities you serve. This means search engines are more likely to show your HVAC company in the search results when users search for things like “HVAC business near me.” And all without giving the search engines a dime.

Top 4 Tips to Include in Your Local SEO Strategy:

• Optimize Your Google Business Profile
  Claim your free profile from Google that highlights your contact information, primary HVAC services, hours of operation, and customer reviews. Once you’ve updated your profile with accurate information, start requesting reviews to show off your 5-star team.
• Keyword ResearchIdentify the top terms and phrases your target audience uses to search for local services like yours. You can use tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to do all the research yourself or lean on AI to help you identify the most in-demand keywords. Use these keywords to optimize your service pages and in your content marketing efforts.
• Update Your Meta Titles and Descriptions
  Meta titles and descriptions are copy sections that the search engines display in their search results listing pages. Include your top keywords to increase rankings for specific pages. Beware of character counts when updating these sections. Too many characters and your prospective customers won’t see it all.
• Create Service Area Pages and Claim Directory Listings 
  Google doesn’t know all the communities your HVAC team serves. You have to tell the search engines by building individual pages for each of your HVAC service areas. You can also claim directory listings, like those on Angi, to reiterate what regions you serve.

3. Build a Website Designed to Convert Users to New Customers

You can send all the traffic possible to your website, but it's not doing you any good if it can’t convert them from web users to HVAC customers. There are technical ways to increase calls, emails, and form fills, like boosting your page speed and making sure it’s mobile-friendly. But you don’t need to have technical knowledge to increase your likelihood of increasing new customers from your website.

You can boost conversions by answering the most common questions your customers ask about your business or the HVAC industry as a whole (think: how often do I need to replace my furnace?). But using sales copy best practices and engaging images throughout your site is another easy way to increase conversions.

4. Launch an HVAC Digital Marketing Campaign

Don’t want to wait for your business to make its way to the top of the search results pages? Google and Bing have their own versions of paid ads that lets you launch a campaign and pay the platform each time someone clicks on one of your ads. All of the social media platforms also offer their own version of paid digital advertising.

The benefit to paying for traffic? When you launch a Google ad campaign, you can target a specific group of people that matches your target audience to build brand awareness. Or you can use an HVAC marketing agency for more advanced digital ad campaigns, like retargeting or Google local service ads.

5. Leverage HVAC Social Media Profiles for Easy Exposure

Free social media business profiles are one of the most efficient, cost-effective ways to reach a wide range of customers to promote your products and services. But claiming a page and occasionally posting isn’t enough.

To see real success, you should follow some general HVAC social media marketing best practices:

• Utilize the right platform for your small business. Not all social media platforms are the same. 
  LinkedIn is primarily used for business professionals to connect and network. Facebook is for families to keep in touch with one another. Instagram and TikTok are highly-visual platforms that rely heavily on visuals to see results. The right platform for your HVAC social media plan is one your target audience uses and you can authentically show up on.
• Optimize your profile.
  Your profile, like your Google Business Profile, has all your basic HVAC business information, including your website, contact information, and hours of operation. You can optimize it with your logo, an engaging cover image, a keyword-rich description and list of local services. Maintaining a regular posting cadence and requesting customer reviews is a type of reputation management that demonstrates your relevance and responsiveness to potential customers looking at your profile.
• Create engaging content. 
  The true benefit of HVAC social media marketing, though, is creating unique and interesting content that’s targeted to your audience’s needs. While you should be consistent with how often you post, you should vary the types of content you share. A healthy mix of promotional and informative content can make you an industry expert. Use video marketing with customer reviews, infographics and step-by-step instructions to keep your content from growing stale.
• Use it as a communication tool.
  Potential customers may prefer to ask about your HVAC services through social media platforms like Facebook Messenger. It’s important to be able to meet them where they are. Tools like Scorpion’s Communication Suite integrate texts, calls, emails, and Messenger into a single inbox so you’ll never miss a lead.

6. Develop Your HVAC Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing is one of the most profitable ways to market your HVAC business, with an average ROI of $42 for every $1 spent. Email marketing campaigns can be used to inform your current and prospective customers about the HVAC industry, promote your products or services, engage your current customers so you remain top of mind, drive traffic to your HVAC website, and test messaging for different audiences.

Emails can be automated sequences that are sent when a user becomes a customer or schedules an appointment. You can send segmented emails to a select group of contacts, like those just within a specific geographic area, to increase engagement with highly-targeted messaging. You can also schedule regular email newsletters as part of your content marketing strategy that establishes your HVAC business as a leader in your community.

No matter what kind of email you’re sending, there are five steps you should take to create your winning HVAC email strategy:

1. Pick the marketing automation tool that best fits your HVAC business.

Before you can send an email, you need to have a platform that can handle high-quality, large-scale email campaigns. And you have plenty of options to choose from. The most popular are MailChimp, Constant Contact, HubSpot, and Aweber.

Looking for something specific to HVAC businesses? Check out Scorpion’s Email Marketing Services for HVAC.

2. Write a Great Subject Line

A great subject line determines whether your contact opens your email or not. The best subject lines are about seven words (or 41 characters), include personalized information like your contact’s first name, and start with an action verb that speaks to your target audience.

3. Make Your Emails Interesting

Now that you’ve gotten your contact to open your email, you want them to read it. The only way to do that is make the content interesting to them. Focus on eye-catching design and content your target audience actually cares about.

4. Include a Call-to-Action (CTA)

You’ve seen plenty of CTAs before. “Act Now,” “Call Today,” “Watch Now,” and “Book Your Appointment” are all good examples. They can direct your users to a specific webpage, watch an educational video, or prompt them to book an appointment. But not all CTAs are created equal. The best CTAs create urgency, set the right expectations, and stand out with unique design.

5. Study and Improve Your Emails

You should track the effectiveness of your email campaigns to spot messaging that resonates with your target audience, weaknesses in your approach, and other areas of concern. How? Monitor the open rate (percentage of people who open your email), click rate (percentage of people who clicked links in your email), and bounce rate (shows the quality of your email list) of your emails. These metrics are like red flares that tell you when and where users aren’t engaging with your email campaign.

Wrapping Up

Digital advertising is a huge opportunity for HVAC businesses, but many are too overwhelmed to start. Whether you're building it on your own or working with a digital marketing agency, well-thought-out, and executed digital marketing services keep your name in front of your target audience, makes it easy to engage with current and prospective customers, and establishes your business as an HVAC leader in your community.

Ready to get started? Book time with our team.