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As someone who works with small business owners every day, I know just how important marketing dollars are. As someone who works with heating and cooling professionals every day, I know just how valuable a successful HVAC digital marketing campaign can be and how its success translates to your bottom line.
As we head into 2020, digital will become even more crucial to helping you increase leads, booked jobs, and revenue.
Digital marketing can be a scary term—I get that. From not knowing what it is, who you should reach out to for help, or even where to start, it can be quite overwhelming. I commonly get questions like, “What is digital marketing? What does it include? Should I invest in HVAC digital marketing? Is it worth it?”
Take a look at a few examples of results digital marketing has gotten for HVAC contractors just like you:
So, the short answer is—yes. Investing in a digital marketing campaign (AKA “internet marketing” AKA “search engine marketing”) is ABSOLUTELY worth it, but only if you do so wisely, with the right company, and with the right strategies in place.
Have questions at the end? Give us a call and we’ll be happy to discuss!
Now, let’s get to it.
1. Do a Competitive Analysis of the HVAC Digital Marketing Landscape
Did you know that 81% of B2C shoppers conduct online research before they make a purchase? (Source) This begs the question, “how is your company positioned online?”
Unless your company is located in Middleofnowhereville, Montana or Nobodyliveshere, Idaho, chances are you aren’t the only heating and cooling company in your city. To fully understand how much time, money, and resources to devote to your HVAC digital marketing campaign in order to generate new business from the web in 2020, you need to do a digital competitive analysis:
As of the end of 2019, more than 64% of searches for HVAC services happen on a mobile device. As if that wasn’t enough, Google has a mobile-first search index (memory bank of web pages to populate search results), meaning if your mobile version of your website isn’t as great as your desktop version, you’ll lose rankings.
Having a mobile-friendly website will serve as a cornerstone of your entire HVAC digital marketing campaign.
The entire reason you and your competitors even invest in an internet marketing campaign is to generate more business. An essential part of your website is ensuring it is conversion-friendly, offering potential customers easy solutions to pick up the phone and call or fill out a contact form and send you a message.
A website’s conversion rate can increase from 200%-400% with a well-designed interface. What does that mean? A conversion-friendly website has:
94% of all page one search rankings are now HTTPS, meaning websites are “https://www.website.com” and not “http://www.website.com.” Google started giving ranking boosts to secure websites in 2014 and even said themselves they are moving towards a more secure web—and HVAC websites should take notice.
Given recent trends and Google’s push for site security, part of your HVAC digital marketing campaign should without a doubt include moving your website to HTTPS protocol*.
*Note: this is a complicated process and should be completed by a professional web developer or internet marketing company to ensure best results.
Like HTTPS and site security, site speed is an important factor of your website performance.
Think about it, how often do you leave a website on your phone or computer because the site takes forever to load?
Quite often, I’m sure.
According to Kissmetrics, a one-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions (form submissions and phone calls) and:
The bottom line: Build a fast website. If you don’t know how, ask your HVAC digital marketing company. If they don’t know, ask us!
Once your website is built and your competitive analysis is complete, it’s time to create an actual marketing plan (or work with a company to do so). A successful HVAC digital marketing campaign should be backed by research and data, continually tracked and measured, and optimized if needed for better performance.
The success of your internet marketing campaign doesn’t only depend on what your website says or how fast it runs. Offsite factors like your local search listings provide ranking signals and provide valuable information about:
As an HVAC contractor you should claim your local search listings on the following platforms (in order of importance—find the full list here):
For best practices on how to claim and build your local search listings, click here.
Social media marketing for HVAC contractors won’t result in hundreds of leads from Facebook each month—the value is elsewhere. We encourage our heating and cooling clients to use social media to:
In the words of Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is, “…a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
In other words, content marketing is the process of creating, publishing, and sharing web pages, blogs, videos, images, social media posts, and other content to advertise your company’s products and services.
In an HVAC digital marketing campaign, your website is the most popular place to publish new web pages and blogs as well as show off your latest products, images of your team, and company profile videos. It’s your all-in-one place for anything and everything you publish!
For heating and cooling companies, it’s important to invest in content marketing and search engine optimization together to maximize your search engine real estate.
Ever wonder why your competitors show up in the maps listings and you don’t? The answer: local SEO.
Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website, online business listings, and social media profiles for local search results on search engines. Combining local SEO with content marketing gives your website the best chance to rank in the Google maps listings and in the top three organic search results.
In a nutshell, local SEO services include:
If you haven’t heard, Google’s Local Services ads are pay per lead ads that appear right at the top of the search results when someone searches for your services.
Unlike traditional paid search ads, you don’t target keywords—you target by services:
Learn more about Local Services ads here: Everything You Need to Know About Google’s Local Services Ads
Online reviews are the new word-of-mouth referrals for HVAC companies and are essential to any HVAC internet marketing campaign. At Blue Corona, we recommend getting as many online reviews in as many places as possible, and here’s why:
To get more online reviews we recommend asking! Seems simple, doesn’t it? But it’s often overlooked. In my experience, the most common reason HVAC contractors don’t have any reviews on Google or Facebook is that they fail to ask. Plain and simple.
Don’t have time to manually ask every customer for reviews? Invest in a review platform to do it for you, like Review Us Now.
Yes, you need a blog. Not only will it increase your chances of ranking in the search engines, it helps attract potential customers to your website and enhances your HVAC digital marketing campaign.
If done right, your traffic trends should look something more like this:
This is a real screenshot of one of our client’s Google Analytics profile. In one year alone, this client generated 160,000+ organic visits to their blog—149,000+ were from unique visitors.
How much would you pay to place your business in front of 160,000 customers? Blogging presents a unique opportunity to market your heating and cooling company and its services, for virtually $0.
Those are just a few to start. Need more ideas? Our team of SEO and content marketing experts can help—just send us a message!
Pay per click (PPC) is a form of internet marketing that places your company at the top of search engines, instantly. It’s a pay-to-play system that is also highly scalable for heating and cooling companies, which is why it’s so beneficial.
Have an extra few hundred dollars (or a couple thousand, for you larger companies out there…) to spend on your HVAC digital marketing campaign? Invest in PPC.
Pay per click is a recommended strategy because:
Opt-in email marketing is a highly effective way to grow your HVAC business. Let’s face it. Not everyone who fills out a form on your site isn’t going to become a customer.
But, this doesn’t mean they’re lost forever. Instead, add a checkbox to your contact forms for visitors to opt-in* to your email marketing campaign.
Email marketing allows you to nurture unclosed leads and keep in touch with past customers, and it can be automated!
*Note: Opt-in email marketing is the direct opposite of sending unsolicited messages to unsuspecting random prospects and opt-in messaging is far more effective than unsolicited.
In the past 30 days, more online video content has been uploaded to the web than the past 30 years of TV content.
Wait, what? Let’s revisit that fact.
Holy moly.
What’s even more important is that companies that use videos in their internet marketing experience a 27% higher click-through rate (CTR) and 34% higher web conversion rates than those that don’t.
This means that video can:
Like any marketing strategy you need to know the value of your HVAC digital marketing campaign and every aspect of it. If you work with an online marketing company, meet with your dedicated account manager on a monthly basis to discuss what’s been done the past month, the results, and how things are pacing.
Not knowing if your investment is working for you or against you results in poorly-informed decision making when projecting end of the year revenue and crafting your growth strategy for the following year to come.
TTTR is our mantra here at Blue Corona. It stands for Track, Test, Tweak, and Repeat.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown:
Every day you ignore your HVAC online marketing campaign is another day your competitors distance themselves on Google and Bing, making it harder for your website to rank well and limiting your ability to generate new business from the web.
Give us a call or contact us online. Our HVAC internet marketing experts will help you get your website ranking and help put your company on the right path for maximum growth.
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