Here are some tips that will help push your HVAC business to the next level in 2020.
It can be easy to get tripped up in details when you start a business, and the HVAC field makes no exception. There’s more to running a business than keeping the lights on and the books up-to-date. In order to stay around for the next ten years, or even the next year, you need to make strides towards growing your HVAC business.
Improve your marketing
Most HVAC companies were founded by someone that was once on the tools every day. Unfortunately in trade school they don’t teach you anything about marketing and growing the business. At most they may discuss putting magnets or decals on your truck, get some business cards printed, and the business will come pouring in.
The days of “build it and they will come” like that are long gone. That may have worked a few decades ago, but not today. Every other week there is more competition opening in the marketplace and business owners need to be at the top of their game when it comes to marketing. While you don’t necessarily need a dedicated, internal marketing team to get there, there are certain things that any HVAC company should do.
Website Design Tips for HVAC Companies
You may have a physical storefront, but for all intents and purposes, your website is the face the world sees when deciding whether or not to choose your services. The first step to marketing your HVAC business online? Build a great website. A website allows you to showcase your products and services, and gives you a platform that supports not only marketing campaigns, but customer service, brand recognition, and client relationship building.
Good HVAC website design impacts your marketing results in a significant way. To reach your business goals, your website must be easy to navigate, feature plenty of whitespace (for the eye to rest), contain multiple calls to action, and feature well-written, easy to read content. More traffic will come to your site from phones than computers, so mobile responsiveness is another must.
Search Engine Optimization Tips for HVAC Companies (SEO)
So! You’ve got a website for your HVAC company. Guess what? So do your competitors. You need to stand out, not just in appearance, but in search rankings. When a potential customer searches “HVAC service” in your city, you want Google to display your website as the first result, not your competitor’s. The difference between appearing first and tenth on a search engine results page (SERP) can mean millions of dollars in revenue annually. To achieve a high ranking, you must optimize your website for search engines.
How does Google determine search rankings? No one truly knows, but all of the following play an important role:
- Responsiveness – You need a site that works on mobile devices.
- Code – You need clean code that a search engine can easily read and interpret. This includes alt tags for images and other non-text elements.
- Content – In addition to the marketing/sales content your website needs to convince prospects to hire you, your site should feature informative articles on your area of expertise. (This very article serves as a fine example!) Good content helps establish your company as an authority on a subject.
- Backlinks – If a lot of external sites link to your site, search engines will view your website as significant/important and move it up in the rankings accordingly.
Did you get all that? If not, don’t worry! Anyone can teach themselves SEO with enough time and effort, but if you don’t want to get your hands dirty, you can hire an SEO company, marketing firm, or a full-time marketing employee to tackle SEO for you.
Social Media Tips
A social media account complements your website in so many ways. For one, you can share pages from your website on your Facebook or Twitter page to reach a readymade audience. Want to show the human side of your HVAC work? Instagram offers a superb platform to show your audience photos of your staff doing what they do best. Social media sites can also help you host any contest that aims to attract new followers and boost sales.
If you opt to spend advertising dollars on social media, you’ll find that you have the ability to reach a hyper-specific audience. Demographic targeting gets very specific, you can hone in on all kinds of parameters, everything from gender and location to interests and age.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
You know those ads that pop up after you conduct a Google search for a particular product or service? Companies just like yours pay a lot of money to put them there. When marketing online, you too should consider going the search advertising (often referred to as pay per click or PPC) route.
PPC advertising brings with it a lot of benefits, including easily trackable and measurable results, a treasure trove of useful data, and of course, more traffic and revenue. PPC also works well with other marketing channels, and is an incredibly cost-effective form of advertising, since you only pay when a user clicks on your ad and reaches your website. If your website does what it should, this could mean a lot of easy money.
Conclusion
The strategies above represent only a few of the measures you can take to market and grow your HVAC company online. Try them out, see what proves most effective, and adjust accordingly.
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