Introduction
According to a research study by BIS, the HVAC market is projected to reach an estimated value of $258 million by 2027 – a significant growth to the current market size of $190 million. This means that over time, the competition in the HVAC industry is only going to get stiffer. You need a solution to get ahead of the competition, position yourself as a top HVAC business to work with, and put your business in front of potential customers.
One sure way to do that is through marketing. Even if you know this, the next question that almost always follows is “How can I find an HVAC digital marketing company?” — In this article, we will be going through the steps you can take to choose the best HVAC marketing agencies that will get you more customers and grow your business. But first, let’s define what a marketing agency is and what they do so you are aware of how they work, the services they offer, and what you should expect from them.
What is are HVAC Marketing Companies?
An HVAC marketing agency (also called HVAC marketing services or SEO company) advertise and promote the services of HVAC contractor businesses with the aim of increasing sales, generating leads, boosting brand awareness, and so on. They do this by implementing and managing marketing campaigns to meet the business goals of their clients.
There are several marketing strategies that these agencies offer including:
- HVAC website design and development
- Pay-per-click (PPC) ads and Google local service ads
- Local search engine optimization (SEO)
- Email marketing campaigns
- Social media marketing
- Advertising
- Reputation management
- Brand awareness
Some marketing companies for HVAC are full-service i.e they offer the whole package. Others are specialized in one or two fields. Neither one is better than the other — it all depends on what you want.
How can An HVAC Marketing Agency Help my Business?
As we’ve stated earlier, marketing is one of the surefire ways to get your business out there in front of your target market. Now you can do this by hiring your own in-house marketing staff, which would cost you a lot of money, or you can outsource to an HVAC contractor agency that knows their marketing. The latter option is more affordable, and you are guaranteed to get results.
Also, these agencies have a lot of experience under their belt. They have worked with tons of businesses like yours over the years, so there’s nothing you will throw at them that they haven’t handled before.
Lastly, marketing strategies change all the time due to changes in technology. Just recently in September, Google updated their SEO algorithm, which affects how they rank websites in their search engine result pages. It is the job of marketing agencies to stay on top of these new developments and ensure your marketing campaigns are not affected.
You might not have the time or expertise to follow these kinds of technological changes, but they do. They also have the tools, manpower, and experience.
What Marketing Services are the Best for my Business
There are a bunch of service offerings under the “marketing” umbrella, and it can be rather confusing to decide which best applies to your business needs if you do not understand how they work. In light of that, here are some common HVAC business problems and the appropriate marketing solutions to guide your decision:
- If you want leads and sales, you’re going to want to look for the marketing agencies that offer services like pay-per-click ads (PPC) and Google local service ads. PPC ads and Google local service ads are the first things you see when you search for a service (like HVAC services for example) around your area. This is one of the fastest ways to generate leads and boost sales. If your website is not in the best shape, you want to add website design and development services in the mix because usually, PPC ads redirect to your website; and if your website is in bad shape, you are not going to convert any leads.
- If you want to create awareness about your business, you are most likely going to benefit from social media marketing (online) and traditional advertising (offline). Traditional advertising includes billboard advertising, poster placements, and tv/radio advertising. Not a lot of HVAC marketing agencies combine digital marketing and traditional marketing, so ensure to ask questions about traditional marketing campaigns so you are both clear on your goals.
- If you want to build relationships with your clients (especially older clients), you are looking for email marketing and direct mail advertising.
- If you want to establish your HVAC business as a leader in your locality, you want to consider content marketing and search engine optimization. Content marketing gives you the chance to display your expertise in the form of blogs and videos. If done right, more people will continue to engage with your content, you will start to build a community around your HVAC business and soon enough, you will be established as a leader in the HVAC industry.
How to Choose a Marketing Agency: 8 Steps for HVAC Businesses
The barrier of entry is quite low for marketing agencies. With a few bucks and a couple of youtube tutorial videos, just about anybody can slap on the title “Marketing Agency” on their business website. That is why it is important to go into your marketing agency fishing expedition with a foolproof strategy.
1. Make a list
First thing we advise you to do is to first make a list of potential HVAC marketing agencies. What you want to do is go to the internet and search “HVAC marketing agencies”. Then make a shortlist of the ones you find.
2. Define your Goals and Compare their Services
If you are trying to fix an air conditioner that is held together with hex head screws, you will most likely go for the hex drill or screwdriver in the toolbox – this is because you need your goal to match your solution. The same goes for choosing an HVAC marketing consultant — you want your business goal to match the solutions they are offering.
3. Investigate their Marketing Campaigns
This is probably the most important step on this list because it helps you confirm if the agency actually does what they say they do, rather than what they show on their website. Here is where you want to ask yourself questions like “how does this marketing agency promote itself?”. Because how they market their own business is a reflection of how they will market yours.
A good trick to use here is to search the keywords “HVAC marketing agencies”, as we stated in the first step above. Then you will see a couple of Google ads that pop up for your location — these are the guys you want to add to your shortlist.
For them to appear on the top of Google result pages for that keyword, it means they must be doing something right.
If you go further down, you will see another list of HVAC marketing agencies with their respective Google My Business profile. You want to add them to your shortlist too.
Simply coming up on this Google maps listing for those keywords proves that they can effectively market physical locations for heating and cooling contractors.
You also want to check if they are currently running ads on social media like Facebook. You can do this by going to their Facebook page and clicking “See all” under the “Page Transparency” section.
4. Look out for Relevant Experience
After defining a clear goal, identifying the HVAC marketing agencies with solutions that address your goals, and investigating their marketing campaigns, the next thing you want to do is to check if they have relevant experience in the services you need. So if you have identified search engine optimization as your business marketing goal, the agency you would eventually choose must have at least 6 months of experience in SEO.
They should also have sufficient evidence in managing marketing campaigns for HVAC businesses precisely. Reason is because each industry has their own marketing challenges. An agency that has experience in managing HVAC marketing campaigns will be in the best position to partner with.
5. Review their Portfolio and Past Successes
This step is sort of tied up with the previous one. While searching for relevant experience you also want to gauge their success rate as well. This you can do by reviewing their portfolio and case studies. You can always ask for a portfolio or previous results for their HVAC marketing campaigns. Some companies leave a couple of client success stories on their website page which you can go through to assess their track record.
Another way to go about it is to check out reviews and testimonials about their marketing services tso you can get a sense of their credibility. It is important to note here that it is almost impossible to have a perfect rating score of 5.0, especially if the agency has worked with a lot of clients. But at the very least, the review score should not be less than 4.0. If you have the time, you can reach out to some of their past clients and ask questions about the HVAC marketing agency. Questions like if they did a good job building relationships, if they are responsive, and the kind of results they have been seeing. This gives you a fully formed opinion about how the agency conducts their business.
6. Review their Price Plans
This is one of the most important steps in choosing an HVAC marketing company. You want to choose one that falls within your budget so you do not spend all your resources on marketing. We recommend you set aside about 10% of your revenue for your marketing campaigns.
So let’s say you did $800,000 in sales in a given year, $80,000 will be your marketing budget. You can then go through your list to check for the HVAC marketing companies that fall within that range. You can even get a little aggressive and allocate 15% — it all depends on how fast you want results. It is important to mention here that you shouldn’t necessarily pick the cheapest marketing agency, and that’s not to say you should pick the most expensive either, because expensive does not automatically equal quality. The best metric for choosing an agency is if they tick all the boxes, and not just their pricing.
7. Check out their Team
The next thing you want to do is to check out the team of marketing experts that would be working on your account. Usually with marketing agencies, they assign an account manager and a group of experts in specialized fields to help you plan your marketing strategies. Here is where you want to ask questions like “who will I be working with should I choose to commit to your agency?”. And if it’s possible, try to strike a conversation with them to gauge their expertise. If you are comfortable with what you hear, you can then move forward on your commitment. You also want to find out if the
8. Evaluate their Communication Protocol
Last but not least, it is important you understand how the marketing agency will be working and communicating with you. This is where you should be asking how their communication protocol is like, how often you will be meeting to discuss results, who would be communicating with you, and the medium of communication. A clear communication protocol is a sign that the HVAC marketing company will make you a part of their marketing strategy.
When to Expect Results from HVAC Marketing Companies
As stated in previous subsections, there are different services in marketing, and each one takes time to yield results. So it is only natural to expect a different estimated time of delivery for each marketing campaign. However, it is equally important to have an idea of when to expect results from your marketing agency so you can measure their competence and know when to take a hike when you are not seeing the desired results.
Digital marketing campaigns like Google local service ads and pay-per-click ads start yielding results almost instantaneously, if done correctly. From the first day the ad goes live, you should start getting calls or visits to your website, especially since these ads are localized to bring in leads from your business service areas. However, you can give a 1-2 month extension to see if there will be any results before you can make a decision.
Search engine optimization, SEO, is the one digital marketing campaign that takes the most time. It can take anywhere from 6 months to a year to start getting meaningful results. SEO results are usually progressive, i.e you see an increase in website traffic gradually over the time. This is something to keep in mind when you analyze results from SEO campaigns. If you see a gradual increase in website traffic, it means the agency is doing something right.
Social media marketing and advertising typically takes around 4 months to get good, consistent results. With this kind of marketing campaign, a series of test ads are usually deployed to get sufficient data. This initial testing phase can take a couple of weeks to a month to complete. Then with a few modifications on the marketing agency’s side, you should begin to see consistent results over time.
In the end, we recommend that you stay with one HVAC marketing agency for at least 6 months to a year, because results may ebb and flow — and that’s not an indication that the agency is not doing their job. SEO, for example, could start giving inconsistent results even after 6 months of consistency. This is because Google updates their algorithm from time to time. The most important thing in situations like this is to see how well and how frequently the agency communicates their results to you.
Which Price Model is Best for HVAC Marketing?
Marketing agencies do not charge the same way, some may charge per project, some might charge by the hour, and others could bill as a monthly retainer. The question then is…what pricing model is the best for your HVAC business?
We suggest you look for HVAC marketing companies that bills consistently month after month, i.e monthly retainer, for three reasons:
- You can plan and budget. Having an HVAC marketing agency on a monthly retainer means you get to budget for your marketing cost upfront. The same cannot be said for performance-based pricing, hourly pricing, or any other price model where they give you a range and you have to pay based on what was achieved or how many hours was spent running your marketing campaigns.
- Retainer pricing is easier to understand. Retainer pricing is heavily value-based, i.e you can negotiate a set number of deliverables (such as number of leads, number of website visits, number of converted customers, etc) for a set price per month. This makes it easier for you to understand if you are meeting your marketing goals for your HVAC business or not.
- The HVAC marketing agency will be incentivized to improve their service efficiency and quality in order to retain you. Since retainer pricing is value-based the marketing company will want to do all it takes to ensure they meet the target you have both agreed on. This cannot be said for say hourly-based pricing for example where the agency might be encouraged to waste time so they can earn more money.
Who are the Top HVAC Marketing Agency Options?
While we have laid out the steps you should take to ensure you pick the best HVAC marketing company for your business, we understand how tedious it can be for you to go through the entire process, albeit beneficial. If you haven’t that much time to spare, we have combed through the internet to make a list of the best agencies in the industry for HVAC companies. These guys are industry leaders with years of experience using proven methods to market HVAC businesses. They are as follows:
- Blue Corona: This HVAC marketing company has been around for 15 years. They are a full-service marketing company that offers services including PPC advertising, local SEO, Google local service ads, email marketing, social media marketing, and even reputation management and traditional advertising. Of all the marketing agencies listed, Blue Corona is one of the few that runs traditional advertising (billboards, tv ads, radio ads, etc.). They also have a Google review score of 5.0.
- Thrive Agency: This is another marketing agency that has over a decade of experience in the industry (17 years) and a good review score of 4.5 from 30 reviews on Google. They specialize in SEO, website design and development, social media marketing PPC, and content marketing.
- Scorpion: This agency has 20 years of experience in marketing. They specialize in Google and Facebook advertising, website management,and SEO.
- Rizen: This marketing agency is well versed in paid ads marketing and email outreach.
- Rival Digital: Rival Digital is yet another marketing agency that specially services HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contractors. They typically run PPC, Google local services, social media, email, and SEO marketing campaigns as well as website design.
- On Purpose Media: This agency is another on this list that is solely dedicated to the HVAC industry. They offer social media marketing, PPC, SEO, and website design.
- HVAC Marketing Experts: This marketing agency offers the full package for HVAC businesses. Unlike the big agencies on this list, HVAC Marketing Experts are a small 25+ person group of highly specialized experts.
Conclusion
To recap what we have discussed in this article, we stated what HVAC marketing agencies are, what they do, and how they can be beneficial to your business. We then proceeded to list 8 steps you can use to choose a marketing agency. You can always use these steps as a checklist to direct you in your search for the HVAC marketing company that works best for you.
