How to Create the Right HVAC Marketing Leads for Your Budget

As part of creating an online marketing plan, you’ll determine your marketing funnel.

While your marketing funnel depends heavily on your marketing plan, we usually take our HVAC clients one of two routes: quick and dirty, or slow and steady.

The quick and dirty route includes:

• Creating landing pages.
• Doing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

The slow and steady route includes:

• Building your online presence with a quality website.
• Marketing the website through PPC, search engine optimization (SEO), and email marketing.

The route you choose depends on both your budget and your timeline.

Choose this option if you:

• Are just getting started in digital marketing
• Have 10 million or less in yearly revenue
• Have about 5-8 trucks
• Need a better online presence up and running in a month or two
• Are running a seasonal campaign

To give you a quick return on investment (ROI), this method focuses specifically on:

• Creating landing pages.
• Marketing those landing pages with PPC.

What’s nice about the quick and dirty route is that you don’t need a full-fledged website to make it work. You can run an effective campaign by driving leads to landing pages, which are stand-alone pages intended to collect leads.

The key word here is “intended”. Landing pages aren’t magic—throwing content into the internet ether doesn’t mean the leads will come rolling in. You need to have quality content on a well-designed page.

A good landing page:

• Sticks to one objective. The more you want your lead to do, the more they’ll get distracted and not do that one thing you want them to. Whether it’s to fill out a form, call your company or watch a video—stick to one call-to-action (CTA).
• Matches content to the search term. If your landing page content doesn’t match the PPC ad your lead clicked on, they’ll lose interest and won’t stay on the page very long. For example, if your ad says “AC repair in Phoenix”, your landing page needs to match those keywords.
• Has important information at the top. Things like your CTAs, offers and promotions, and unique selling points should be up top and noticeable to your leads.
• Builds trust. Displaying things like customer testimonials and certifications badges helps give validation, so leads know your company is one they can trust.

You can see more of these tips included in the top of this George Brazil landing page:

Once you get the landing pages up, you need to…

PPC ads are the search results you see first listed in Google results. They’re a great way to generate leads quickly.

You need to consider several factors when working with PPC, but it comes down to this: If people are searching for the keywords you bid on and your ad is written well, you’ll get clicks.

PPC is so effective for getting leads because it gives HVAC companies prime search engine real estate to attract people searching for their offerings. As you can see in the graph below, the ROI (effectiveness) of PPC is much higher right off the bat than anything you’d get organically.

The downside to the quick and dirty method, as the little yellow line shows, is that PPC isn’t a great solution for the long term. It can also be a massive waste of money if you’re not doing it right or if your landing pages aren’t designed well.

Check out our PPC ad management service.

If not, consider the more substantial method of getting leads.

Choose this route if:

• You already have a website, but it needs an upgrade
• You have 20 million or more in yearly revenue
• Have about 10 trucks or more
• You can wait 3+ months to see results

This route more of a slow burn that builds your online presence over time through:

1. A quality website
2. PPC
3. SEO
4. Remarketing

Those four things work together to create a lead generation funnel:

Each part of the funnel plays an important role in getting leads, but you can see that your website is the pivotal area that turns leads into customers.

Your website is the foundation of your digital marketing. Every marketing tactic you do depends on it. If you’re doing everything else right and your website isn’t great, you won’t close leads.

When it comes down to it, your website should answer people’s most basic questions about your company. We’ve worked with dozens of HVAC companies and found five questions customers ask most often:

• Why should I choose you over a competitor?
• Is there a cost for diagnosis?
• How much is this service going to cost me?
• What if I’m not satisfied?
• How and when can I contact you?

The more of those questions your website answers, the more qualified leads will contact you.

Download our report to learn the top five reasons HVAC websites lose quality leads.

Once you have a good website going, start driving leads to it.

PPC strategy doesn’t change much between the two methods. Just as it does in the quick and dirty method, PPC in the slow and steady method:

• Will quickly get you HVAC leads.
• Depends on quality content.

The one difference between the two methods is where you’re driving leads. In this method, you’re driving to your website, as opposed to just landing pages. This creates more opportunities for your PPC campaign, since you have a full-fledged website with many pages of content versus a single landing page.

It’s especially important in this method to have a quality website, as PPC works together with SEO to generate leads for your business.

With PPC, you pay for leads to come to you. SEO brings those leads to your site naturally. Ultimately, you want a mature lead generation funnel that looks something like the last one here:

See how the mature funnel relies more on SEO than it does on PPC? That doesn’t happen overnight.

It takes time to “build authority” to rank for organic searches on Google.

To see how to do that in detail, check out this article: Local SEO for HVAC Companies: A Beginner’s Guide.

One of the best things you can do for your lead generation is to nurture your current customers through remarketing (marketing to the same person multiple times). This makes sure you stay top of mind to your customers and give them information and offers relevant to them. Show them some love—or at least some valuable content.

Email and social media are great channels for remarketing your current HVAC customers.

Email

You can segment email lists in just about any way you want—location, services purchased, purchase frequency, satisfaction rating and so on—to give your customers relevant content.

Some ideas for email remarketing:

• Reminders about tune-ups
• Special deals
• Tips for equipment maintenance
• Other educational content

This email newsletter, for example, includes educational content and a monthly special.

Social media

Like email, social media channels let you segment your customers to give them targeted content:

• Facebook Custom Audiences lets you create lists from your customer data, so you can target ads to specific groups of customers.
• Twitter Tailored Audiences does something similar, letting you target your customers from lists, your website and your mobile app (if you have one).

If you want to learn more about we can help you market your HVAC company, give us a call at (800) 339-7305
 or contact us today.