You wouldn’t set out on a road trip without first mapping the route to your destination, right?
Of course not. That’d be a waste of time and gas money. Not to mention, you’d probably never actually make it to your destination.
The same kind of logic should be applied to your HVAC marketing goals.
Clear and specific goals act as a “roadmap”. Without goals to guide your marketing efforts, you’ll find yourself wandering aimlessly from project to project, watching your budget quickly disappear with little results to show for it.
If that last scenario hit too close to home, don’t worry. We’re here to help. In this blog, we’ll outline how you can set marketing goals that drive better results for your HVAC company.
- Familiarize yourself with the business goals
- Determine marketing goals that align with business goals
- Refine your goals
- Next steps (and a few other considerations)...
Need help from a team of marketing professionals? Rocket Media can help. We keep our team small with the intention of giving you the focus that results in stronger strategies.
Step #1: Familiarize yourself with the business goals
First, let’s make one distinction clear: marketing goals and business goals are not the same things.
Business goals are typically higher-level, are inherently more ambitious and require support from all departments.
For example, some common business goals include:
- Drive more installation sales
- Grow brand awareness
- Expand your market share
- Enter a new service area
- Increase profits
Marketing goals, on the other hand, should be much more specific to efforts primarily carried out by the marketing department. But more importantly, your marketing goals should support the overall business goals.
That’s why step #1 is simply to understand your company’s overall goals. Once you know your business objectives, you can better select marketing goals that support those objectives and drive business results.
Our pro tips for this step:
- Reach out to various stakeholders to get their feedback on the company’s business objectives (CEO, CFO, business owner, sales managers, etc)
- Beware conflicting answers from stakeholders. This might mean more work needs to be done to define the business objectives. You might suggest a meeting where all stakeholders can get on the same page as far as business objectives.
- Focus on the business’ short-term objectives (goals for the next 12 months vs 5‑year goals)
Step #2: Determine marketing goals that align with business goals
Now that you know your business objectives, you can map out marketing goals that will help move the needle on those objectives.
For example, let’s say one of your HVAC company’s goals for the year is to increase installation sales by 20% YoY.
Examples of marketing goals that support this objective might include:
- Rank well for AC installation terms
- Drive more traffic to your AC installation website page
- Drive more click-throughs on paid ads
Our pro tips for this step:
- Avoid outlining any specific tasks at this point. Instead, you’re simply identifying the high-level marketing goals that will help the company achieve its objectives. For example, “drive more traffic” is a high-level goal, “write a blog post” is a specific task that might be necessary to achieve that goal
- Whittle down the list of company objectives to the 2 – 4 most important goals before this step. Anything more than this and you risk setting too many goals and spreading your marketing team/resources too thin. Also, you may need input from stakeholders for which business goals to prioritize/support.
Step #3: Refine your goals
Once you have a list of marketing goals that aligns with the overall business’ goals, you’ll need to “refine” those goals.
By “refine”, we mean make the goals much more specific in terms of:
- Measurement
- Timeframe
For example, refining the example goals in step #2 might look like:
- Rank well for “AC installation” terms > By March 1st, we will rank on page 1 for “AC installation in (area)”
- Drive more traffic to your AC installation content > By April, we will be driving at least 10% more traffic YoY to the AC installation page on the website every month.
- Drive more click-throughs on paid ads > By April, we will have increased the CTR on AC install campaigns by 15% when looking YoY for each month
Our pro tips for this step:
- Schedule an actual meeting for this step. Include anyone who will be involved in the work required to achieve each goal. That way, you can get team buy-in on the scope and timeframe of each goal.
- Be realistic. Be careful not to overestimate what you can complete with the resources that will be available to you.
Next steps (and a few other considerations)…
At this point, you should have a short list of very specific marketing goals that align with your business goals.
You still have some planning ahead of you. For example, your next steps will be to:
- Outline the specific tasks required to reach each goal
- Assign the person responsible for each task
- Assign due dates to each task
- Reassess your goals every month (you may need to adjust based on how you’re pacing month to month)
The good news is if you’ve completed steps 1 – 3, you can rest assured that you’re headed in a solid direction.
Need a marketing partner who can take all this off your plate?
Rocket Media is here to help. For the past 18+ years, we’ve developed (and achieved) marketing goals for HVAC companies across the US.
In fact, we’ve helped giants in the industry like George Brazil, CoolToday and Michael & Sons — and we can help you too.
Over the years, we’ve intentionally kept our team small. This helps us give clients the time and attention required to really understand your business and develop stronger marketing strategies as a result.
Want to learn more about our team? Just contact us or visit our website to learn more about our digital marketing services for HVAC companies.
