The Best Marketing Strategy For HVAC Contractors

“How to increase HVAC sales?“

This question may have plagued your thoughts many times before as an HVAC Contractor. You’ve also tried searching for HVAC marketing ideas in an attempt to find a solution.

Coming up with a brilliant HVAC marketing strategy takes work. Unlike other business models, HVAC customers often scrutinize contractors to ensure they’re getting the best deal. That’s normal. After all, installing a new air-conditioning and heating unit is not cheap.

So, how do you go about marketing your HVAC company? More importantly, how do you stand out from the competition in winning the hearts of undecided HVAC customers? The answer lies in your story.

The best HVAC marketing strategy you can implement is a holistic brand-forward marketing strategy. 

What Is A Holistic Brand-Forward HVAC Marketing Strategy?

You have an HVAC company and want to attract more customers. A conventional approach would be to advertise on Facebook, send out some targeted direct mail, and put ads on Google. In other words, you hope potential customers will come across these advertisements and call for your services.

With a holistic brand-forward HVAC marketing strategy, you prioritize telling your story and showcasing the values that set your brand above the competition. You support it with soft and hard call-to-actions (CTAs), and a balanced presence online and off. This can be done by:

• Defining what your core values are and how you can frame them in an interesting package.
• Figuring out your distinctive story
• Developing an advertising campaign that can endure for many years. 
• Running an intrusive mass media campaign at the correct repetition.
• Aligning your other brand identifiers to your long-term campaign. 
• Creating solution awareness and offers that protect the brand’s identity.
• Identifying the landscape where you are best suited to meet your prospects online and off. 
• Slowly shift your marketing budget to lower-cost lead capture as your brand takes full effect. 

A holistic brand-forward HVAC marketing strategy helps you become the solution people feel they know, like, and trust before they need what you sell. When something breaks in their home, the best strategy is to be the one they think of first and choose to call over all other options. 

There’s just one thing: you can do all of the above and still fail. 

Why? Five big things, presuming you're delivering a quality service: 

1. The message isn’t potent. 
2. The repetition is too low. 
3. The reach is too low. 
4. You aren’t present where people go looking for your service or brand. 
5. Your channel messages don’t feel the same and fail to convert.  

After 35 years of practice, we’re incredibly confident in our strategy at Wizard of Ads®, but results are never guaranteed. If you’re missing any of the five things above, the whole thing falls apart. 

Getting professional help on building holistic brand-forward HVAC marketing strategies is worth the price of admission. The alternative is far more expensive than the investment. I know how to get it right. With hundreds of home service clients, we know exactly what will help you stand out and hold attention. 

What Is Holistic Brand-Forward HVAC Marketing?

Holistic Brand-forward HVAC marketing means entertaining your trade area with your brand’s unmistakable personality and character on strategically selected online and offline channels. 

With 60% of your message building brand awareness, 40% of your messaging should attempt to activate sales with soft and hard call-to-actions (CTAs). 

The third element of a holistic brand-forward marketing strategy includes an investment in lead capture. The cost of capturing leads is directly correlated to how strong your brand message is. 

The more they look for you directly, the less you spend on capturing the lead, directly lowering the cost of acquisition. 

Where Should I Spend My Marketing Dollars?

There is soooo much noise out there, and it is difficult to know how to get it right. Honestly, there are a bunch of different ways that will get you there. You just want to avoid as many pitfalls and roadblocks as possible along the way. 

The cool thing about creativity is that even if you choose the wrong name, have a terrible truck wrap, or even show up in your marketing inconsistently, there are ways to make it work. 

As long as you are operating with integrity, everything else can be improved. 

One-Time Investments (in priority sequence)

1. 60% Your Message: Get your story straight first. You know how amazing a powerful story can be. Show up with a story that matches the price you want to charge. Make sure it’s durable. Cute and clever won’t get the retention and recall you’re hoping for when it counts. 
2. 5% Your Name: Get your name right. Make it authentic to what you stand for and how you show up in your market. The key is to be easy to remember and recall in relation to the pain you relieve. Your best name will come from your brand messaging. When they think positively about you, when something bad happens to something you sell, you win. 
3. 15% Your Logo, Typeface, and Colors: Getting the feel of your visual brand right is valuable. The best time to do this is after you have developed your durable and distinctive message. A lot can change when you uncover your original story. 
4. 20% Your Uniforms and Other Marketing Assets: Truck wraps, uniforms, trade show booths, giveaways, billboards, and so much more all help you tell your story. The better these marketing assets align, the easier it will be to remember your brand. Instead of picking something cute, pick something universally coveted and memorable. 

Ongoing Investments (Implementation)

Holistic brand-forward marketing is not for the faint of heart. First and foremost, you have to have an operation that you believe in and that stands for something. Superficial entertainment and disingenuous value propositions get the bang, but not the buck. You’ll just show up faster and go down harder when you're all sizzle and no steak. 

Many impatient and overzealous entrepreneurs have been caught up in the myth that a lead is something that can be magically “generated” with enough money. And they’re not wrong. Poor. But not wrong. You can capture a lead if a lead is all you want. No guarantees. But they are busy! For now. Until they’re not… aaaaannnd there’s no money left. 

A holistic brand-forward marketing strategy is an investment in a long-term play. A long-term relationship. It takes trust and courage to believe in your business to earn the opportunity to get a second chance when it comes time to serve the customer again. It takes faith that a great message at the correct repetition will seep into every crevice of your trade area, understanding everyone with a friend is an influencer. 

Can it be painful at times? Scary? Yup. But no more scary and painful than spending a bunch of money on expensive leads that never convert. At least with a brand, you're building a future as you slowly become a household name. 

Here’s where the budget goes:

• 35% Brand Awareness: As you roll out your shiny new brand, you need to stay current and relevant. You want your brand message to evolve and evoke an emotion. While your truck wraps and logo are representative, they are also passive. Investing in sharing your developing story to as many people as you can afford to with high repetition is essential to attract new customers and remind previous customers alike why they should choose you when something goes wrong. 
• 25% Sales Activation: Not all sales activation tactics are discounts. You can instill a sense of curiosity or discomfort by simply bringing awareness to a situation that is in your prospect's blind spot. Discounts are also a way to lower the resistance to using your service. When designed carefully, you can make an offer and protect your brand’s integrity. Done carelessly, you’ll train your buyers to wait for your predictable offers. 
• 40% Lead Capture: As far as the marketing budget goes, you need to spend money to be present where your buyers go looking for your brand or your service. This budget should be divided into online and offline efforts, based on the unique assets you create and deploy to activate and capture prospects that step into your gravity well. 

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Eventually, you’ll discover that your cost to capture leads will drop. A little at first, then a lot. This is what Roy H. Williams meant when he said that advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable. No surprise, the mature McDonald’s brand has no need to run unbranded PPC campaigns for hamburgers. 

As a brand exceeds 8% market share, we consistently see dramatic reductions in total advertising spend as a percentage of revenue. Of course, as brands, market conditions, and competitors vary, so will results. 

What is the ROI on Holistic Brand-Forward Marketing Strategy? 

What I love most about a holistic brand-forward marketing strategy is the ROI. I’m a business, man, so I want results. 

Brand equity is a real thing. Here’s the thing. Branding is a deposit into the mental bank. It’s compounding. Spending money on lead capture is a withdrawal. A necessary spend, but a cost that adds zero value to your actual growth. And, just like compound interest, an investment in brand exposure has a multiplier effect. 

Coming from the highly transactional automotive industry and retail prior to that, I know how much of a grind it can be. The difference is night and day when you have the full force of a beloved household name at your disposal. 

The second thing we see after some fun anecdotal feedback is the shift in lead quality. A great brand will attract more and more relational buyers, ready to listen to your recommendations, buy what you suggest, and be more open to more robust solutions. I call these High CAP customers. High conversions, average sale, and profits. 

What’s most surprising to most is the independence businesses start to achieve from targeted lead capture channels. Channels can be super finicky. As technology evolves, so will the way people interact with them. Some are fashionable and trendy. Some are durable and entrenched. 

We study the shifts twice a year as the data is released, making sure that we stay in front of the most amount of people for the least amount of money at the correct repetition. This matters a lot, and there is no one-size-fits-all channel mix for businesses, even those in the same town. Getting the marketing mix correct up front is essential if you’re hoping to see results. 

The biggest mistake entrepreneurs make about ROI in a holistic brand-forward marketing strategy is time. Time is always the unknown variable. We have no idea how long it will actually take to work. We can guess. We certainly hope it’ll click fast. We can pour on accelerant, we can strategize on timing, but we can’t control the uncontrollables. 

So, give it time. All the time it needs to get the result you expect, and then results that exceed your expectations. Disappointment lives in imaginary expectations, and most entrepreneur brains clock a 2X speed. 

Every single person who trusts in the process and gets through the chickening-out period are elated with the impact a powerful brand adds to the profitable growth of a business. 

What’s Next? 

Let’s talk. This is what I do.