Create awareness, grab their interest, influence their decisions, and drive them towards action. That’s the path towards lead generation and future conversion for HVAC businesses.
Although it seems simple at first, it isn’t if you don’t know the correct strategy to entice customers to avail of your HVAC services. How can you expect leads when your website lays barren with no trace on the first page of SERPs? This equates to being invisible when your competitors are shining in the eyes of the customers.
Thus, to ensure all your marketing efforts bear results, continue reading as we uncover some of the best strategies to generate HVAC leads for your business. So, without any delay, let’s get you shining in the HVAC industry and gain the attention of visitors who need HVAC service.
Importance of Lead Generation for HVAC Businesses
Ask any marketing expert, and they’ll tell you how important lead generation is for business, be it HVAC or others. It’s a route through which interested audiences will ultimately become paying customers and avail of your services whenever the need arrives. And for that, they need to know you exist in the first place, which is challenging if you have the wrong approach.
For example, a person’s air conditioning unit broke, and he’s searching for keywords like “HVAC near me.” Now, are you sure he’s going to find your business in the crowd of search results? Is your business even on the first page, let alone first place in the SERPs?
If not, then a lot of work must be done for your business to be visible to potential customers. No one in this day and age scrolls past the first two or maybe three results in the SERPs as people believe in Google algorithm’s ranking procedure. Besides, a HubSpot report even shared that 75% of users don’t even scroll past the first page of SERPs.
So, for that, you have to appear on the first page. Otherwise, everything’s for naught as you’re just another entity lost on the internet whose potential is left unrecognized. Therefore, lead generation is important to expand your market, gather more customers, grow your following, boost revenue, improve lead quality, and so much more.
Thus, if you want to sustain your HVAC business for long, lead generation is the path to success. However, that’s easier said than done because a lot of smart work, strategizing, and patience are required to get quality HVAC leads.
If you can put in the work required to follow through with an ultimate lead generation strategy, then we’ll guide you through the process.
What Makes an Effective HVAC Lead Generation Strategy?
The HVAC industry is just like any other – a rat race! If you fall behind, even a step, you lose. That’s why you need to prioritize what’s best for your HVAC business in the long run. To explain how you need to set the right priorities to generate quality leads, we’ll be using the same analogy used by Ryan Lynch.
We’re sure you’d have already seen the oft-repeated and famous analogy of the professor who asked his students to fit rock, pebbles, sand, and water in a single jar. Now here, you’re not a student but an HVAC contractor whose task is to prioritize what’s best and should ideally come first for effective marketing and powerful lead generation.
How well you can fit all these materials in a single jar will tell a lot about your business tactics, marketing priorities, and everything in general. We don’t know about your answer, but ours would be:
- The rocks signify your target audience’s interests, needs, and expectations.
- Pebbles are the strategies that will convert the target audience into quality leads.
- Sand signifies distractions holding back your HVAC business from generating leads.
- Water signifies converted leads at the end of the sales funnel.
Once you identify what’s what for the business, you can successfully manage the space and move away from distractions hindering the process. Afterward, you can follow a lead generation strategy ideal for your business, depending on the location, customer demographics, and other metrics.
Here’s what an effective lead generation strategy looks like.
Step 1: Identify business goals and customer expectations. They should be in congruence with each other.
Step 2: Analyze customer behavior and buyer’s journey.
Step 3: Analyze the lead generation tactics used by competitors.
Step 4: Identify the proper marketing channels to use.
Lead Identification for HVAC Companies
Although all other steps of a lead generation strategy are pretty simple to identify, locating the right marketing channels can be tricky. So, if you’re just beginning to realize everything and it all just seems confusing at best, don’t worry. We’ve got your back with ways that will tightly grip the interest of your audience and ensure that they’ll transform into quality leads.
However, for that, you first need to identify the place where your leads come from. It will help you focus on those areas through which more leads are generated while eliminating other time-consuming or costly tactics that aren’t successful.
For better understanding, look at this data shared by Smart Insights in their report on B2B marketing trends for more leads and sales in 2021. This report noted that as much as 65% of B2B respondents attributed their marketing leads to referrals. At the same time, 38% and 33% attributed their leads to email marketing and search engine optimization, respectively.
As you can see, print advertising or direct mail for lead generation, which were once considered the best years ago, are kind of useless now. So, you must get rid of traditional methods and focus more on ones that are on par with changing times.
Nowadays, social media and content marketing or even influencer marketing have taken the forefront regarding lead generation or conversion. And that’s quite apparent from HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing Trends 2022 Report, which has reported social media as the top marketing channel.
You can go through the carefully curated bar graph below to recognize the channel that can be used for your lead generation strategy and follow along.
Strategic HVAC Lead Generation for Better Conversion
Once you’ve acquainted yourself with the process and identified the key marketing channels, it’s finally time to put all the information to good use. But before you begin our strategic guide, remember that a little bit of mind reformation is important. We’ve heard various HVAC contractors saying, “these hands repair ACs or heating units and don’t write blogs!” Well, it’s high time you do.
It was identified that businesses that run blogs get 67% more leads monthly than businesses that don’t. But that’s not all. Many such ways seem unconventional to construction or repair industry businesses like HVAC but aren’t and have proven successful in lead generation.
So, follow the key strategies below to get HVAC leads for your HVAC services.
1.) Get HVAC leads by boosting online presence
We couldn’t stress enough the importance of boosting your online presence to get HVAC leads for HVAC services. That’s because, without a proper online presence, needy customers can’t reach out to you in a pinch. They won’t even know your business exists without an acquaintance informing them about it.
Besides, even if you’ve successfully generated a lead, how are you possibly going to guide the same to your location without having a Google My Business account in the first place? But yeah, who are we kidding, as every HVAC business surely has a GMB account to offer local services in the area.
Yet, that’s not all, as there are many such GMB listings where yours would simply get lost in the crowd on SERPs. And that’s where tactics like Search Engine Optimization, SEO-optimized blogs with quality content, or even Google knowledge panels can help. Although the latter isn’t essential, it can surely boost brand authority among customers so they can actively seek your services whenever the need arises.
We have highlighted a few ways by which you can boost your online presence to get more leads below.
Search Engine Optimization of HVAC Website
SEO-optimizing your website is one of the most important steps to getting quality leads, and almost all third-party HVAC lead generation companies will agree with that. It’s because that’s the aspect most HVAC businesses ignore as they see their website just as an extension of a brochure and not as a sales representative, which is ideal.
Again, an optimized site will rank higher than the ones that aren’t and will provide a solution to people at the time they’re searching for it. It boosts the organic search results, drives traffic to your website, and, if it’s valuable enough, converts the visitors into possible leads.
Therefore, following SEO best practices like:
- Using rich keywords
- Building a user-friendly website, both for mobile and desktop
- Improving page speed and ensuring there are no bad links
- Using internal and outbound links effectively
- Prioritizing local SEO, etc.
Nevertheless, you should know that SEO isn’t a done and dusted strategy that will always remain effective like an outbound marketing strategy. Google keeps on changing its metric of evaluation regarding which site should rank higher to provide the best experience to its users. So, you need to be on the lookout for any changes and optimize your website at regular intervals to reap profit.
A Business Blog with HVAC-Related Content
Running a business blog that caters to your customer’s needs and has been Search Engine-Optimized with proper keywords is beneficial for generating leads and successfully converting them.
Being an HVAC contractor, you would know how necessary initial safety steps are before a technician arrives at the location. But how can an average person without any expertise in the area know about such safety procedures? Well, your business blog will inform them and guide them through the process.
Simplified content with text-based CTA is perfect for pitching the interest of the target audience and even driving them into signing for your newsletters containing tips and tricks for homeowners. Once they do that, you can make a database of their information and use the same while following a targeted email strategy.
Additionally, you must carefully link CTAs to effective landing pages with lead generation forms. If they fill them, then you can use the expertise of your key decision-makers like facility managers, to nurture the interest of the audience. Through this, the KDMs can actively lure visitors into the sales pipeline with the purpose of converting them into quality leads at the end of the sales funnel.
However, to ensure your audience keeps coming back and doesn’t bounce, ensure the blog is well-optimized and revamped. You can use Google Search Console to look at how your blog is performing and which pages on the website need to be worked on. Also, use Google Analytics to review visitor activity as well as get better insights about your business in general.
Run Online Social Media Ads or Search Result Ads
Search Engine Marketing isn’t out of trend and won’t be in the near future as people constantly seek them in a pinch. That’s why it’s one of the most tried and tested strategies to generate HVAC sales leads. Pay-Per-Click ads or Google local service ads is one such SEM marketing strategy that you shouldn’t give up to generate more HVAC leads and convert them.
Unlike search engine optimization, which is a patient process and drives long-term results but a bit late, PPC advertising is like a shortcut for instant results. Through this method, your HVAC services ads reach people who are searching for them so they can find an instant solution.
In PPC ad campaigns, you pay only when a customer clicks on your ad, while there’s even an option of optimizing those ads based on location, keywords, audience, etc. Although your marketing budget can sometimes skyrocket, it will only happen if you don’t know how to effectively run Google ads for your local HVAC business.
Therefore, ad optimization and setting an advertising budget are necessary to ensure you don’t go over and beyond the set marketing budget.
Now when we say ads optimization, it means paying right for the right keywords while letting go of negative ones. Bids on unnecessary keywords like “HVAC spare parts” would be useless and expensive if you deal with HVAC services alone. That’s why it’s better if you go through keywords carefully to cut costs and gain more ROI to ensure your marketing efforts reap real benefits.
2.) Get HVAC leads by using social media
Recall the HubSpot report regarding inbound marketing trends in 2022. Do you remember what the top-most marketing channel was? Wasn’t it social media? So, giving up on the trend would be a fool’s play, even if you’re running an HVAC business.
Small businesses are using social media channels to promote their services and create awareness about their brand with the motive of creating effective sales leads. Now, although the bounce rate of diverted traffic from social media channels is high, it surely doesn’t hurt to try.
You can use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., to spread awareness about your brand, educate the audience, and engage them in more ways than one. Because at the end of the day, lead generation is all about enticing, attracting, and luring visitors so that they can potentially be your leads. And social media features like shorts, reels, posts, etc., can be beneficial in that regard.
Besides, let’s not forget that videos, images, and infographics stand to be the best tools for grabbing the attention of visitors. So, create compelling content, run paid aids, and establish a continuous presence among the audience. Also, you can post referrals or do some promotions on platforms like Facebook (which is an absolute must) or Instagram to drive traffic to your site and eventually gain leads.
However, most importantly, don’t forget to run targeted ads on all your social media handles where you’re active. This will lead the audience to your page, whereby they can know more about your services and other important information.
3.) Email marketing for generating HVAC leads
Do you remember when we talked about newsletters and making a database of information about those who sign up for them? Well, this is where that information will come in handy.
Email marketing is an effective way to get HVAC leads if it’s done in the proper manner. So, if you have visitors signing up for your newsletters, then that’s the best way to feed quality information to them, and it has more potential for generating leads.
You can add promotional offers and general information that can be useful to the customers who have opted for your newsletters. By sending regular emails to potential customers, you can rest assured that your HVAC company will be the first one to cross their minds in case they require urgent services.
Moreover, it can also be helpful for existing clients as they might need your services again, or you can remind them if their next maintenance cycle is just around the corner.
On that note, you must follow a legit and balanced email marketing strategy that doesn’t irritate people from opting out of newsletters. Online marketers nowadays write engaging emails that instantly grab the attention and draw the interest of readers, so you should guide your team to follow that too. Also, don’t forget to follow the right format and avoid typos and other critical factors while devising an email.
4.) Using lead flows for generating HVAC leads
Adding lead flows to your HVAC company website is another remarkable inbound marketing strategy to gain leads that can convert into potential clients. Lead flows grab the attention of users and encourage them to fill in details in the form included in it.
They come in a variety of forms on HubSpot, and you can choose a design that caters to your HVAC business and appeals to customers. Although years of lousy marketing have attributed a bad reputation to pop-ups, if used effectively, they can render excellent results.
You can either choose a format like a pop-up box, slide-in box, or a dropdown banner and include them on any page of your website and customize it accordingly. On that note, it’s wise not to use lead flow on every page of the website, especially at the bottom of the funnel landing page.
However, adding them to a blog to entice visitors to subscribe to your newsletter would be great.
5.) Other ways to get HVAC leads
Some other useful tactics that HVAC companies can utilize to create commercial HVAC leads are listed below.
- Research your HVAC leads well.
- Encourage HVAC techs to deliver the best services.
- Do an ROI measurement to assess which method generates maximum leads.
- Streamline online marketing with the sales team.
- Manage online reviews and ensure they’re positive.
- Try using personalized CTAs in content rather than basic ones.
- Do a quantitative analysis of leads by following a lead scoring strategy.
- Design quality HVAC lead generation forms.
- Run referral programs and incentivize them.
- Use YouTube to build great video content and add it to your blogs.
Best HVAC Lead Generation Tools
As an HVAC contractor, you would only want a profitable business without wasting additional time or energy on strategizing on lead generation. That’s quite understandable, as many HVAC contractors outsource this task to experts who are well-versed in the field. Although these outsourcing firms might suck you dry with increased costs, it can be worth the load if ROI is better.
So, if you’re one such HVAC contractor or home service business owner who wants to create quality leads, then some of the best HVAC lead generation tools are listed below.
Final Thoughts on Generating Leads for HVAC Contractors
Lead generation is an important strategy to gain potential customers and earn more revenue to sustain business in the longer run, especially for small business owners. But the task is obviously easier said than done because there’s no sure-shot way to generate leads, particularly the ones that convert at the end of the sales funnel.
It’s a long and patient process as putting all your bets on PPC ads campaigns isn’t practical. You need to follow a great content and email marketing strategy while search engine optimizing your website to cater to visitors’ needs.
Thus, to ensure your HVAC company is the one preferred by customers, follow a lead generation strategy that specifically caters to your business, service, audience, location, etc.
Now, that was all from our end. We hope you gain quality leads that convert to become your delighted customers.
Till then, keep strategizing!