HVAC Promotions Blog

Free Search Engine Optimization Tip/Trick for More Business in 2012

Websites & Online

Online business directories help consumers find businesses when they need them. That alone is a good reason to make sure your business is listed and listed correctly. But did you know that it can affect your Search Engine Optimization as well. Google uses the data in these online directories to confirm that you are a legitimate business, to give you credit for a backlink (your website link coming from a legitimate source) and to rank your site a little higher on search engine results pages.

What we have found is that not only are many HVAC companies not listed here, but the ones that are listed have missing and conflicting information. Addresses and phone numbers are incorrect, web addresses aren’t listed, logos aren’t shown and more. It would be advantageous to visit these sites, find your company or add it, and make sure all of the information is present and correct. Besides being good for SEO, listing your company on these sites is absolutely free!

If you want your name to show up when a potential customer searches for a heating and cooling company, you definitely want to do this. Your competition may already be savvy enough to have done this, and if so, at least you’ll be on a level playing field. But if not, you could get ahead of the curve online. Every little thing you do to improve your SEO will help your HVAC business improve. Most improvements cost money, but this little trick is completely free, so take advantage of it. You may not want to do this all at once as it will take a little bit of time to visit every directory site and update it. But you can set a goal to do one or two a day. To help you get started, here is a list of the most popular free online directories for 2012. Just click on a link to get started. By taking a few hours out to do this, you will be rewarded with better search engine rankings and increased calls! We want to help you get the most leads for your HVAC business in 2012. For help with these directories or more SEO tips, call Joe Brennan here at HVAC Promotions.

Google
Yahoo
Bing
Yelp
FourSquare
Yellow Pages
Superpages
City Search
Angie’s List
Express Update USA (formerly infoUSA)
Merchant Circle
Dex Knows
Insider Pages
Localeze
Judy’s Book
Yellow Bot
Kudzo
HotFrog
Local.com
DMOZ

The Cure for Boring HVAC Adzzzzzzzz

General Marketing

In a letter to his father, on April 13^th, 1738, Ben Franklin wrote "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." This quote applies to so many things in life, but especially to marketing. The whole point of advertising is to stand out from your competition. After all, you pay good money to get your name and your message out there. Why then, do so many ads say the exact same thing? I’ll tell you why-time. No one has the time to come up with a new way to say the same thing so we fall back on last year’s ads.

Does your marketing suffer from this affliction? What are you going to do about furnace replacement leads this season? Send out the same old boring message as last year and expect to get better results? We know, we know, you’re busy running a company. You don’t have time to come up with something new. We understand the dilemma you face. That’s why we’re here to help. Call us for fresh, attention-getting ideas to market your heating and cooling company. From direct mail to print to radio, we can make your message exciting and unique so it actually gets noticed! And don’t forget, we’re HVAC marketing experts, so your advertising couldn’t be in better hands. Call us at 855-765-4500. Or just ignore this message, send out the same old ads, and tell us to go fly a kite.

Top Three HVAC Cross-Selling Tips

Guerilla Marketing

Service Call Opportunities
Don’t waste an opportunity once you’re in a home. After the service is complete, arm your service technicians with flyers. Flyers can promote maintenance plans, include coupons for future service, offer discounts on other products, even encourage referrals. You want to take advantage of every opportunity to get more business out of existing customers. Plus, after a service call, the customer is happy and satisfied so it’s an ideal time to encourage them to do more business with you. Magnets and pens and other leave behinds can help keep you top of mind, but they don’t cross-sell like a printed promotional piece can.

Service Technician Opportunities
Your service technician is your liason between the company and the customer. Most service techs are great at what they do, but they’re not trained to sell. Sometimes just a little internal training can help them get more business while they are with the customer. It can be as simple having them tell the customer when they are paying for service, “Did you know you can save 10% today by signing up for our maintenance plan?” It doesn’t have to be hard core sales training, just saying the right thing at the right time and looking for opportunities to cross-sell or upsell can really improve your sales.

Call-Taker Opportunities
Your dispatchers also have direct contact with your customers. Again, they are not born salespeople, but they can be taught to improve their sales skills in simple ways. For instance, when a customer calls, for furnace or AC repairs, your dispatchers can say, “You can save up to 20% today, plus get an AC and furnace tune-ups by signing up for our maintenance plan. It includes two tune-ups, up to 20% off all future service and priority treatment when you need us.” Keep them in the loop and make them aware of current specials so when and opportunity arises from a customer conversation, they can inform them of the special that applies.

Get Hometown Results with Geography SEO

Websites & Online

So your website is optimized for your location, but what about other towns or suburbs that you also service? For instance, you may be on page one for Dallas Furnace Repair, but have you tried searching a suburb like Irving, or even a nearby city like Ft. Worth? We have seen great success with geo-targeting your site to secondary markets that you service.

What exactly is geo-targeting for SEO? It is simply a strategy for gathering leads online when potential customers include a city or area in their search terms. There are different levels of geo-targeting. It can be as simple as working nearby cities into your page copy or as advanced as building a specific geography page with the city and top keywords for your industry sprinkled throughout.

Geo-targeting shouldn’t be your first priority when it comes to spending your marketing dollars. There are plenty of improvements you can make to your website that will increase your leads online. But if your site is optimized and you are looking for ways to increase its effectiveness, geo-targeting is a great tool that you can use to gather the low lying fruit. When potential customers search by “city/furnace repair” for instance, if your site is optimized for that city, you will come up first.

Our clients who have optimized for geography have seen great results. Geo-targeting has given them a fast return on investment, expanded service areas and an increase in online leads of 10-20 per month depending on how many areas they target. To get the same amount of new customers you would have to spend $42,000 annually in traditional media. In online SEO pages, it would only cost you $1,500 one time. Be aware that not all cities/suburbs are worth targeting. It’s a statistical game so we don’t recommend targeting any city or suburb with a population of less than 1,000. Odds are it won’t pay off for your efforts.

There are a lot of ways you can leverage your website to increase leads. We study HVAC websites every day and we know what works. Geo-targeted pages are just another weapon in the arsenal. We know the tricks of the trade that will get you more leads. There is low lying fruit out there. Are you missing it? If your website isn’t a top source of leads, it’s not optimized properly. Call HVAC Promotions and talk to one of our marketing experts about lead generation strategies for your HVAC company.

MarketingXchange, Inc. and HVACpromotions.com Join ACCA!

Websites & Online

In our ongoing support of HVAC contractors, last week, we joined ACCA (Air Conditioning Contractors of America). ACCA is the HVAC industry’s resource for “best practices” for business operations, service standards, character sales and marketing support.

When it comes to marketing support for HVAC companies, we have clients from the vineyards of California to the concrete jungles of New York. Our extensive experience in marketing for replacement leads, service calls and maintenance customers makes us an ideal fit to be an ACCA member.

Can You Afford to Stand Still When Everyone’s Going Mobile?

Websites & Online

mobile phone blog Here’s the scenario – Joe homeowner is driving home and gets a call from his teenage son who says, “Dad, the air conditioner is broken. It’s 83 in the house.” Joe whips out his smart phone to surf the web for an HVAC company to call. He Googles and finds a site or two but they are much too hard to read on his cell phone screen. The third site pops up simple and friendly (like the site pictured here). He clicks the Call Now button and boom…he’s connected to that company with one touch. That’s the real-life beauty of a mobile website.

So, as business owner, you say to yourself, “Sure, smart phones are out there, but what percent of the population really owns them?” According to Nielson by the end of 2011 there will be more smart phones in the U.S. than feature phones. That means that smart phones will soon be in about HALF of your customers’ hands. Have you looked at your site from a smart phone? Obviously, a site that’s been designed to view on a large computer screen is not ideal to use on a tiny cell phone screen. Users don’t want to have to scroll up and down and across just to read the content. Mobile sites solve that problem.

Top 3 No-Cost Ways to Improve Search Engine Ranking

Websites & Online

There are many ways to move up in the search engines to get your site seen faster. Unfortunately, most of these cost money – some cost big money. But there are ways you can help your site rank higher that won’t cost you a thing. Consider doing the following and see what happens.

1. Populate Free Listings Online – there are lots of free listings available online. All it will cost is your time to go there and list your company. Fill out as much information as you can.

Why Your Website Is Your #1 Marketing Tool

Websites & Online

Ideally, your marketing plan should revolve around your website. Every other form of advertising you do, from direct mail to print to radio to TV should drive the consumer to your website. Why? First of all, statistics show that 77.4% of people in the U.S. use the internet http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. It’s available 24/7 and chock full of information, so why wouldn’t they go there? They’re certainly not going to sit around waiting for the TV or radio commercial to air.

Secondly, it is the only piece of the marketing puzzle that doesn’t limit the amount of information you can share. All other media either limits you by space (print, direct mail & outdoor) or time (TV & radio). On your website, you can present as much information as you need. As long as your site is easy to understand and navigate, the consumer should be able to glean as much information as he or she needs to make an informed decision. So it only makes sense to make your website your hub.

Thirdly, you can collect valuable information from your site. There are myriad tools available to collect customer information and track customer behavior. By collecting names and addresses, you can stay in contact through emails and/or newsletters and turn a visitor into a future customer. By tracking behavior, you can find out what’s important to a visitor, like how they search, what they like and what makes them take action. Then you can use that information to further improve your website.

If you think your site is not optimized to get leads, call us. We are pros when it comes to HVAC websites and we can make yours a lead generating machine. Click here to check out some of our custom websites.

How to Get Your Name to Stick with Customers

Guerilla Marketing

Part of the problem with being a heating and cooling company is that your customers’ needs are random. You may fix someone’s furnace in late October and they won’t need to call you again until next summer. Unfortunately, by then, they may have forgotten who they called last time and end up calling a competitor. Aside from getting them to sign up for a maintenance program, how do make sure you’re the company they call next time? Unit stickers.

As elementary as it sounds, just putting a sticker with your company name and phone number on the unit itself can work wonders. When the heat or AC doesn’t work, the customer goes directly to the unit to check it out and voila!, there’s your name at the exact time that they need it. Unless you really messed up the first time, they’ll have no reason not to call you immediately. Plus, if that homeowner moves, your sticker stays, greatly increasing the likelihood of a new customer. Just make sure that if your stickers are for commercial or outdoor units that they are weather and temperature resistant and UV coated to keep them from peeling or fading. A unit sticker that no one can read doesn’t do much good. Check out our high-quality custom HVAC unit stickers at www.hvacpromotions.com

3 Steps to Finding Your Best Target Customers

Direct Mail Marketing

Database Analysis can tell you more than you know! Any HVAC business owner will tell you that their target is something like 40 plus in age, owns a home, and has money. Brilliant! That’s the exact same target that everyone else is going after. To be really dynamic and frugal with marketing dollars, you need to know more than that.

Step 1. Analyze your current customer database. Give us your customer list (yes, we practice 100% confidentiality) and we can append demographic information to it. You’ll be surprised at what the data can tell you. You might find that your customers are slightly younger or older than the norm and possibly have less money than you think.

Database marketing uses many theories. My favorite is that your company has a personality and brand all its own. You attract a certain type of person based on how you do business, your pricing, your technicians, your advertising, etc. So it breaks the idea that all targets are the same for a specific industry. I’ve done this for years and I can personally tell you that no two companies are the same.

Step 2. Get a target prospect direct mail list. After receiving a report and having us analyze the data with you, you can determine and narrow down your “target” audience. That way, you spend fewer dollars on direct mail and other marketing by eliminating the waste. Then, you will want to have us find out how many available “prospect” homes there are that meet the age, income, home value, marital status, with or without children, etc. within each zip code. This is your target to measure against and your REAL prospects.

Step 3. Request a “Zip Code Penetration Report”. Be specific on this. You want to see how many customers you have in each service area zip code compared to how many of the above target, prospective homes are available in that zip code. The equation is your customers divided by the total target homes. This will give you your “Target-Zip Code Penetration”. Now you not only have your best targets, but you can find out what zip codes offer you the most opportunity for HVAC direct mail, guerilla marketing, etc. And in reverse, you can see which zip codes not to waste your money in. Don’t be fooled, the outcome is usually not what you would expect!

To wrap this up, I always tell HVAC owners to plan your marketing and implement that plan. A proper database analysis will help you succeed in any direct marketing efforts, increase ROI, eliminate wasted money and generate revenue!!!

Please call HVAC Promotions if you would like to discuss analyzing your database 855-765-4500.

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