Just because you run a brick-and-mortar HVAC business doesn’t mean you can’t — or shouldn’t — use digital marketing to attract new customers and stay top of mind with existing ones.
The first step to creating and executing a winning digital marketing strategy is to set ambitious yet realistic digital marketing objectives.
5 Tips for Setting Digital Marketing Objectives for HVAC Businesses
Here are some field-tested tips on goal setting from our in-house digital marketing experts in New Orleans:
1. Choose Marketing Goals That Support Your Broader Business Objectives
Your business objectives and marketing goals aren’t the same things.
Business objectives are higher-level, long-term goals that pertain to the future of your company as a whole. Common business objectives include:
- More new customers
- More service calls
- Greater brand awareness
- Bigger market share
- More service areas
- Better customer experience
- Increased conversion rates
- Increased profits
Marketing goals are much more specific and short-term. Their purpose is to support your broader business objectives. For instance, if you want to increase the number of service calls by new customers by 30% YoY, marketing goals that could support this business objective include:
- Driving more organic traffic to your website
- Ranking higher in search results for HVAC installation in your area
- Increasing the click-through rate on your paid ads
So, to set effective digital marketing goals, you need to get clear on your company’s overarching business objectives first.
For best results, focus on your mid-term objectives for the next 12-24 months, not the next five years.
Make sure to also gather feedback from different members of your team — your sales manager, head of marketing, and other stakeholders — to better understand their views on where the company should be heading in the foreseeable future.
If their answers don’t align, this indicates your team should spend more time defining your business objectives before thinking about your digital marketing strategy.
2. Learn To Set SMART Digital Marketing Goals
SMART goals are:
- S = Specific
- M = Measurable
- A = Achievable
- R = Relevant
- T = Time bound
The key to setting SMART goals is to tie them to a specific metric or key performance indicator (KPI) you can easily track. This way, you can measure your progress but more importantly — you can know what success looks like to begin with.
You also want to be realistic. Keep your digital marketing objectives ambitious but achievable and tied to a short to medium time frame.
For instance, if you want to drive more visitors to your HVAC articles, your SMART goal could be to increase blog traffic by 20% in six months’ time.
If you want to rank higher in Google when potential customers in your area look for AC repair services, your SMART goal could be to rank in the top five results for the search term “emergency AC repair in [your location]” by the same time next year.
3. Create a Roadmap for Achieving Each Marketing Goal
Once you’ve narrowed down your marketing goals, it’s time to break them into smaller tasks. For this step, it’s a good idea to hold a meeting to discuss the specifics with the staff members who will be responsible for achieving each goal.
Let’s consider one of the examples above. If you want to boost traffic to your blog, you will first need to write compelling blog posts. To that end, you must come up with and research interesting topics. Then, you’ll need to collaborate with a content writer to flesh them out.
You should also invest in search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure your new blogs rank as high as possible in Google and other search engines. SEO involves peppering your content with targeted keywords and phrases, formatting the copy to make it more readable — for instance, by using bullet point lists and short paragraphs — and other tactics.
It’s also a good idea to refresh your existing blogs and optimize them for SEO as well. Google routinely updates its algorithms, so you should rehash old content to make sure it continues to rank high.
Each of these tasks should have a due date and a person responsible for it. Accountability is critical for achieving your marketing goals across time.
4. Get To Know Your Customers
Defining and understanding your target audience will help you to set more impactful and realistic marketing goals.
You can identify one or multiple target audiences, but what matters is that you customize each marketing campaign to one of these customer segments. This will ensure your message reaches the right people at the right time, maximizing your conversion rates.
When defining your target audience, aim to get as specific as possible. You want to know your (prospective) customers’:
- Gender
- Age range
- Locations
- Household size
- Annual income
- Job titles
- Preferred social media channels
- Preferred marketing medium (i.e., blogs or email)
The more you know about your target audience, the better you can adapt your marketing campaigns to their needs and interests.
5. Do Competitor Research
In addition to knowing your target market, you should also know your competitors in the HVAC industry.
Find out who the major service providers in town are, then start following their blogs and social media channels. Try to determine what digital marketing strategies may have worked for them, and see if you can recreate something similar.
This research may involve a fair amount of guesswork, as your competitors likely won’t disclose their marketing strategies publicly. Still, you’ll be surprised how much you can glean about a company with a little online browsing.
Need Help Setting Winning Digital Marketing Objectives?
Digital marketing needn’t be overwhelming with the right partner by your side. At ServiceHawk, we help HVAC businesses in the New Orleans area level up their digital marketing and SEO to generate consistent revenue growth.
Let us take care of the marketing legwork while you focus on running your business. Call (985) 888-0455 or contact us online to schedule your free strategy session.
For more digital marketing tips and tricks, read our article on remarketing vs. retargeting.