Are you looking for new leads or ways to amplify brand awareness for your HVAC company? Social media has grown into one of the most powerful marketing tools in the Digital Age and can change the outlook of your business forever. Everyday, millions of people interact with videos, pictures, and other creative content on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and etc. Your HVAC company can engage with your online audience(s) to build brand authority and loyalty. We’ve compiled the best ways your brand can increase engagement levels and increase profitability through social media.
Still wondering if social media is worth your time? Data by Simply Measured indicates that brands with more than 100K followers on social media have since grown by 163% in the past three years. Social media now represents a significant percentage of all online shopping and traffic. Social platforms are a handy tool for business; they are multifaceted, exciting, and useful for entrepreneurs.
Social Media Marketing Strategies for HVAC Contractors
1. Choose A Platform
It’s not wise to use all social media platforms at once. There are too many, so it is more effective to choose one and become an expert at it. You can add more accounts and profiles as you grow your experience in social media marketing. Facebook is a priority for many businesses, but do your research to find out which platform(s) are most popular among your target audience(s).
Facebook reports that at least 2.7 million people use their platform every month. This social media site provides many tools that you can use to expand your business’s reach and influence. Some of these include Facebook Group, Facebook Page and Facebook Ads. The platform also enables the creation of email subscription portals, About Us pages, and other convenient business frameworks.
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2. Create A Strategy
The success of social media marketing depends on the strategy you implement from the start. That involves choosing the right channels, audience, and content for your business. If you work with Facebook, for instance, you will need to decide whether to use Facebook Groups or Facebook Pages. You can utilize both, or just one of them depending on where your customers interact the most.
Take the time to analyze your audiences. What are their interests? What do they post or talk about most? Figuring out your audience can help your HVAC business create and optimize content that meets their needs. Many small businesses often lose engagement or followers due to posting irrelevant content. A savvy content strategy will enable you to sustain your social media marketing efforts over a long period of time. Instead of trying to create post ideas every day, you can have that mapped out for a week, a month, or even longer. You can plan each day of the week with its activity, for instance introducing the followers to your technicians, a live video about your HVAC staff at work, helpful DIY HVAC maintenance tips, or virtual office tours. Here are some simple content ideas you might include in your strategy:
- Linked posts that send users to your website for detailed information
- Company and industry news
- A weekly HVAC DIY series
- Customer spotlights
- Charity or cause marketing
- Thanking loyal customers
- A weekly Facebook Live session for HVAC maintenance tutorials
3. Use Hashtags
Now that you have created a content strategy and identified creative messages to spread on social media, you need ways to amplify these messages in the efforts of expanding your business’ reach. One way to make your brand’s post more visible is through strategic hashtags. Social media platforms use hashtags to categorize content so that it is shown to the relevant people.
Social media hashtags are the key to increased visibility for your business. When you properly use this tool, your HVAC business will appeal to receptive audiences searching for your services. For your home services business, you can embed your website URL links in the hashtags to transport fans back to your landing page. Examples of hashtags to use include: #HVACDIYTuesday, #HVACMaintenanceServices and #HVACInstallationYourLocation.
When you use hashtags on your social media posts, you give platforms a chance to know what the post is about and which audience to show it to. Without hashtags, your videos and pictures will be free floating, and they will have less impact.
4. Post Consistently
New content has the magnetic power to retain and attract new followers to your company’s social media pages. Post regularly using videos, text, and images to entice new followers. You can also use infographics and memes to entertain your audience(s). Followers tend to forget about a dormant social media feed, and you will start losing followers if you fail to post interesting content.
Apart from posts on HVAC installation, repair, and maintenance, your audiences will be expecting general home improvement information regularly as well. You can explore related topics and discuss home gardening, interior, exterior decor, and/or cooking. While these posts are not directly related to your HVAC business, they will help break the monotony of posts about heating and cooling systems while still remaining relevant to your audience of homeowners. As you well know, communication is not complete without feedback. Whenever you post on social media about your home services, seek to get audience feedback. That often works by posing a question at the end of the caption and asking to hear about your audiences’ ideas and opinions. Others choose to post an exciting picture and then ask the audience to suggest captions.
Provide a simple user-experience by being straight to the point. If you want followers to find out more about your services, funnel them (via links) directly to the service page(s) on your website. Brands that randomly lead users to their main homepage from a social media post usually end up losing out on conversions and sales because the call-to-action isn’t clear.
Also Read:
- How to Get HVAC Leads and Service Calls in 2023 for FREE
- Digital Marketing Strategies for HVAC Contractors to Grow Leads & Revenue
- How to grow your plumbing or hvac business from 1 million to multi-million dollar
- Newbury Park HVAC company increases digital marketing efforts
- Richard Uzelac what HVAC and plumbers must know about the google guarantee
- Best HVAC keywords for contractors
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5. Appeal To Social Media Influencers
Influential social media users have a large, thriving fan base. These people are paid to mention brands, thus putting them on other users’ radar. Every industry has their own particular influencers. Perhaps your social media strategy will involve appealing to HVAC bloggers or industry giants to mention or tag your brand on social media. This will help boost your business’ overall exposure and online engagement. Keep in mind that you can hire social media influencers for a specific campaign or just general posts. When they share your post with their thousands or millions of followers or friends, your HVAC business has the potential to go viral.
6. Video Content For Higher Engagement
Video has become too popular to ignore when building your social media marketing strategy. These days, most social media users prefer video over still visual posts. Video has a unique ability to captivate attention, attract viewers, and call people to action. It helps to break the monotony of picture posts, dynamically sharing your brand’s voice, process, and messaging. Close to 80% of consumers prefer watching a video about a product than reading a wall of text. Social media marketers are now using informational, entertaining videos to delight customers as well as convey important brand information. As a home improvement business looking to remain competitive, it’s vital to stay aware of trends and what people expect from video content.
Videos improve brand engagement. They entice users to stop scrolling and interact with your content. For instance, video posts on Facebook have a 135 % greater chance of improving your brand reach than photo posts. Utilizing video encourages more interaction and keeps your company relevant to emerging audiences, thus pushing your HVAC company to prominence online.The use of video on social media also helps keep audiences on your page longer. You can find creative ways to embed live or recorded videos to improve user experience on your company’s pages. Video also helps in building trust and credibility among your customers because it puts a face to your company.
7. Capture Your Audience’s Attention With Quality Visuals
As opposed to plain text social media posts, a picture has a thousand different ways of telling your brand story, and an infographic makes information easier to consume. To increase the online popularity of your HVAC company, you will need to use quality visuals to engage followers. If you’ve been settling on sub-par photos or infographics for your company’s social media pages, you should replace these with more quality content for an overall attractive feed.
Real-life pictures and behind-the-scenes footage will also have a significant impact on your business. When it comes to HVAC repair and installation, your technicians can take nice pictures while on the job. Posting such images on social media can help improve the popularity of your company, allowing users and followers to see your quality work firsthand. You can caption them with details about how stuff works when it comes to HVAC repair, maintenance, and installation–or even tag the satisfied customer for additional interaction and social proof.
Also consider sharing photos of your office and team. It could be a company meeting or an anniversary celebration. These photos will let your followers get a glimpse of what goes on in your company, making your brand seem more personable and immediate.
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8. Create And Engage Within Communities
Invest time and effort into making your social media followers feel special. You can make your clients feel appreciated online by liking or commenting on their posts. Interacting with your followers will help you build a loyal community. Tag them, chat with them, praise them, and provide useful insight, tips, suggestions, and recommendations in a friendly way.
What makes social media great for home improvement businesses is the ability to inspire and educate your followers. Facebook has many tools that can boost overall interaction between your brand and customers. Failing to show real interest in your follower’s comments and opinions can truly hurt your business.
Plan to respond to all social media comments promptly with useful, friendly messages. You can also mention users and make former clients feel special by mentioning them in your posts. This level of interaction will improve your social media presence and help your HVAC company stand out–it’s just an extension of quality customer service and attention.
When creating your social media platforms, be sure to invite your email contacts. You can use social media to cultivate a warm relationship with your email subscribers. By meeting them on social media, you will get to know a great deal about them. Ensure the information you are sharing with your audience is accurate, quality and helpful–such that they cannot get it anywhere else.
9. Organize Contests and Giveaways
Contests are necessary to excite your followers and to get them talking about your company and its services. The competition could involve your fans posting pictures of their heating and cooling system together with comments. The image that receives the most likes and shares is selected as the winner of a discount or company merch. A prize could include a free inspection or parts replacement services. To qualify for the contest, you can make it obligatory for new users to follow your pages or use your hashtags in their posts.
Contests help to create consumer-generated content. Consumers generally like to interact with content generated by their peers. If they use your company’s hashtags in their posts, you will start seeing increased brand visibility and loyalty online.
When consumers interact with a brand, they want to be part of the movement. If they are happy about a product or service, they’ll go out of their way to create and share stories of their journey with a brand. Nearly half of consumers wish brands would tell them what type of user content to create and share, but sadly only 16% of brands actually do this. For that reason, organizing contests is a great way to increase user-created content.
It can also be highly beneficial to use Facebook live video in the contest. When you organize giveaways, you can use live video to record the winner getting their prize. This video will gain traction on your company’s page and also the client’s social media account or page. With proper tagging and the use of hashtags, your brand engagement levels can improve significantly.
10. Share Milestones and Life Events
Incorporating holidays, life events, and milestones within your social media strategy can help you achieve a more refined reach because you’re making the effort to stay timely and relevant. Start looking at anniversaries, birth dates, and other milestones to customize your services. All this information is on every user profile.
Another way to entice customers to follow and like your HVAC Company on social media is to provide fan-only offerings. Have visitors like your posts or subscribe to your email newsletter for a special promotion. You can then send special offers and coupons straight to their news feed, inbox, or emails.
With the advancement of mobile technology, social media has become a part of everyone’s daily lives. Believe it or not, this is good news for small home improvement businesses because social media marketing is a low-cost marketing channel with a lot of potential for higher ROIs. Have more questions about social media marketing? Talk to one of our GoMarketing professionals today to figure out the best digital strategies for your business: 805-413-7893!
