Building a blog for your HVAC business might seem like a mountain of work. Although, HVAC contractor marketing can be as simple as regularly sharing what you love, what you do and how you do it on your company’s blog.
Let’s discuss some fundamental strategies on how you can build your own marketing battle plan using:
- Three main content buckets that allow you to easily drop ideas where they fit
- A “done-for-you,” customizable editorial calendar download
- Simple pro-writing tips on blog style
- Brand voice to elicit trust
How an Effective Blog Strategy Impacts Your HVAC Contract Marketing
An overwhelming majority of consumers leverage the wealth of information on the internet to inform their purchase decisions.
In fact, “97% of people learn more about a local company via the internet,” according to SEO Tribunal.
You operate a business thriving on local search visibility. Gone are the days of jockeying for the best spot in the Yellow Pages.
Now, it’s all about your business’ visibility and relevance in online search. A key cornerstone of visibility revolves around your HVAC company’s website.
The best way to optimize your HVAC company’s site to appear in the most relevant, local search results is to create and maintain a blog.
This long-term strategy is a fantastic method to boost your business in the area that matters most, showing up the moment a potential customer is looking for help.
We’ll lay out an easy-to-follow strategy that makes the daunting task of content creation far less mysterious. Use this strategy to better suit the schedule and interests of any HVAC business.
Download your FREE HVAC contractor marketing blog strategy guide to receive a sample editorial calendar and tips on crafting effective content outlines!
The Three-H Content Strategy for HVAC Contractor Marketing
Hub Content – The Most Frequently Published Content Type
The first pillar of this strategy is the most common type of content you’ll be generating for your company blog. These are the quick-snack posts that turn your site into a routine visit for your customers.
The Hub Content post will be the most common type of post filling out your editorial calendar.
The main characteristics of a Hub post:
- Shorter in nature
- Positioning your site as a daily visit
- Build on your community’s interests
- More niche for your active customers
Use hub content to build your company’s relevance and increase the stickiness of your brand in the minds of your loyal customers.
Ideas for hub content include industry news or a schedule of upcoming trade shows or events. In addition, you can use episodic content that’s easy to repeatedly create.
For example, episodic content ideas include:
- Tool reviews
- Answering customer FAQs
- Thoughts on specific techniques
- Testing out new technologies in the HVAC space
Also, new ideas for posts can come from repeated questions or topics found in your or your competitor’s customer reviews!
Help Content – The Most Searchable Content Type
An abundant category of monthly searches are derived from users asking questions in the search box.
Take advantage of this and build out content that explains how to do something or answers common questions. Websites, like Answer The Public, help reveal commonly asked questions pertaining to the HVAC industry.
Google’s own marketing strategy even suggests, “Use search insights to find the most frequent searches (aka “queries”). Which queries can your brand credibly answer?”
How-to posts can be shorter and straight to the point. Use them to pull in the attention of visitors that may also find value in other content on your site or your core HVAC business services.
Help content is wildly useful to your company’s site in becoming the go-to resource for common maintenance tutorials. Consider creating specific how-to explainers on specific brand and model equipment to capture relevant search traffic.
Also, help content can be useful for your business by explaining specific pain points you wish customers would know or quick fixes try before calling.
For instance, customers can handle simple maintenance like:
- Replacing an air filter
- Basic A/C unit maintenance
- Cleaning leaves from the fan
- Cleaning the air intake grate
Use this content bucket to capture ideas for common symptoms and easy fixes to things that would take up your field team’s time but wouldn’t generate a ton of income.
Plus, you may find that giving away these tips can create goodwill and trust with your existing customers – while also winning over new ones.
Hero Content – The Most In-Depth Content Type
This collection of content is also often referred to as pillar, cornerstone, tent-pole, or prestige posts. Though, however you slice it, these will become the crown gems of your collection.
The hero content will be your lengthiest posts. These will take the longest to create and may require research. Though, the investment you put into these posts will show their returns almost immediately.
“Hero content has a lot of benefits, but above all, it makes you credible. If you are not credible, you will not have clients. It is as simple as that,” explains the digital advertising agency W3 Lab.
Since this content pillar will likely take the most to create, this can be the last of the three you begin releasing for your HVAC contractor marketing strategy. However, it is important to consider your three-h strategy before publishing content.
Having hero content incorporated in your strategy from the start will help inform your overall approach. Define the broad yet important topics you want to cover, then create pillar posts about these. For example, routine maintenance or trends in HVAC may be good topics to focus on.
Once you define these topics, create more hub and help content that supports them. You may also find the smaller posts you created earlier may give you ideas for your larger hero content pieces.
Key elements of hero content include:
- Broader intended audience
- Less frequently released
- A higher overall quality
- Multimedia rich
Variety is useful when promoting hero content. Remember to rotate topics and tactics in your hero content strategy.
Tips on Generating Hero Content
Let’s say you’ve identified a specific topic that you’ve found customers often request information on in detail. It could be based on a checklist of monthly maintenance customers could perform before calling. Or maybe an equipment primer with safety tips for each year’s cold season.
This hero post could include a rundown of the topic covered, expanding on central themes and encouraging a visitor discussion on social media.
Position your hero content to be the most visible, with general interest to the widest net of your potential customers.
Plus, with that broad appeal, and longer creation process, plan on the topics any hero post covers to be as evergreen as possible. In other words, choose content that doesn’t age quickly, and isn’t tied to any current event that might quickly evaporate from the public’s interest.
This is the content you’ll most likely pay to promote on social media. Hero content is best used to position your brand as an authority in the industry.
Also, when staffing up for the busy season, hero content can help present your company in the best possible light to potential candidates.
Download our FREE HVAC contractor marketing blog strategy guide to learn how to craft a compelling outline that’s GUARANTEED to grab attention!
How to Write Like a Pro in HVAC Contractor Marketing
If you find yourself thinking, “I’m not a writer, I’m an HVAC tech!” However, the knowledge you have to share is more valuable than you might think.
Even if you don’t consider yourself a skilled orator, this strategy will help you hone your message to find those who are searching for your wealth of knowledge.
When writing, remember to use short, punchy sentences, and stick to an active voice. “In general, the active voice makes your writing stronger, more direct, and, you guessed it, more active,” notes Grammarly.
Vedantu.com provides a simple example of the difference between active and passive voice in sentence construction: Active- He loves me. Passive- I am loved by him. “The active sentence’s subject becomes the passive sentence’s object.”
While our school teachers taught us differently, try to keep paragraphs shorter. Aim for three sentences max. However, we’ve found two sentences usually work best.
One sentence paragraphs are great for the occasional emphasis of key points.
Dense sections with important info is best when:
- Broken
- Down
- Into
- Bullet
- Points
Remember, you want to keep all your work as easy to scan for a reader as possible.
Repurposing Content – The HVAC Contractor Marketing Secret Weapon
You may already have other online marketing strategies in place for platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook or even TikTok.
The tidbits of content created for those platforms can fuel your HVAC company’s blog strategy, and vice versa. A great post on your blog could generate dozens of bite-sized pieces of content for use on other platforms.
Or in turn, a great YouTube video could become the basis of a companion post on your company’s blog.
Gary Vee, one of the largest modern internet marketers, breaks down just how easy it is to re-contextualize a piece of content for multiple platforms.
Gary’s secret? He takes a large piece of content, then “[his] team is able to repurpose that one piece of content into dozens of smaller pieces of content, contextual to the platforms that we distribute them to.”
Use The #1 HVAC Software to Level-Up Your Marketing Strategy Now
FieldEdge can take your marketing strategy to the next level, allowing you to:
- Create email campaigns like blog newsletters and automate communication
- Improve customer retention by maintaining contact with existing customers
- Build trust and credibility by sharing your expert knowledge and timely tips
- Drive consistent and intelligently targeted traffic to your website
Your New HVAC Contractor Marketing Blog Strategy Starts TODAY
If you already operate a company website, it’s in your best interest to include a blog.
Routine contributions to your HVAC company’s blog can create a long-term stream of new customers. Build your content around the honest intention of helping those seeking guidance online.
Use these easy strategies to start harnessing the power of HVAC contractor blog marketing today!
