Using Social Media to Drive HVAC Industry Traffic
How does a local family-owned HVAC business increase web volume and boost service growth while maximizing return on marketing spend? Success takes a sustained organic and paid social strategy, smart content marketing, and tactics to smooth the industry’s seasonal peaks.
Company Profile
INDUSTRY: HVAC
SERVICE AREA: North and northwest Chicago Suburbs
SERVICES: Repair, maintenance, and installation
Key Outcomes
%
Increase in social media referrals
%
Growth in Web Volume
The Challenge
Over the last 50 years, this family-owned HVAC company had grown its service offerings and footprint in the Chicago suburbs. As consumer research and purchases increasingly tilt digital, though, its marketing strategy needed to adjust as well. The company’s leadership realized that social media had become a must-have, but in a competitive space with significant seasonal fluctuations in its demand curve, developing the right strategy was difficult without expertise. In addition, with limited staff, management of the strategy, content, and engagement would be challenging.
This client turned to the JRS Mar/Com team for help creating and executing a social and content strategy to build traffic and grow engagement while maximizing its marketing investment.
Problems to Solve
- Develop and manage social media strategy
- Boost web traffic
- Increase engagement
- Decrease cost per lead
- Modernize referral program
- Manage spend vs. demand curve
The Solution
Our team started with an audit to capture the baseline traffic and engagement prior to starting the campaign. With thorough research into keywords, the demand curve, and the client’s goals, we built a social strategy to increase traffic and engagement through both paid and organic posts. We managed every aspect from copywriting to graphic design, video production, posting, scheduling and reporting.
The paid portion of the campaign featured videos and other targeted content to drive people to “like” the company’s page or visit dedicated landing pages on its site. These landing pages included contact information capture and calls to action to schedule service. This strategy helped to increase the number of pre-qualified leads and accelerate conversion to customers.
On the organic side, frequent posts engaged new and existing social followers to extend reach and boost awareness, especially during times of peak demand in winter and summer.
Key Points
The business’s service areas in the north and northwest suburbs overlap, enabling efficiencies in spend on social campaigns in this geography. Temperature fluctuations in winter and summer drive spikes in pay-per-click using Google, creating a higher-price, lower-value expense.
- We were able to level out peaks and valleys in this demand curve by decreasing spend during peak temperature swings and increasing spend if temperatures delayed typical installation and service schedules.
- We modernized the company’s existing referral program, decreasing the cost per lead substantially from $50 to $3 per lead.
- Our campaign was effective in driving interest and sales for installation of UV filters, a new service launched during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.
The Outcome
%
Increase in social media referrals
Growth in social referral traffic
2019: 1680 | 2020: 5245
This represents the number of people visiting the website exclusively from social media channels