Social Media is an Important Part of Marketing your HVAC Business
You provide a service business that relies heavily on advertising and word of mouth. But what about finding other streams of income for your business? Has your company started embracing social media? Below are some suggestions to help you get started.
Referrals
When dealing with water heaters and air units, your company likely also encounters water damage and mold at times. Many water mitigation companies pay a referral fee to contractors that refer new business to them, even repeat business. In this scenario, the contractor goes out to do a duct job and finds mold. He calls XYZ company to handle the mold and gets a referral fee for the job. Or perhaps the water heater needs fixing and a flood is present, again the water mitigators would be called to dry the area. I have witnessed this scenario more times than I can count. Call around to a few of the local companies and ask what they’re going rate is for referrals.
Blogging
I’m often surprised by the amount of companies that haven’t yet joined the social media age, starting with a blog. While the purpose is to market your services, you can expand your reach to an audience around the world by providing information; not to mention it’s good for your brand. You can write posts that offers how to articles and videos and photos. Blogs are fairly easy to install these days with WordPress and Fantastico that is available with most hosting programs. The more content you provide, the more helpful your site is, the more worth that the search engines give it. Be a resource of help to visitors in your areas and ones that are also not in your area.
If your company is not yet tweeting you really need to jump on the bandwagon. Start by tweeting helpful tips and finding people of interest to follow. While the intended purpose is to get more people to your site, don’t just blatantly sell your business. You need to have a tone to share as well as information. Twitter is about communicating and sharing information and can be hugely successful in drumming up more traffic and interaction for your site. If you don’t have the time to do this for yourself, consider hiring someone to do it for you with the understanding that the twitter account is yours and you will retain it. They are being hired to tweet on your behalf. Once you build up your Twitter account and have a good number of interactive followers you can get paid to tweet.
Most companies do have a Facebook page for their customers. Many of those pages lay dormant. Interact with the people that like your page and business it encourages referrals and future business. A small personal touch goes a long way.
One of the hottest social media sites nowadays is Pinterest! You can share, find and bookmark information on anything from making a bow to making beef jerky and cleaning tips – literally anything and everything can be found. You can just as easily share your own work photos.
Tying it All Together
Start by signing up for all the social media sites using your business profile and most importantly, after you have signed up and you are using your profiles make sure they are linked too on your website so it is easy for people to follow you and interact. It may seem like a daunting task at first but once you get started you will see that it’s not as bad as you thought. Takes only a few minutes a day and can equal a greater deal of business and/or traffic for your site no matter your industry.
Gabrielle Greene is a co-blogger for TipsOnHowToSaveMoney.com.
Social Media is an Essential Part of Marketing Your HVAC Business
