Outdoor Direct Media
The best option for outdoor advertising are your vehicles. Pay to get them wrapped in any color but white. Maybe focus on your brand logo colors. Be bold. Be clean. Use a professional graphics designer to help you with your truck wrap.
This is mostly a focus on brand. Trucks get more than 30 thousand exposures a day. A good wrap will raise brand awareness and familiarity that makes you a safer and familiar choice when viewing your other marketing.
Home Shows
Visit the next home and garden show as a consumer. What gets your attention? Chances are it is not a booth with Company XYZ’s name across the top. You will be interested in problems and solutions that speak to you.
This will be especially important for high-performance contractors. You are not just another HVAC company, but you will get viewed that way if you fail to differentiate yourself. Remember, your high-performance services are your brand.
Follow the same advice given above and ask about a problem. Once people enter your booth, be prepared to talk about stories and/or give demonstrations. In a home show, demonstrations are especially effective.
Speaking Opportunities
Do not overlook the opportunity to speak on home performance in your community. Every service and civic club is looking for speakers, week in and week out.
Many homeowners’ associations feature speakers at their meetings. Corporations that have brought people back to the office hold “lunch and learns.”
Almost all of these will involve putting together a tight 15-to-30-minute canned presentation on high-performance contracting. This is an ideal environment to open by discussing what it is and how it is different.
Use stories as illustrative examples. Close with information on how to find a High-Performance HVAC contractor. Remember, you are speaking to the process and solutions, not advertising for your company. The promotion is inherent.
You should be a member of a local service club. Get on the program rotation. Rotary and many other clubs use speakers’ bureaus. Do some Internet sleuthing and find them online.
The Motivation
One problem you face with potential customers is how much motivation they need to decide and act. Many people live with problems because they are unaware that there is a solution. Even then, when presented with a solution, they often have no urgency to act now. This is why you create urgency with sales, specials, buy one/get one, and so on.
Track your promotions to run counter season. When things slow down, your promotions and offers should pick up. These should not take away from your profit but should be built into your pricing as part of your marketing budget.
Some high-performance contractors tend to look sideways at marketing and brand promotions as though they devalue their service. Nonsense. Promotions are nothing more than reasons to act now instead of waiting. People are subject to inertia. Absent an outside force, they will not act. Promotions are the outside force.
Timing
When marketing fails, it is because it is either the wrong message, wrong media (or audience), wrong motivation, wrong timing, or some combination. You can control the message, media, and motivation. You can tweak them and adjust them.
Timing is beyond your control. This is why brand marketing should be done all year long. True, you pick it up during predictable seasonal slowdowns, but you should never stop.
Marketing your business is a lot like pushing a dead car in neutral gear. It takes effort to get it rolling, but less effort to keep it rolling once it starts. If you let it roll to a stop, it will take more effort to get it rolling again, so do not stop marketing. Ever.
Matt Michel is a member of the Contracting Business Hall of Fame and a recipient of the Air Conditioning Heating & Refrigeration NEWS’ Legends in HVACR award. For newsletter and other marketing ideas, consider supplementing your National Comfort Institute membership with a membership in the Service Roundtable. Learn more at www.ServiceRoundtable.com. Matt can be reached at mattmichel@mail.com or 214.995.8889.
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