This ac repair and appliance repair marketing webinar goes over EVERYTHING you need to know to create an effective online marketing plan for your heating and cooling company or appliance repair company in 2018. Marlon shares everything with you, holding nothing back in this webinar. You will also find a free downloadable workbook below the webinar video to use as you follow along and get ideas to develop your 2018 internet marketing plan. Take the time to learn what Marlon is explaining and how to apply it to your air conditioner repair or appliance service business. It could make an incredible impact with increased profitability of your hvac company or appliance repair business in 2018.
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In this article we’re going discuss your 2018 internet marketing plan and how you can maximize your lead flow using the latest internet marketing strategies. Now I know as an air conditioner repair company or appliance repair business owner, you’re really busy and I do value that time. So let me get right into it. We’re going discuss your goals for 2018 and how many leads you need each month if you want to hit those goals. We’re now into the second quarter of 2018, and how did you do for the first quarter?
Did you hit those goals?
If not, we’re going to talk about a few things to help you hit your second quarter goals and maybe even exceed them, so that you can be on track with your goals for the rest of the year. We’re going talk about the 3 fundamentals of marketing success.
We’re going to take a step back and look at marketing 101 because sometimes, the fundamentals are what we need to get stronger. We’re going to talk about how to optimize your website for conversion in 2018 and beyond. We’re going to look at the big picture of all the online marketing channels you should be tapping into, if you want to maximize your lead flow online. And then we’re going to develop a custom action plan based on where you are right now and what you need to do to get to the next level. I know you are really busy, but I want to encourage you to read to the end because this is important. So to encourage you to stay, I want to offer you a few different bonuses.
We have an image or infographic for what we consider to be the online domination blueprint. If you want to dominate your local service area where you’re getting as much air conditioning repair or appliance repair leads as you can handle, that’s pretty much what it looks like.
Put it up on a wall or provide it to your hvac business or appliance repair marketing departments if you have one, this can help you get to the next level.
It has some of the top things you need to focus on if you want to get more ac repair business or appliance service leads online. There may be some things on there that you’re already doing, you may learn some new things as well that you need to implement right away.
Next, we have the most commonly searched heating and cooling business or appliance repair keywords for both SEO and pay-per-click.
What are you doing for ac repair or appliance repair SEO, or are you doing any type of paid advertising like Google AdWords?
You may be wondering what keywords you should be going after. We’re going to give you a list of the top keywords that you should be trying to get your website ranked for or that you want to target in your pay-per-click campaigns. If you follow everything here, and if you’re an hvac company or appliance repair business owner that is serious about getting better results in 2018, then this will definitely have an impact on your business.
So who am I and why should you listen to me?
I’m the author of How to Generate a Flood of Leads, Customers and Profits for your heating and cooling company or Appliance Repair Business. My second book is How to Fill your Days with Appointments. I’m widely accepted as a premier expert in internet marketing for the ac repair and appliance repair industry. I work with several hvac businesses and appliance repair businesses across the US, and I’m a consultant speaker and trainer for online marketing agencies.
We are air conditioning repair and appliance repair marketing experts! Unlike a lot of online marketing agencies; whether it’s SEO agency or a pay-per-click advertising agency, that work with multiple clients in multiple industries, we only work with air conditioning repair business and appliance repair companies. We have been doing that for the last five years. So, we do understand your ac repair business and appliance repair business and we do understand your customers. That’s why we’re very effective in what we do.
What are your goals for 2018?
Here’s a quote from Brian Tracy, “Success is goals. All else is commentary”.
If you’re not familiar with Brian Tracy, he’s a very popular sales coach. If you want to learn more about sales too, you could just look him up on Amazon. If we’re not setting goals, then that could be one of the reasons why we’re not getting where you want to be with our air conditioning repair business and appliance service business.
Let’s talk about your air conditioner repair business and appliance repair advertising goals for 2018, what is your monthly or yearly revenue target?
We do usually recommend that our clients set a yearly revenue target and then break it down on a monthly basis. That way, you can track and see where you’re going each month. You don’t want to get to November and then find out that you’re so far off from your goals, because you were not actually tracking them. At that point, it’s too late.
Now we’re in the second quarter, so it’s a good time to review how the last few months went and see if you’re on track. For some reading this it may be $50,000 while for others it could be $100,000. Some of you have larger operations and maybe you want to target $1.5 million.
Go ahead and write down what you would like to make by the end of 2018, before reading any further, don’t worry I’ll wait on you…
Now that we have your yearly goal, the next step is to divide your target revenue by 12, so that we can figure out what your monthly goals should be. And you can look at these numbers later to see if you’re on track if you don’t already know.
Alright, so once you have the monthly amount, we need to figure out how many calls you need per month to hit the targets?
And then, what is your average transaction value?
I’m going to go over an example, so that you can see how I’d actually do it for one of my clients.
Also, what is your lifetime customer value?
This is a very important number because this is going to help you figure out how much you should be spending on advertising and we’re going to discuss that a little bit more. Some of you may need to hire more technicians to hit your goals, so we’re going to go over that information as well.
Let’s take a look at an actual example here:
Revenue target of 100,000 per year (If we break that down monthly, it’s about $8,300 per month). The average transaction value I’m going to do at $150 which is probably on the lower end. You may be at $175, $200, or may be at $220 depending on your area and the type of appliances that you’re servicing. So just fill this in based on your average transaction value. And just to break that down a little bit more. When I ask my clients to figure out the average transaction value, I’d say to them, “If I sent you 10 customers right now, how many of those assuming you did get all 10 of them completed as a repair job, what would the average be?” It’s usually somewhere between at $150 to $200, unless it’s high-end appliances.
Hopefully, that helps a little to make the calculation easier. Now we need to figure out, how many calls do we need to get in to hit that number? And based on an average job value of $150, we will need to get in 56 calls per month. Divide your monthly target by your average transaction value to come up with the amount of calls you need each month.
Now what is the lifetime customer value?
You may not be tracking this, but how do you figure out a lifetime customer value?
How much is that customer worth to you over the next few years?
And this is going to vary from one ac repair company or appliance repair company to another, and from region to region. But basically, what we want to factor in here is that when you get a new customer and you do a repair job for them, you should get more repair jobs from that customer, when their other appliances break down. It shouldn’t just be a one job situation.
But if you’re not doing any type of follow-up or staying in touch with past or existing customers over the months or the years, then it will be a one-off situation. A customer should be worth a lot more than that initial service call or repair job.
Other things you want to factor in here is to know every homeowner has multiple appliances, right?
They have a dishwasher, stove, refrigerator etc. Each appliance represents a potential profit center for you. And each of your existing customers all have friends and family that they can refer your heating and cooling company or appliance repair company to. So when we break this down, if an air conditioner repair company or appliance repair company is doing the necessary follow-ups to stay in front of their customer base over the upcoming months and years, then on the low end and on average, each customer is actually worth about $1,000 dollars and that is what that lifetime customer value should be for the average air conditioning repair company or appliance repair company.
How many technicians will you need to hit that goal?
How many service calls can one technician do?
You know for some of you, it may just be 5 per day. And if your service area is smaller or more dense, then your technicians can probably do up to 10 jobs per day.
So how many technicians would you need to get 56 service calls/jobs done per month?
Now, let’s look at how many hvac business or appliance repair leads you’re going to actually need
What is the average conversion rate from caller to book call?
If you got 10 phone calls that came in on a particular day, how many of those do you think you could turn into a scheduled job?
Once you figure that out you want to multiply your call targets with the amount we discussed, for my example that number was 56 calls. You want to multiply that amount by your conversion rate.
Let’s look at an actual example, if the average conversion rate is 55 percent. (If you’re conversion rate from phone to service call then you definitely want to look into improving it) So if we multiply the 56 calls from the example we showed earlier by the 55 percent conversion rate the result is 286 ac repair or appliance service leads per month and that is what we would need to get to $100,000 per year in revenue.
The Fundamentals Of heating and cooling business And Appliance Repair Marketing
Now let’s take a step back into the fundamentals of marketing as this is air conditioner repair or appliance repair marketing 101. Some of you may have seen this before, some of you may not. But there are three main fundamentals of marketing.
The first one is the market, which is ‘who’ (who are your customers)?
The next one is the media which is the different sources such as newspaper, radio, your website etc., it’s how you’re going to reach your target market. And then the message is what you’re going to be saying to that target market.
What is the message on your advertising?
Is it same day service?
Is it 20, 30 years of experience?
Is it that you specialize in a certain type of appliance?
Those are some examples of different types of messages. So that’s what we’re going to drill down into, to help you figure out who your target market is if you don’t know already or maybe you’ve never even done this exercise done before.
Do you know who calls your air conditioning repair business or appliance repair company the most?
Are they mostly male or female?
What age group are they in?
We’re going to discuss that in more detail, let’s look a little bit more into what your ideal customer looks like.
Now you may not realize it yet or never thought about this before, but if you were to take a look at all the customers over the last year that you’ve gotten, even over the last month, you’ll start to notice that there’s some commonalities within your customer base. For some of you maybe you get more females calling in than males or the other way around.
We’re going to look at some demographic information and also some psychographic information. If you’re not familiar with those as it relates to your hvac company or appliance repair business, don’t worry we’re going to really drill it down and simplify it a lot.
It’s important to know who your customer avatar is. And what I mean by the avatar is really understanding who your customer is. For most ac repair companies or appliance repair companies, it’s both male and female, but there’s a certain gender that makes up the larger part of your market. It’s usually not a 50/50 ratio, it may be 60/40 or 80/20. It’s never the same.
Knowing what gender is important so that we can figure out who exactly who makes up your target customers?
If it’s more female, then we want to target the message to communicate better with female than male because that will help us get more conversions. We’re going to talk about the goals and desires of your target customer, their dreams and aspirations.
What are their fears?
What are their pains?
What’s their frustration?
And then, we’re going to tie this in directly to air conditioner repair or appliance repair and why this is important.
So just stick with me.
Let’s start with the demographics of what your ideal customer could look like. And these are just some examples to help you figure out your own customer avatar or your own ideal customer.
The first one is the demographics of a homeowner. You may be in that area where you get more renters than homeowners. But for this example, we’re going to assume that person is a homeowner. They are 35 or older. You can actually figure this out from the phone calls or the type of service jobs that you’ve scheduled. In this example we get more female than male. They’re typically married with two to three kids. They’re head of the household. Their income is $65,000 or more. Family oriented, reliable, easily frustrated. And then they like to please people and they expect the same in return. They’re not handy, so that’s a good thing for air conditioning repair companies or appliance repair companies.
As they’re not going to try and fix the ac repair or appliance repair themselves. They’re going to just call a good company to come out. They like garden, crafts, arts. They live in the suburbs. It may be upper middle-class neighborhoods is where they live. We’re also going to talk about pains and frustrations, right. Their pain and frustrations when it comes appliances are when they are not working. We all rely on appliances nowadays. I mean they’ve simplified our life so much that when one breaks, it’s a huge frustration. Especially when they can’t get a heating and cooling company or appliance repair company on the phone or maybe they’ve left a message and they never get a call back. So these are common frustrations that consumers experience and they need to get the appliance issue resolved as fast as possible. They’re too busy to deal with it. They’re worried that the situation at the house could be unhealthy for their family.
So hopefully, that gave you some ideas.
Let’s look at it now in more detail and on how it relates to the air conditioner repair or appliance repair industry.
FEAR #1 – Some of the fears that a consumer has is that they fear being ripped off or overcharged by an air conditioning repair company or appliance repair company. If the customer has this fear, you need to overcome this when you answer the phone and it starts with the way the phone is answered.
If you just answer hello, what do you think that communicates to a customer?
That fear is being ripped off, right?
The phone needs to be answered professionally to help with that.
Paying too much for something they could have gotten elsewhere, meaning they don’t want to throw good money at an appliance that is not worth fixing, for example a 25-year old refrigerator.
They kind of want to get an idea if it’s even worth fixing the appliance, yes and I know you can’t accurately diagnose an appliance over the phone and I’m not asking you to but for certain brands of refrigerators that are 25 years old or older, probably won’t have parts available for it in the market anymore.
They don’t want to waste money and you shouldn’t want to waste your time either, going to a customer’s house just to collect a service call on a 25-year-old appliance is probably not worth it to you, if all you will get is the service call.
That’s why asking them questions like how old is the appliance help the consumer out, they will remember your goodwill and honesty, guess who they will be calling if any of their other appliances break down or if they know somebody that needs ac repair or appliance repair?
You! Remember what their #1 fear is? Yep being ripped off, you just proved to them that is not your intention.
In addition, it’s going to save your technician time as well, so it’s a win win situation. You don’t want to just schedule every single call that comes in if it’s not even worth fixing.
FEAR #2 – They don’t want to have their home damaged by a technician that doesn’t know what he’s doing, or the appliance being damaged by lack of experience by the air conditioner repair or appliance service technician.
FEAR #3 – Fear of wasting time – They don’t want to have to wait around all day for the tech to arrive.
So many consumers complain about this. Yes, as an hvac business or appliance repair company, you do have to give an appointment window. But just letting the customer know, that the technician is going call them about 30 to 45 minutes when they’re on their way will be helpful to a consumer because they can still run around and get errands done.
Their whole day is not tied up or maybe they even work close to home, so they can just take off work when they get that 30-minute call from the ac repair or appliance repair technician. That way, they don’t have to take off the whole day from work and not get paid for that day. And another common complaint about heating and cooling businesses or appliance repair companies is that their techs didn’t show up.
In that situation the consumer takes the day off from work, they didn’t get paid, and the air conditioner repair business or appliance repair company didn’t show up, and that does leave them in a worse situation because they now need to take another day off from work which is going to be hard. It doesn’t look good to the boss, and they must go through another day of the appliance not working. And imagine if that’s a refrigerator, the food keeps spoiling and now the problem has become even more expensive. They may have laundry piling up and no clean close for their family. That’s why it’s important to keep these things in mind when dealing with consumers.
FEAR #4 – Being inconvenienced by trying to coordinate with the tech. Some air conditioning repair businesses or appliance repair companies don’t open after 5 p.m. and are closed on weekends, which can make it difficult to schedule an appointment for consumers who only have time after five because they work Monday through Friday, so their only available times are after 5pm during the week or on the weekends when they are off from work.
FEAR #5 – Having the repair attempted by a tech that doesn’t know what he is doing, we’ve touched on this before, where an inexperienced technician may cause harm to not just the home, but also the appliance. If tech is working on a washer and doesn’t know what they’re doing and causes a flood in the home, then now the consumer not only has an appliance issue but now also a water damage issue. And that’s just one example of ac repair or appliance repair going bad, but I’m sure you get the idea.
This is why a consumer is going to want to know that your heating and cooling company or appliance repair company does have insurance in the event of something like that.
Fear #6 – The invoice will be more than they can afford. Some consumers already have a number in mind when it comes to how much they want to spend on air conditioner repair or appliance repair. Maybe they don’t want to spend more than 200 dollars on a repair and if it’s going to cost more than that then they would rather invest in a brand new appliance. So if it’s a compressor type situation for a refrigerator or a transmission leaking oil for a washer. You know those type of repairs might not be worth it at all, when the cost of repair is compared to buying a new appliance.
Let’s now talk about the goals and desires of the average consumer
They want to get the air conditioning or appliance fixed, period!
They want to have that issue behind them, so they can get on with their regular lives.
They want to have a well-kept home. So no appliance is broken, no damage to the home.
And they want to take care of their family. If the fridge is not working, that affects the family life as well as the laundry.
More income, money, wealth. They want to live in a nicer area, have more luxurious cars, drive nicer cars, kids healthy, happy and successful.
They want to spend more time with their family. They don’t want to be waiting around all day for an ac repair company or appliance tech when they could be out spending time with the wife and kids. They want to travel and have fun with the family.
They want the respect, an approval for the friends, family, and relatives.
And they want peace of mind.
If you can see the customer through the customers eyes, then you can sell what the customer buys.
So if you really understand your customers, you’ll be able to craft an effective advertising message to get them to hire you which is ultimately what you want.
So that was the section on market or the ‘who’. We discussed the customer avatar there, so let’s talk about crafting that message now.
What is your hvac company or appliance repair company’s message?
Why should someone choose to do business with you versus your competition?
You should be able to answer that with a list of reasons without hesitation. And you don’t want to just say you’re the best in town.
You want to go into it a little bit more. We’re going to discuss a few more suggestions to help you come up with that message. And then, what benefits do you offer that your target customer avatar will resonate with.
So now that you’ve figured out the fears and frustrations and the goals and desires of your customer avatar, you can now come up with benefits that will relate more to that target audience.
So here are a few things:
Same-day service, or emergency service; those are things that could differentiate you from your competitors as some of your competitors may only offer next day service, some don’t offer service after five. If you do, then you may want to have emergency or 24-hour service.
On-time service – That’s big because we talked about the frustration of the customer waiting around. The tech is late, or the tech doesn’t show up at all.
Straightforward pricing or upfront pricing – charging a flat rate versus hourly for labor. And then the upfront pricing is telling them specifically what the service call fee is. So that’s just a flat rate upfront. And yes, I understand you can’t tell them the cost of the repair if you haven’t diagnosed it and I don’t recommend you trying to guess either because that can lead to another set of problems.
Having a guarantee warranty – What is your warranty? Is it 30 days, is it 90? We have some clients that offer up to a year.
Trustworthy technicians or years of experience technicians – Technicians that specialize in a certain appliance. You know, maybe you do more repairs on a specific brand of appliance in your particular city than anyone else. Those are all great things that you can include in your message.
Let’s put that all together now into a message and see what it looks like.
Fast same day service, money-saving offers, 24-hour with no overtime charges, clean-cut professional technicians.
We’ll leave your home cleaner than the way we found it.
Some ac repair companies and appliance repair companies will do simple things like the technician will take his shoes off before entering a home or some will have those covers for their shoes that the technician put over his shoes before entering the customers home.
Those things are great, well maybe not so much taking the shoes off, but having the covers for the shoes is a great first impression. And a technician that show up in his uniform is another example of a great first impression, right?
Great service guaranteed, is another example of something you can include in your marketing message to attract more air conditioner repair or appliance repair customers.
Now let’s take a look at media or the ‘how’
Your website is the hub of all your online marketing activity. What I mean by that is all of your air conditioning repair or appliance repair online marketing strategies and some of your offline or traditional advertising should lead customers back to your website.
So if you’re doing any type of SEO, the customer finds your website in the search engine results page and then they click into the website.
If you’re doing pay-per-click advertising or advertising on Yelp or Yellow Pages, the customer sees the ad, clicks on it and they are taken to your website.
Social media, same deal. They find your hvac business or appliance repair company on social media and if they want to learn more, they will click on your website link.
So the website is the hub or you can think about it also as the foundation.
Now why is this important to your ac repair business or appliance repair marketing efforts? Because if it’s not set up to convert customers into buyer, you may not be getting as much leads as you possibly could.
Is your website set up to convert the visitors to callers?
Once a consumer comes to your website, is it set up to encourage them to call your heating and cooling business or appliance repair business?
One of the most important conversion elements, is having the phone number prominently displayed in the upper right hand corner of your website. And this should be on every single page. That alone will increase your conversion rate immediately if you don’t already have this in place.
So if there’s one thing you take away here today, is get that number big and bold in the upper right hand corner of your website, if it’s not already there and watch your air conditioner repair or appliance repair leads actually increase.
Since we are on the topic of conversion, it’s only right that we take a look at an image we created to help hvac businesses and appliance repair companies turn their ac repair or appliance repair websites into an hvac company or appliance repair lead generation machine, so let me introduce you to The Ultimate Air Conditioning Repair or Appliance Repair Conversion Machine.
This is a PDF document that we created to help ac repair companies and appliance repair companies figure out how to make their website better converting or to convert more of the consumers that visit their website into customers.
It has several tips which include having the phone number in the upper right-hand corner and making sure you have social icons because that helps. Other elements would be having displaying reviews from other customers and then having trust icons from sites like the Better Business Bureau.
All these things help with conversion. Another very important thing or take away from this document is that you must have a responsive air conditioning repair or appliance repair website what that means is your website display correctly on mobile devices.
If you don’t know if your website’s mobile-friendly, just take a look at it from your phone and you should probably that right now before reading any further. So go to the website address and see if you can actually navigate your website from your phone.
Now this should be easy. It shouldn’t be where you have to zoom in, slide over; no. If that’s the situation, you’re losing customers because customers aren’t going to do that. And you should have a click to call button at the bottom of the website that should be displayed on every page. Make it easy for the consumer. If not, they’ll immediately just leave your website and go to one of your competitor website that is more mobile friendly.
Can conversion optimization have an impact on your marketing?
It sure can and let’s say you’re doing a 5 percent conversion rate from a consumer that visits your website to them calling your business.
Let’s say that’s at 5 percent.
Now getting that conversion rate to 10 percent is a big difference because it can mean doubling the amount of air conditioner repair or appliance repair leads that you receive. And at 10 percent, you will see that there’s still 90 percent conversion that could be worked on. But being at 5 now and just getting to 10 percent will double the amount of leads you have right now.
So if you’re getting 100 leads a month right now just increasing your conversion through optimization, that will get you to 200 leads per month.
Is your website set up for conversion?
Does it speak to your target market?
Does it address their fears, frustrations and speak to why they should choose you over your competitor?
Does it have real authentic images of your team and throughout the website?
A lot of hvac businesses and appliance repair companies will get stock images for their website, especially if they hire a big name website company like web.com to design their website.
But having real images of the owner, the team, the vans will help significantly with conversion.
Do you have video elements on your website?
Like having a welcome video, talking about your years of experience in the ac repair and appliance repair industry, and why the customer should choose you, would be all great content to include in a welcome video great and really helps with conversion. You also could have a video describing each of the air conditioner repair or appliance repair service that you offer.
One for refrigerator repair, one for dishwasher repair etc. And then another video explaining why they should contact you versus competition.
Does the website showcase your online reviews?
And is this on all pages?
You want to make your reviews prominent, because more and more consumers are looking for these reviews before making their decision to hire an air conditioning repair or appliance repair company.
You want to know what other consumers have said about your air conditioning repair company or appliance service company before they make their buying decision or before picking up the phone to set up an appointment.
You want to also make it easy for them to take action and contact your company.
This is accomplished by having that phone number in the upper right hand corner, having a click to call button for consumers that are on a mobile device, will help a lot as well and also having an email form as an alternate means of contacting your business. If the consumer is at work, they can’t always speak on the phone. Having that email form on your website, they’ll be able to contact you and schedule that appointment.
Getting the basics in order.
So we’ve talked about having a phone number in the upper right-hand corner.
We’ve talked about having the email form that they could fill out.
And then authority symbols from like the Better Business Bureau that communicates trust and there are sites like Angie’s List that do offer some credibility symbols as well.
Have a call to action and phone number on each page of your air conditioner repair or appliance repair website to ensure it speaks to the customer and tell them exactly what to do next.
You may be wondering what a call to action is why it’s important…
A call to action tells the customer what you want them to do, which in the case of an air conditioning repair company or appliance repair company usually it’s ‘call now’. That’s your call to action or ‘fill out this form’. Those are examples of call to actions.
Alright, so the next important thing to discuss now is, do you have tracking in place?
Are you tracking the phone calls that are coming in from your advertising?
It’s important to use call tracking if you’re not, because you want to find out which of your adverting sources are working.
Is Yellow Pages really working?
If you have a call tracking number that’s dedicated just to your Yellow Pages advertising, you’ll be able to tell. You should have a call tracking number for every source of advertising you use.
Is Google AdWords working and how well is it working?
You may be getting leads but at what cost, how many clicks does it take you to get a phone call, this is an important metric to know with Pay Per Click Advertising, because each click does NOT always result into a phone call. Call tracking will help with figuring this out and also helps you to figure out the average cost per call that’s generated.
Call tracking platforms will provide you with a dashboard, so you can measure your KPIs or key performance indicators. What gets measured gets done. If you don’t know what your cost per lead is and you’re just paying for advertising, you’re probably losing money because you’re spending too much.
What is it really costing you?
Tracking the performance of your advertising will help you to move your advertising dollars around from the ones that aren’t working so well to the ones that are working better. It’s really important.
Just to recap, we’ve talked about clear goals and targets for 2018. We’ve gotten clear on market, message, and media; the fundamentals of ac repair and appliance service marketing.
We’ve discussed to make sure that your website is optimized for conversion because it’s the hub; everything comes back to the website.
And now, we’ve talked about the importance of having tracking in place. So you can keep track of all your different advertising sources, so you know what’s working and what’s not working. We’ve discussed the online marketing dominance image that we’ve created. There are several different things there to improve your online marketing.
Step #1 – AC Repair and appliance repair SEO or search engine optimization, which deals primarily with the “Big 3” search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Step #2 – Pay-per-click advertising such as Google AdWords, Yellow Pages ads.
Step #3 – Retargeting. Some of you may or may not be familiar with that. But what retargeting pretty much is, there’s a lot of consumers that come to your website and then they leave without calling your business, not because anything is necessarily bad with your website, but they may have gotten distracted.
They may have been at work and the phone rang, or they may have been at home and then the baby started crying so they got distracted, and they clicked away from your website. What retargeting does is it puts what is called a cookie or a type of tracking code in their browser that now follows that customer around.
So anywhere they go online such as Facebook, it’s going have one of your retargeting ads show up. So let’s say they go read an article on the Wall Street Journal’s website, your ad’s will show up in attempts to remind them, that they need to get their air conditioners repaired or appliances fixed.
So that’s what retargeting does. It helps you recapture customers that may have gotten distracted from your website for whatever reason and it forces them to or encourages them to contact your company again.
Step #4 – Paid online directories like Yelp and Yellow Pages. You should be including these in the mix.
Step #5 – Repeat and referral customers.
Step #6 – Pay per lead service providers, let’s talk about ac repair or appliance repair leads providers, there are good and bad, but mostly bad unfortunately. Don’t make the mistake of thinking all lead services are the same, which is what most appliance repair business owners do when they have a bad experience with one company.
Step #7 – Social Media Marketing – there’s social media advertising platforms such as Facebook and YouTube which is also great to help with referral traffic and/or referral customers and staying in front of your existing customers.
Step #8 – Referral programs are good to implement into your business. Examples of these are offering gift cards, to reward customers for calling you again when their appliance breaks down.
That’s it in a nutshell and is what the online dominance blueprint looks like. And if you’re doing all of these eight steps, there’s no question that you’ll dominate your local market. You’ll have more air conditioning repair or appliance repair customers than you can handle.
Let’s look at the SEO strategy for the online dominance.
Are you optimized to rank in the Google map?
Google Maps is still considered to be part of SEO, but it’s not organic SEO. If you look at the search engine results page, there are those little areas shaded in pink which has the first three listing or the paid ads and then usually below the paid ads is what’s considered to be the Google map section.
Just doing regular hvac business or appliance repair SEO is to get your heating and cooling company or appliance repair website to rank in the organic section which is below the map section. So if you’re only trying to get ranked in the organic section, you’re missing out on leads from the Google map section.
So are you optimizing your website to also get listed in the Google Maps?
And this is through the Google my business platform, so this is where you start the process.
Let’s talk about now the foundation of the online marketing channels.
Organic SEO is a long-term strategy.
It usually takes months, usually closer to a year to get onto the first page, if done correctly.
Then above that will be social media, and then pay directories, and then pay-per-click would be at the top.
If you’re not, then you’re missing out on a lot of referrals. Social media is now the new word-of-mouth advertising. I can’t tell you how many ac repair and appliance repair companies I speak to and I ask them, “Where do you get most of your business?” And they respond “word-of-mouth.”
If an hvac company or appliance repair company relies mostly on word of mouth advertising and don’t do any type of paid advertising then in most cases, they’re usually slow.
Why?
The reason is because word of mouth advertising is typically not consistent. That’s why you want to have several sources of advertising, which includes paid advertising.
Let’s assume that you use to be busy in the past with word of mouth advertising. You probably have seen a decline over the years. The reason why, is social media is the new word of mouth and more and more people are joining social media, young and old.
So if you like word of mouth advertising, you really should consider doing some social media marketing or getting active on social media because this will result in more repeat business and more referrals.
Now are you taking advantage of paid online marketing opportunities like Google AdWords or some other form of pay-per-click advertising?
Are you doing any paid ads with sites like Angie’s List, Yellow Pages, or Yelp?
You want to build a custom marketing plan for your air conditioning repair company or appliance repair business.
Which would include looking at some of the foundational things that you need to put in place such as making sure your website is optimized for conversion. Making those little tweaks, like having the phone number in the upper right-hand corner, that could get you from that a 5 percent conversion rate to 10 percent.
Let’s look at some of the action items that you should be focusing on as we come towards a conclusion.
What are your top 3 internet marketing initiatives that you need to implement to hit your 2018 goals?
You should have at least 3 things by now from all the information that we covered, that you may want to start implementing.
So if you weren’t doing Search engine optimization before, maybe that’s what it is.
Maybe you want to start looking in some different paid sources of advertising.
Maybe you want to get into the Google Maps.
Maybe you want to start doing some social media advertising.
And maybe you want to look at some other elements such as looking more into your target market, figuring out who your customer avatar is and better tailoring your advertising message to attract more of them.
If you’ve been relying on your advertising rep at the radio or the TV station to come up with the right marketing message, you may want to review those and compare it to some of the examples that we’ve talked about.
And just keep in mind those fears and frustrations that a consumer has and as you create your message, make sure to them.
We’ve covered the importance of getting clear on your goals and targets for 2018.
If you’re not clear on it, definitely take some time to figure that out over the next few days or the next few weeks, so you can get on track there.
And then make sure your website is optimized for conversion.
If you’re not doing any type of tracking, I highly encourage you to start tracking ALL your advertising. If you want implement call tracking, it’s relatively inexpensive. We’re talking about $1 per month and 5 to 10 cents per minute is what you would pay.
It’s going save you so much money as it will help you identify sources that aren’t working.
I want to encourage you to go out and execute this 2018 internet marketing plan and make this year your best year ever.
I also want to offer you as an additional bonus here for everyone, who had read to the end of this article:
A Free 2018 Online Marketing Plan Review with me
We’re I’m going to take a look at your online visibility, create custom keyword lists for you, and put together a ranking report. You will see where your websites are ranking if you want us to.
We will do an analysis of your online directory listings and the consistency of them.
We’re going to take a look at your online reviews and reputation.
Reviews are becoming more and more important nowadays and when customer leave reviews online for hvac businesses or appliance repair companies they’re being ignored. I highly encourage you whether you get good reviews or bad reviews, that you should always respond to them. And if it’s bad, you want to see if you can turn that bad review into a good review. Even if that means refunding the customer their money, because bad reviews are going to hurt you so much more, as it cost you future business.
Wondering why business is so slow this year? Check your online reviews and reputation, you may find your answer there…
Customers reviews are going to become more prominent in the future, as consumers are looking for reviews first before calling an ac repair business or appliance repair company. And that’s going to become the new standard in the future. So if they see these bad reviews, you don’t know if you’re losing 10, 20, 100 customers a month because of those bad reviews.
That’s what I mean by it’s costing you more than refunding them the service call fee, than you really think.
Just refunding that $50 or $150 back to the customer is going to save you a lot more money and it’s not uncommon for a customer if you do that, (refund them the money) for them to go back online and change that review from bad to good. We help our clients with that all the time.
So back to the 2018 Free plan review – We’re also going to take a look at your social presence to see what you’re doing online. And then we’re going to take a look at your website and to see if it’s converting on an effective level. So if you want to get this Free 2018 Online Marketing Plan Review click here to go to my online calendar where you can schedule an appointment or give us a call at 866-561-5627 and let one of my assistants know you want to set up an appointment to speak to me.
And they’ll go ahead and get that scheduled for you. Again, I do appreciate your time. I hope you found this information valuable and look forward to speaking with you soon. Take this information and implement it for your heating and cooling business or appliance repair marketing success today.
Resources Mentioned:
- Get the workbook for this session here
- Book: How To Get A Flood Of Leads Customers And Profits For Your AC Repair Company Or Appliance Repair Business
- The Appliance Experts – AC Repair & Appliance Repair Leads
- CallFire
- Yelp
- Angies List
- Better Business Bureau
- Guide: seo for hvac companies
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