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HVAC video marketing – a new direction for your online marketing?

Posted on May 4, 2017 by Niamh Lynch

If you’re in the HVAC or other service business, it can be difficult to catch your customers’ eye. So how do you keep people aware of what you do, propel your website to the top of search pages, and remain current?

Have you considered boosting your online presence with HVAC video marketing?

HVAC video marketing

How-to videos are very popular on YouTube. Did you know that they are just as popular on search engines? The biggest search engine in the world (Google) will display video results on the 1st page of results. This is an excellent way to catch the eye of prospective customers.

What’s interesting is that YouTube itself is also a search engine, and it regularly outranks Google for traffic (well, in a way – Google owns YouTube!). In fact, if you’re using a desktop computer, YouTube results are often the very 1st results you see.

Having your videos on YouTube will benefit you in many ways, not just because your customers can watch what you do. You can also use your videos to rank your webpages by doing the following:

Link relevant blog posts in the details section of each YouTube video
Link social media accounts on your YouTube videos and profile
Link contact details and website on your YouTube profile
Embed YouTube videos onto your website

Embedding your YouTube videos onto your website is beneficial for both platforms. Every time a visitor views your video on the website, your view count increases. As your view count increases, and particularly if it increases over a short amount of time, your video will climb higher in the search rankings.

How To Get Started

The quickest way to get underway is to tell your viewers/customers what you do and why you do it. See the Fox Family Heating and Air Conditioning Channel Trailer for an example of how this is done extremely well. Video editing software is relatively inexpensive and with minimal investment you can end up with something slick and well produced.

A trailer video on your HVAC channel is a teaser/taster for what you’re going to cover on your YouTube account. Keep it short, no longer than 1 min 30 seconds, and subtitle any speech in the video.

What next in video?

Remember when we discussed blog topics for HVAC companies?

The same rules apply when you’re compiling videos for a YouTube channel. Here are two examples from two very different channels that show just how you can vary your content and attract customers to your business

A day in the life of an HVAC Technician

HVAC 10 Commandments

What about audio?

Podcasts are extremely popular, far more popular than you’d imagine. You don’t need to be stationary to listen to a podcast and many people download them and listen as they’re going about their daily business, commuting etc. It’s an excellent way to teach people about what you do.

We recommend checking out the HVAC School – For Techs, By Techs podcast for an example of how this can be done extremely well and to great success. It’s the number one ranking podcast for HVACs!

Can You Use Your Video Elsewhere?

Absolutely! We recommend uploading videos directly to YouTube for sharing on most social media accounts, embedding on your website, and search purposes. When it comes to Facebook, however, we recommend uploading the same video directly for all to see.

The Facebook algorithm prefers ‘native video’ which is video uploaded directly to the platform. If you’ve made that video, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t benefit from it in many ways.

When you’re selling your company the biggest investment you need to make is your time. You can see that investing your time in creating unique video and audio content may just benefit your HVAC company.

Are you making HVAC marketing videos yet or do you have a favorite channel that you’d recommend to others?

Posted in Best practices, General | Tagged Community Manager, field service, management, marketing, Mobile Devices, technology, tips | Comments Off

5 tips for a hypnotizing HVAC website!

Posted on April 19, 2017 by Niamh Lynch

How Does Your Website Grow?

So you have a HVAC website and you’re wondering why so few people stay on it. Let’s face it, HVAC topics can be a hard sell sometimes. If you follow our guidelines, however, there’s no reason why you can’t outshine the rest!

Stay Connected

Do you have social networks for your HVAC company? Make sure to include them on your company website, and make sure those links are ‘clickable’ and open on a separate page or tab.

Check your link settings

Once you attract a visitor to your website, you want them to hang around and see what you’re about. If you direct people way from your site, make sure that the link opens in a new tab. This way the visitors can always return to the original page and you lose less traffic down the rabbit hole that social media can be!

What’s On Your HVAC Website?

Is your website full of text with very few pictures? Is it rich in content and engaging?

Where you do have pictures are you using stock images? We’ve all seen the lovely websites with the same smiley staff members and wondered where we’d seen that friendly (and strangely good-looking) office worker before!

Ok, so it’s not an employee, but it IS our real office!

One of the greatest assets your company will ever have is your workers. So why not champion the staff and use pictures of them working? This is a great way to engage customers with the work that your team does and to help them identify the people they will meet on a service call.

YouTube And Video

Did you know that YouTube is owned by Google? YouTube itself has a powerful search engine which plugs back into Google. You can’t afford not to be on YouTube with your own company-specific channel if search is important to your HVAC company.

The good news is that videos you post on YouTube will boost your search ranking. You can use your channel to share simple fixes for common customer complaints, show a typical day for a service engineer, or even a walkthrough of a recent project. YouTube videos can be easily embedded into most websites and blogs, which you can set to automatically play. Auto-play will increase your views on your channel and ultimately improve your search ranking even further.

Be Responsive

How does your HVAC website look on different devices? Does it adapt to the size of the device you’re using? Does it scale to a handheld smartphone, then increase in size for a tablet, and look completely different on a desktop? If so then you’ve aced one of the most important website tests there is.

Test the responsiveness of your site with a tool like this

Having a ‘responsive website’ is extremely important on today’s internet. The majority of visitors to your website will use a smartphone to find you. If your website doesn’t work on a smartphone, then it’s time to review your settings.

Keep Customers Informed

It’s always a good idea to use your website to inform your customers of news, updates, and special offers. It’s natural that your news should go onto your website, even if you do enjoy the instant gratification of sharing good news on social media. We’d advise you mark an occasion for posterity and use your website as well.

Even better, why not pop an email subscription box underneath your news, or on the footer of your website? If you can catch the attention of a visitor for long enough they’ll sign up. Treat each email address like gold-dust. It’s a sign that you’re doing something right, that people are interested in what you do, and that a customer will likely return to you for future business.

Why not use your tips above to give your website a tune-up today?

Posted in Best practices, Mobile clients | Tagged field service, marketing, Mobile Devices, people, Synchroteam, technology, tips | Comments Off

Blogging for HVAC Companies

Posted on March 28, 2017 by Niamh Lynch

In our last post, we looked at how you can use search engines for success by reserving your business space online. However, reserving your location is only part of the bigger picture, because search engines use SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to figure out which websites go to the top of a search. Today, we’re going to look about how blogging for HVAC can help your brand.

Say, for example, a customer searched for an air con company in Boston. The first company to come up is “Atlantic Heating and Air Conditioning” and it’s easy to see why. This company has a busy, regularly updated, blog.

Blogging is an effective and inexpensive way to boost your search ranking and get your company to the front page of search engine results in your area.

What Can HVAC Companies Blog About?

Perhaps heating, ventilation, and air conditioning might not be the most exciting topics to write about so we’ve got some suggestions for you to get you started.

Why Is My?

Answer the ‘why is my’ question with your blog. To find out what popular questions are about air conditioning we simply asked Google and these are the types of queries that people type:

You are, after all, the expert in your field. You answer all these kind of questions every day, so you’re best qualified to answer.

As you can see, people ask Google questions about HVAC all the time. If you can answer this kind of question on your blog, you’ll easily be able to convert local queries to customers.

Write Relevant Blogs For Your Audience

Keep an eye on the weather forecast. If you’re based in Alaska and you know a freeze is coming, write about how to keep your heating going in extreme cold. If you’re based in the South, and you hear about a heatwave on the way, write about how air conditioning can regulate the temperature in the office and home.

Tips, Tricks, And How-To

There are some jobs in the home that even the most seasoned HVAC professional doesn’t need to do on a call out, such as bleed a radiator. So why not write an instructional blogpost, or even film a short video showing your customers how to do it themselves. This will show customers that you are an authority in your area, and build trust.

Money Saving/Efficiency Advice

Everybody loves to save money. Write a blog post for your customers on how to use the appliances they already have efficiently. Is it more cost effective to keep your offices at a constant medium temperature, or to keep the offices at a lower temperature with a boost every now and again? How insulation and a proper airtight building can save money in the long run.

Use Social Media To Share Your Content

When you write a blogpost, don’t forget to share it. The more times a blog is shared and read, the more likely it is to go to the top of a search engine query. Use your customer email, and include them in your blog mailing list (with their permission). This gives you a great opportunity to remind your customers of what you do, and how you’re always available to discuss their needs.

We use Buffer to help share our blog posts

Share your blogposts on social media accounts like Facebook or Twitter and don’t be afraid to tag other HVAC companies, not forgetting Synchroteam of course, in your posts. We’re always happy to share interesting blogs and updates with our followers and readers.

Do you blog for your HVAC business? We’d love to hear more about what works for you and how you’ve found it adds to your business!

Posted in Best practices | Tagged blogs, Community Manager, field service, marketing, Synchroteam, tips | Comments Off

Local SEO For Local HVAC Success

Posted on March 14, 2017 by Niamh Lynch

Location, Location, Location – Local SEO

When a customer is looking for a HVAC company nearby they no longer pick up the yellow pages and thumb through the listings. The first and probably the only way for them to find out who’s close enough to solve their problem speedily is a search engine.

In the past, you might have spent hours figuring out the text to include in your yellow pages ad. Nowadays it’s quick and easy to mark your territory on the internet, but you do still have to make sure you stand out from the crowd.

We’re going to cover off the two most popular search engines for businesses in this blog post; there are far more than that but these are the websites that the vast majority of your customers will use. Plus, as a bonus, we have another location website that most businesses neglect.

Google For Business

It would be difficult to find somebody who has never heard of Google as it’s the most popular search engine on the planet! Did you know that you can manage your business listing on Google for free? Not only can you get your address and website listed, but you can also have the listing marked on Google Maps, making it extremely easy for your customers to find you.

While it does take a little bit of time to set up, it’s easy to arrange your listing on Google. It is surprisingly easy to manage too. All you need to do is to sign up for a “Google My Business” account and you can do this with your existing GoogleMail (Gmail) account, or set up a new account altogether. Once your account is set up, it’s easy to mark your business on a map, monitor reviews and feedback, set opening hours, etc. You can also officially verify your business with Google which is a process where they contact you at your postal address to confirm you operate from that location.

The beauty of having your business listed with Google is that you have a virtual location on the search engine which gives customers a preview of your business. This can include images of your offices, busy hours for customers, and a click-to-call button straight at the top of your search engine results.

Bing Places For Business

Similar to Google, Bing allows you to claim your business location online. The process is similar. In this case, you use your Microsoft account to log into Bing Places For Business. You’ll have one of these accounts already if you use any of the Microsoft suite of applications such as Office (Word, Excel etc).

Interestingly, Bing allows you to hide your exact business address from the search results but still claim your location with a valid address. This could be very helpful for HVAC service companies who use a call centre for customers, for example.

If your company has more than one location, you can easily claim these using the Bing platform and the nearest address will show up in search to those who have their location services switched in their browser.

Apple Maps

Okay, we know that Apple Maps isn’t technically a search engine, but it is used by customers who use Apple software. So if your customers use an iPhone, iPad, or Mac for search (and these are all very popular) then you can’t neglect your business here. In fact, this map is the default for anybody using Apple software.

To claim your business location all you need to do is go to https://mapsconnect.apple.com/ then sign into your Apple account. You will have one of these if you use iTunes, or have one of the devices listed above. If not, it’s easy to set up.

You then set your relationship to your business and follow the simple steps to complete your listing.

If you haven’t got these three location based services enabled for your business then you’re missing a trick!

Posted in Best practices | Tagged Community Manager, field service, marketing, Social, Synchroteam, technology, tips | Comments Off

Facebook For HVAC Companies – A Basic Guide

Posted on February 8, 2017 by Niamh Lynch

If you read our last article, you’re probably already sold on the idea of automating some of your Facebook messages while out of the office. The good news is that today we’re back with a few more tips about using Facebook for HVAC companies.

Continue reading →

Posted in Best practices, General | Tagged Android, Community Manager, field service, iOS, Mobile Devices, Scheduling tools, social media, Synchroteam | Comments Off

Using social media for customer service in the HVAC industry

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Niamh Lynch

Social media for customer service – always be on!

As we mentioned in our last post, most people expect responses to Twitter queries within 2 hours of posing a question. And while this might be easy to manage during a 9-5 working day, how do you use social media for customer service outside of office hours?

Continue reading →

Posted in Best practices, General | Tagged Android, field service, iOS, Mobile Devices, social media, technology, tips | Comments Off

6 advanced tips: how HVAC can get the most out of Twitter

Posted on January 4, 2017 by Niamh Lynch

Last week, we took an in-depth look at the pros and cons of using social media for your service business. This week, we’re taking a look at one of the largest, most useful but often neglected social networks – Twitter for HVAC professionals!

Twitter for service businesses offers a swift, public way to deal with customer queries, complaints, and feedback. The biggest input in managing a Twitter account is time because having an account itself is free. Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged Community Manager, field service, marketing, Social, social media, Synchroteam, technology, tips | Comments Off

What can social networks do for your maintenance company?

Posted on November 30, 2016 by Niamh Lynch

Networking, recruiting, customer service and exploring new markets: social networks can do a lot for maintenance companies! However, service companies frequently neglect this element of their service experience. For example, in France, only approximately 30% of HVAC companies use social networks.

While some might be put off by a lack of resources or skills in-house, social networks are of prime strategic interest and deserve special attention. If your company uses dispatch software to deploy technicians in the field, read on to find out what social networking can do to help you stand out from the competition… Continue reading →

Posted in Best practices, General | Tagged Community Manager, field service, marketing, opinion, social media, Synchroteam, technology, tips | Comments Off

Synchroteam at Mobility for Business

Posted on September 6, 2016 by Niamh Lynch

Mobility for Business, France’s largest event for mobile apps and solutions, is taking place in Paris on November 8 and 9, 2016.

This event is huge, with over 120 exhibitors, 3 keynote speeches, 43 workshops, and over 3,000 visitors. The themes this year are many and varied – app development, mobile marketing, geolocation, traceability and logistics, IOT and business security.

It’s bound to be a great event – with one proviso: this is a French-speaking event, so if you don’t parlez Français, you might want to check out a different event this year.

Synchroteam at Mobility for Business

As ever, Synchroteam will be there. You can find us at stand D29. We’d love to have a coffee and a chat, so if you’d like to set something up, let us know!

If you’d like to get a head-start, you can fin out more about Mobility for Business on Facebook, Twitter, and their website.

And you can find us here, here and here!

Come see Synchroteam at Mobility for Business, we’d love to meet you!

Posted in General | Tagged events, news, Synchroteam | Comments Off

HVAC video marketing – a new direction for your online marketing?

HVAC video marketing

How To Get Started

What next in video?

What about audio?

Can You Use Your Video Elsewhere?

Are you making HVAC marketing videos yet or do you have a favorite channel that you’d recommend to others?

5 tips for a hypnotizing HVAC website!

How Does Your Website Grow?

Stay Connected

What’s On Your HVAC Website?

YouTube And Video

Be Responsive

Keep Customers Informed

Why not use your tips above to give your website a tune-up today?

Blogging for HVAC Companies

What Can HVAC Companies Blog About?

Why Is My?

Write Relevant Blogs For Your Audience

Tips, Tricks, And How-To

Money Saving/Efficiency Advice

Use Social Media To Share Your Content

Do you blog for your HVAC business? We’d love to hear more about what works for you and how you’ve found it adds to your business!

Synchroteam at Mobility for Business

Synchroteam at Mobility for Business

Come see Synchroteam at Mobility for Business, we’d love to meet you!

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