Are you the owner of an HVAC company? Have you been wondering whether or not to start advertising on Facebook? Hi, my name is Francisco. I own a Digital Marketing company called Planet Marketing. We specialize in Facebook Ads, Google Ads and Remarketing. Over the years, I have worked with many of HVAC companies. Most initially have doubts about the usefulness of Facebook Ads in their line of business. If you are one of these people, this article aims to give you peace of mind. The post is composed of the following sections;
- Why HVAC companies need to start advertising on Facebook.
- Getting set up.
- Creating your first Facebook Ad.
Why HVAC Companies Need to Start Advertising on Facebook
Should HVAC companies advertise on Facebook? The answer is a massive yes! However, I am a realist. If you go online today, you will come across tens of articles on the same topic. Most claim that advertising on Facebook is easy. But, that is hardly the case.
For one thing, people do not go to Facebook to buy stuff. They have better things to do, such as watching the latest fail videos or sharing gossip with friends and family. With such important matters on their minds, any ad that you may throw into their faces risks being ignored.
To understand what we are talking about here, let’s refer to Google. A person that searches for “HVAC company near me” on Google probably has some issue that needs to be addressed urgently. Perhaps their air conditioning has packed up and they are looking for nearby experts to carry out repairs.
Google ads benefit from better search intent on the platform
But would someone go to Facebook to look for an air conditioning expert? Probably not! Most people go there only to check out companies they may be interested in. In other words, Facebook is better for reviews. Clearly, Facebook has a problem with intent.
However, that doesn’t mean that all is lost. In fact, Facebook is VERY useful as a digital marketing platform. You just need to know what you are doing, and that’s what I am here for! The following are some of the reasons why Facebook rocks for HVAC companies looking to achieve growth;
Your Audience is Already on Facebook
This applies whatever the business that you may be involved in. I have previously written countless Facebook Ads marketing articles.
You will notice from these articles that Facebook Ads can be used by various businesses in different sectors.
Today, Facebook plays host to over 2.8 billion monthly active users. That’s a large chunk of the global population. So, chances are high that the people that your business is targeting are already on Facebook.
Find more statistics at Statista
The challenge for you is to know how to find them. You can see the current Facebook statistics in the above graph from Statista.
You have the tools to precisely target your audience on Facebook
Audience targeting tends to be where most people fail when it comes to digital marketing in general. The same is true for Facebook. If you don’t define your audience well enough, your ads will be delivered to people who have no interest whatsoever in what you have to offer.
The good news is that Facebook provides you with a raft of tools that are useful as far as audience definition is concerned. In fact, you can very narrowly target your audience on Facebook, making it likely that your ads will reach people who are most likely to respond positively to them. So, what tools are we talking about here?
Location
Where is your target audience situated? Are they in the whole of the United States? Or are they in your town or neighborhood. The location setting allows you to specify where you wish to have your Facebook Ads for HVAC companies delivered.
It’s important to get it right here. Not all businesses are the same. HVAC companies, as an example, are highly localized. You are not going to get clients in another State. You are also not going to get customers in another country.
The same is true for restaurants, bars and other local businesses. For them, operations are restricted to only a few miles around their physical locations. How many miles, depends on the business. Gyms can only carter to a clientele that’s about 4 miles around their physical locations.
Where do you wish to have your Facebook Ads shown?
HVAC companies can operate across a small town. For this example, we will assume that our HVAC company operates from Overland Park, Kansas. We are going to target our ads at people living within a radius of 15 miles.
Age
You can also have your ads delivered to people within a particular age range. As an example, people 20 and below are probably not going to be much interested in hiring an HVAC company. For this example, we will target people 35 years and above.
Gender
Gender can also be used to further define your target audience. That’s particularly useful if you are into gender specific products. However, for this example, we will have our ads delivered to both men and women.
Languages
Facebook ads can also be delivered only to people who speak a specific language. Perhaps you are targeting a Spanish speaking community, in which case you would specify that using this setting. For our example, we are going to leave things as they are.
Detailed Targeting
Narrow down on your target audience
If we leave our audience as it is right now, we may have some success. The problem is that our audience is still too wide. It’s composed of people living 15 miles around our location in Overland Park, Kansas. But what about them? Surely they are not going to all be interested in the HVAC services that we have to offer.
The good news is that you can narrow down on your target audience using the Detailed Targeting option. This option uses Demographics, Interests and Behaviors to really zoom in on the people who are relevant to your business. For this example, we will target people who are interested in the following;
- Air conditioning
- First-time home buyer grant
- Home Ownership Scheme
- HVAC
- Just Married
- Home construction
Facebook Ads are affordable
HVAC companies are usually small. Maybe you run yours on your own. Or maybe you have one or two employees.
Whatever the case, chances are high that you don’t have an unlimited marketing budget. You may, as a result, be worried about whether or not Facebook Ads for your HVAC company are going to be affordable.
The answer is yes, Facebook Ads are very affordable. Just to put things into perspective, you can boost a Facebook post or create an ad for as little as $1. For that, you will reach a respectable number of people. And if you have gotten your audience targeting right, it will definitely be worth your while to advertise on the platform.
Wish to make further savings? Run your own campaigns
Facebook ads can be a vast, intimidating subject. There are so many angles that you could end up thinking it’s impossible to master everything. I mean, I have been creating ads almost on a daily basis for years, and there are still many things that I am yet to learn.
However, that is not to say it’s impossible to learn how to run your own Campaigns. In fact, that’s the entire point of this article; I want to teach readers the basics of creating Facebook Ads for HVAC companies (or for any other company for that matter). By the end, you should be able to run your own campaigns.
Getting set up
Most people simply jump into creating the first Facebook Ad for their HVAC company. That’s now the right approach. There are a number of things that you are going to need to do beforehand. The following steps should help you overcome some of the challenges that come from advertising on Facebook;
Create a Facebook Page for your HVAC Company
No matter how small or big you may be, the good news is that you can start marketing yourself on Facebook for free. To get started, you need to create a Facebook Page. Facebook Pages are great since they act as hubs on which businesses can meet new customers while interacting with existing clients.
It’s not difficult to create a Facebook Page. You can have one up and running in as little as 20 minutes. But that’s only the initial work. The hard work comes in promoting and sprucing up your Page. Facebook Business Pages are not a once off event.
If you want to make yours relevant, strive to keep the conversation going on your Page through regular and helpful posts. And what you post shouldn’t be solely about you. You can post useful HVAC related articles on your Page to get people interested. That’s a good way of promoting your brand.
Retarget audiences
Diagram of Retargeting
One of the great things about Facebook advertising is that you can do retargeting or remarketing. As an HVAC company, chances are high that you already have a website. If that is the case, then you will be well aware of the challenges that are encountered in trying to get people to that site.
It’s sad, therefore, that you will probably only ever be able to convert about 2% of that audience. That seems little after you have put so much effort into SEO and other traffic generating efforts. So, what can you do to recover some of this lost traffic?
The answer lies in remarketing. It’s essentially a way of following people from website one to website two and so on to show them ads based on their interest on the first site.
So, if someone landed on your HVAC website and they were interested in air conditioning, you can follow them to Facebook to show them relevant ads. That essentially increases your chances of making a conversion.
Tracking is via the Facebook Pixel
Anyway, that’s all great, but how do you track someone’s interest on your website. The answer lies in Facebook Pixel. That’s a piece of code that you install on your website. It monitors what people are doing on the site.
And because the whole world eventually lands on Facebook, you can create ads for specific sections of your website. You can have an ad covering air condition, another for heating and another for ventilation. Those sections can further be divided depending on the services that you offer.
As an example, you can have a section covering industrial air conditioning and another covering domestic air condition. So, you could have relevant ads for each. Based on Pixel’s tracking, a person that has been to your website is shown an ad that applies to their interest.
Have clear goals
Most people probably have vague ideas what they wish to achieve with their Facebook Ads marketing efforts. However, this approach can land you in trouble. You should, instead, try to be as clear as you can be about your goals for each of your advertising campaigns.
What is it that you wish to achieve? Do you wish to create awareness about your brand? Do you wish to get people to a landing page? Or are you looking to reach as many people as is people? You can also choose to get an instant message from people on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp.
Being clear helps you choose a Campaign Objective
But why is this important? Well, Facebook requires that you choose a Campaign Objective as part of the process of creating your ad. In fact, it’s about one of the first things that you will be required to do. Facebook gives you 11 Campaign Objectives. However, you can only have one per Campaign. The following are the available Campaign Objectives;
- Brand awareness
- Catalog sales
- App installs
- Video views
- Traffic
- Reach
- Conversions
- Store traffic
- Messages
- Lead generation
Best Campaign Objective for HVAC companies
Some people have problems choosing the best Facebook Ads Campaign Objective for HVAC companies. However, that needs not be the case. Nobody is going to say this is the most ideal campaign objective in this case.
In fact, you can have different campaigns running at the same time on different Campaign Objectives. Below, we show you the Campaign Objective that we are going to use for this example.
Creating your First Facebook Ad
We have covered the preliminaries of creating Facebook Ads for HVAC companies. Now we get to the specifics of coming up with your first ad. Facebook Ads are created in Ads Manager. The process of coming up with an ad has 3 basic steps;
- Choosing a Campaign Objective
- The Ad Set
- The Ad
The Campaign Objective
Choose a Campaign Objective
For this example, we will go with conversions as our campaign objective. That’s because we will be using a custom audience, based on visitors to our site, to try and get people to convert. These people, as noted earlier, have already shown an interest in us. So, it’s up to us to create an ad that convinces them to become clients.
The Ad Set: Audience and Budget
Choosing a Campaign Objective should not take you more than a few minutes if you have read the first section of this article. From there, you go to the Ad Set. This is really where you do most of the work. The Ad Set has the following important sections;
- Budget and Schedule
- Audience
Budget and Schedule
We have already noted that Facebook Ads are affordable. You can set how much you are going to spend on your ads in the budget and schedule section. Most people are not really sure how much to spend at first.
No one is going to prescribe anything for you here. In my case, I like to start small. Maybe you can start with something like $5 per day. You can take it from there based on the results. That’s what I like to do for my clients.
One thing that I need to note is that you should strive to have control over your spending. I know of people who ended up racking up thousands of dollars in debt to Facebook, simply because they were negligent at the beginning.
How Facebook Ads work is that you give them your credit card details. The same applies for Google Ads. What you need to do is to specify how much you are going to spend per Campaign or per given period.
If you don’t do this, Facebook will keep charging your credit card. Your ads will run forever. That’s something that you should avoid at all costs. How I control spending is I set a start and end date for my ads on a daily budget. That way, I know exactly how much I will have spent per campaign.
It’s also possible to specify the lifetime budget for your campaign. That way, you will know how much you are going to have used up by the time your ads stop running. So, this is important. Make sure that you have control of how much you are going to spend per day or per campaign.
Audience
Also in the Ad Set, is the audience section. We have already covered some of the things that happen here at the top. The audience section is where you define to whom your ads are going to be delivered. There are several types of audience when doing Facebook ads marketing;
Types of Audience
When doing Facebook Ads marketing for HVAC companies, you have the option of the following types of audience;
New audiences
You can target a new audience. That’s based on what we noted at the top; location, age, gender, language, demographics, interests and behaviors. New audiences are great if you wish to expand your brand’s reach.
Custom Audiences
Custom audiences are composed of people who have had previous interaction with your business. A pixel generated audience is a good example of a custom audience. You can also target people who have been to your Facebook Page.
The following is a full list of custom audience sources that you can use when creating Facebook Ads for HVAC. Most of the other sources are from Facebook, such as your Facebook Page or Events;
- Website
- App activity
- Customer list
- Offline activity
- Video
- Lead form
- Instant Experience
- Shopping
- Instagram account
- Events
- Facebook Page
- On-Facebook Listings
Lookalike audiences
Lookalike audiences are similar to other audiences that you have defined on Facebook. Maybe you have created an audience based on your Facebook Page. Maybe it’s composed of people who have liked your Facebook Page.
You can then expand your reach using custom audiences. Maybe you could target people who have liked pages similar to yours. In this case, those will be people who have previously liked about HVAC companies’ Facebook pages.
Saved audience
Saved audiences: Facebook Ads for HVAC
You can also save your audiences for use in later campaigns. That’s great if you have come up with a top-notch audience. There is no need to go through the process of creating a new audience when you have one that has previously worked very well.
The Ad
The ad is what people will actually see. All the work that we have been doing so far will be hidden in the background. So, you need to really work hard on the ad. You can have video, single image or carousel ads.
Your choice will depend on what you wish to achieve. I advise people to do a lot of A/B testing. That way you will be able to come across the right format for your particular line of business. That’s the beauty of Facebook Ads. You can do a lot of testing till you have hit the right formula.
If you choose to go for a video ad, make sure that it’s no more than 15 seconds long. If you go beyond that, you will lose your audience. Also, make sure that you limit text on your ads. People respond better to images and videos.
Summary
In this article, I showed you how to create Facebook Ads for HVAC companies. Hopefully, the information given here will help you master the art of creating your own ads. If you need further advice, feel free to reach out to me.
Facebook Ads are what I do on a daily basis. Also, feel free to join my Facebook Ads Mini Course using the section below. The course contains a lot of useful videos that will help you become an expert in the creation of Facebook Ads.
