A Guide to Using AI in Your HVAC Marketing

Calling the introduction of AI in HVAC marketing “disruptive” is an understatement. This technology promises to revolutionize the industry from top to bottom, from customer targeting to sales calls and everything in between. While HVAC marketing has always focused heavily on data, there hasn’t been a way to sort through and efficiently use all that customer data at once.

This changes now. 

Integrating AI into your HVAC marketing is about finding new ways to maximize efficiency, customer targeting, and data harvesting. For the first time, you can simultaneously deliver automated and personalized messaging to individual customers, allowing you to add a human touch to your marketing at scale.

Here’s what you need to know about using AI in HVAC marketing. 

Educate HVAC customers about the benefits of AI

Maintaining occupancy comfort year-round has always been a major concern of HVAC customers, whether commercial or residential. Seasonal weather shifts mean repeated tinkering with indoor appliances to keep temperatures and air quality at manageable levels. That places the burden of building maintenance on the customer’s shoulders.

AI changes this dynamic for you entirely. As part of your HVAC marketing initiatives, explain to your customers the many benefits of using AI-enabled appliances in their buildings. These benefits can include the following: 

• AI-enabled devices offer superior monitoring capabilities. Smart HVAC systems can detect potential health risks, such as poor indoor air quality, before they turn into a serious problem. 
• AI allows the use of more energy-efficient air conditioning systems with the ability to self-regulate a building’s thermal comfort based on its changing occupancy levels. 
• AI-powered appliances can track HVAC system performance data over time. You can create individual profiles for each building and know in advance when an appliance needs maintenance. 

Many customers won’t be familiar with these advantages, so it’s your job as an HVAC marketer to share this with them. For instance, you could conduct an educational email marketing campaign explaining how AI assists with predictive maintenance for HVAC systems. This should be a top priority for your content marketing, which also uses AI to achieve marketing goals. 

Using persona generators for content creation 

You can use AI to inform your content creation process. First, let's consider the task of educating your customers, but who are your customers exactly? You can use an AI-driven persona generator, such as Delve AI, to find out. 

These tools work by input and output. If you’ve been working in the HVAC industry for a while, you’ve already accumulated a lot of data about your target audience. This data will be the variables you use in a persona generator to know your customers better. You can be as detailed as you want with this by incorporating elements such as: 

• The challenges your customers routinely face and how your HVAC company helps overcome them
• Common personality traits or interests of your customers — this often varies widely based on age and geography
• How often your customers schedule service calls or need maintenance
• Their individual motivations, whether they’re commercial business owners or interested in homeownership

The more personas you generate, the more your targeting ideas will evolve. You’ll begin to see patterns in the data you haven’t noticed before, and this will shape your future marketing initiatives. You can even start filtering your customer base around specific personas down to a micro-level, allowing you to send marketing messages that are both exquisitely personalized and automated. 

This enhances the entire customer experience beyond anything previously possible. You’ll still invest time and resources, but you’ll do so much more and reach more customers with the same resource investment as before. This levels the playing field in the HVAC industry and gives small businesses a golden opportunity to compete with the bigger fish. 

AI-assisted HVAC content marketing generation

Content marketing for HVAC can also greatly benefit from AI. It doesn’t free you from having to sit down and do the work, but it expedites and streamlines the process. For instance, it can suggest different ways to phrase an overly complicated sentence or help you layer your content writing with more organically placed keywords. 

Once again, personalization in content marketing is the most significant benefit of using AI. HVAC companies can use AI to identify which customer segments are most receptive to certain kinds of content marketing, such as blog posts, videos, or articles. A younger audience consisting of busy professionals might prefer visual content, but older homeowners might prefer a detailed case study instead. 

More specifically, you can use AI in your content marketing to: 

• Forecast seasonal trends in your customers' preferences, allowing you to see when select marketing methods will be most effective.
• Quickly translate marketing materials into other languages to reach a new audience. Just make sure to have a native speaker proofread the translation to avoid the occasional embarrassing mistake.
• Further align your marketing with your brand voice to create a more consistent message across the board.

Essentially, AI can save you a great deal of time. Rather than blindly following whatever you hope might work, use AI to make data-driven decisions for your HVAC marketing plan. You can also centralize all your marketing data and competitive insights into one hub.

Mastering the HVAC AI revolution

The novelty of AI can make it hard to get your head around it. Try to approach this new technology strategically. Rather than listening to all the hype, take some time to think about how it can actually benefit and streamline your HVAC operations. Stay up-to-date with the latest trends, but also put into practice what you learn and find out what truly works. 

There’s no question that AI will change the landscape of the HVAC industry, but it’s up to you to educate your customers, satisfy their needs, and create relevant marketing materials. Carefully designate where to deploy your company’s resources most effectively. This is an admittedly delicate balance, but you have many advantages on your side.