An HVAC marketing audit built on your numbers, not a list of tactics.

Nine areas, every time: measurement, paid search, paid social, spend efficiency, website and funnel, organic and AI search, offer and positioning, competitors and lifecycle. For an HVAC company we read them against booked and installed work rather than traffic, so call tracking software, recorded intake, Google Local Services Ads, Google Business Profile and reviews per market, direct mail, the maintenance agreement base and the sales handoff are all in scope.

A list of strategies tells you what other companies do. An audit produces findings about your business, each with the measured evidence beside it, a severity band, what leaving it alone costs, and the fix. The nine-area scope is fixed so nothing is skipped, but every line in the workbook comes from your analytics, ad accounts, call recordings, invoices and live site rather than a template.

By comparing like weeks year over year, by looking at demand indices per market alongside your own numbers, and by reading metrics that weather does not move much: booking rate on inbound calls, close rate on replacement estimates, average ticket, agreement attachment and cost per sold job. A hot July raises every channel at once, which is exactly why the audit reports rates rather than volumes.

That is usually the first finding. We reconcile marketing's report with jobs booked and installed revenue, place live test calls, and score recordings for booking rate, hold time and missed calls. Top performers book 62% of inbound lead calls against 39% for the rest, so intake usually explains more of the gap than any channel does, and the workbook names which it is with the recordings referenced.

Yes. Blending markets hides the answer. Spend, booked calls, cost per sold job, local search position, Google Business Profile health and review velocity are reported branch by branch, so a strong market stops subsidising a weak one in the reporting. Where one branch is genuinely better run, the workbook documents what it does differently so it can be copied.

Yes, as audited channels with their own findings. We reconstruct spend from invoices, match drop dates and flight dates against call and booking volume by postcode or market, check the offer and creative against what the site and phone then deliver, and state plainly where the evidence to judge a programme does not exist yet. Where that is the case, the plan says how to make the next drop measurable.

Both. We review Local Services Ads budget, Google Guarantee status, dispute handling, booking rate and cost per customer against paid search on the same searches, and every Google Business Profile listing for categories, service areas, hours, photos, review velocity and response habits. Findings say what to change and who owns it; account management is not part of the audit.

Neither. Coaching works on how the company is run: recruiting, pay plans, targets and accountability. Advisers work on transactions, and HVAC has plenty of that activity: Capstone Partners counted 92 sector transactions in its July 2026 update, down 4.2% year over year, with private equity add-ons at 41.3% of dealmaking. We review the marketing function with evidence, and say when a finding is really operations.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of brands, branches and ad accounts in scope and the state of your data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For context on scale, The CMO Survey puts marketing at 9.0% of company revenue and 33.6% of digital activity in the hands of outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

Not as part of this. The audit is a project with a defined end and no attached retainer, which is what lets the workbook say that a channel we would happily sell is not worth funding for you. Your team, your current agency or another firm can execute the plan. If you later want us to run something, it is scoped and quoted separately.

As far as they affect what marketing can produce, yes. Top performers present good-better-best options on 57% of residential jobs against 41%, and 87.5% run an active agreement programme against 68.7%, while financed jobs carry a median ticket 64% higher, with HVAC contractors seeing a 66% increase. Where those are absent or invisible on the site, that is an offer finding.

No, that is part of what the audit measures. Validity's 2026 study found 62% of organisations lost revenue to poor CRM data and only 41% had a named governance owner, so waiting for clean data means waiting forever. We document what the data can and cannot support, label directional findings as directional, and put the repairs in the plan. Building that layer is marketing operations consulting, quoted separately.

Direction of travel. The audit looks backwards at evidence: what the marketing function has been doing, what it produced, and what is broken. HVAC marketing strategy consulting looks forward and decides service-line and branch priority, positioning, channel roles and budget. Most operators buy the audit first, because a plan written on unverified numbers is a guess with headings.

Scope of the question. Growth advisory hunts the commercial constraint wherever it sits, including the maintenance base, replacement close rate and branch mix. The marketing audit stays inside the marketing function and produces evidence plus a 90-day plan. If you already know marketing is the problem, the audit is the cheaper first step.

Whoever owns marketing, one operations leader, and someone who can grant access to analytics, ad accounts, call tracking, the field service software and invoices, for roughly three to four hours across the week. Afterwards your team runs the plan, with every action owned and acceptance tested. Where you want a standing numbers habit, scorecard advisory sets one up and hands it back; the parent engagement is the marketing audit.