Every HVAC owner in the Twin Cities eventually asks the same question, usually in March when the phones are quiet: how much should we actually be spending on marketing? The honest answer is a range, not a number, and the range depends on how fast you want to grow and how well the money is tracked. Here is the model we use with our own HVAC clients.
Start with a percentage of revenue
For an established heating and cooling company that wants steady growth, a total marketing budget of 5 to 8 percent of annual revenue is the working range. A $2 million shop therefore lands between $100,000 and $160,000 a year, or roughly $8,000 to $13,000 a month averaged across the year. Companies in aggressive growth mode, opening a second location or adding trucks, often push to 10 or 12 percent for a year or two. Companies that are at capacity and only need to keep the calendar full can drop toward 3 or 4 percent, as long as the local SEO foundation is maintained.
Two cautions. First, that percentage includes everything: ads, video, website, direct mail, software and agency fees. Second, if you have never tracked which channel produced which job, spend the first quarter fixing tracking before you scale anything.
Weight it by season, not evenly
Minnesota HVAC demand has two peaks, the first cold snap in October and the first heat wave in June, with predictable troughs in April and November. Spending evenly across twelve months means overspending when the phone rings on its own and underspending when you need to create demand.
Our rule of thumb: put 40 percent of the annual budget into the six weeks before each peak (mid-April through May, and September through mid-October), keep 35 percent for the peaks themselves, and hold 25 percent for the shoulder months where maintenance agreements, replacement offers and video content do the work.
Fund channels in this order
- Google Business Profile and reviews. Nearly free, and the single biggest driver of emergency calls. Fix categories, services, photos and review velocity before spending a dollar on ads.
- Response speed. A missed-call text-back and an after-hours answering assistant cost a few hundred dollars a month and recover leads you already paid for.
- Local Services Ads. Google Guaranteed leads at $35 to $90 each in the metro, billed per lead, are the most predictable paid channel for repair work.
- Google Search ads for replacement and high-ticket terms, with dedicated landing pages and call tracking.
- Video and social. The compounding channel. Technician videos build the familiarity that makes every other channel convert better, and they feed your ads with creative.
- Every Door Direct Mail to routes with 15-to-25-year-old homes, timed four to six weeks before each season.
A sample budget for a $2M company
Averaged monthly: $2,500 in Local Services Ads and Search spend, $900 in Meta boosts, $2,400 for a video and social program, $1,500 for local SEO, $300 for tracking and AI follow-up software, and one $3,000 EDDM drop per season. That is roughly $9,000 a month, or about 5.4 percent of revenue, with the weighting above pushing it to $13,000 in pre-season months and $6,000 in the troughs.
What to measure
Not clicks or impressions. Track cost per booked job by channel, the share of revenue from replacements versus repairs, and the number of maintenance agreements added. If a channel cannot report booked jobs, it is not ready for more budget.
If you want us to build this model with your real numbers, book a free strategy call or read how we approach marketing for HVAC companies.
