Short answer: the right HVAC marketing company is the one that gets your phone ringing with calls from people who need a furnace fixed this week, not the one with the slickest sales pitch. Most of them look the same from the outside. The differences show up in month three, after you've already paid.
Here's what to actually check before you sign anything, and what questions to ask so you're not stuck in a year-long contract with nothing to show for it.
Strip away the jargon and it's usually some combination of these:
Some do all of this. Most do two or three of these well and charge you for the rest. Ask directly which of these they handle in-house versus hand off to a subcontractor. You want to know who's actually touching your account.
This varies a lot by market and what's included, so be suspicious of anyone who quotes a number before asking about your business. What matters more than the price tag is what you're getting for it. A $500/month retainer that includes real review management and fast lead response can beat a $3,000/month package that's mostly a dashboard nobody looks at.
Ask for a plain list of deliverables. Not "brand awareness" or "engagement." Actual things: how many Google posts a month, how fast they respond to a new lead, who answers if a review comes in at 9pm on a Saturday.
Because a lot of them are built that way. Twelve-month minimums. Setup fees that disappear if you cancel early. Ad spend bundled into the management fee so you can't tell what's actually buying clicks versus what's paying their salaries.
None of that is illegal. It's just not in your interest. Before you sign, ask two questions:
If the answers are vague, that's your answer.
A few questions separate the companies that know your trade from the ones that are running the same playbook for every local business, from dentists to dog groomers:
If a company can't answer the first one without hand-waving, keep looking. Response speed is the single biggest lever in this business. A homeowner with no heat in January is calling three or four contractors in the same ten minutes. Whoever answers first, wins the job. A lot of marketing spend gets wasted driving calls to a phone nobody picks up.
This is the part most general marketing companies miss, because they're built for industries where people fill out a form and wait. HVAC customers don't wait. If a lead comes in and gets a text back in under a minute, your odds of booking that job go way up compared to a callback an hour later.
This is the one piece of marketing for hvac businesses that I think gets underpriced and under-discussed. It's not flashy. It doesn't show up in a slide deck about "brand strategy." But it's often the difference between a marketing spend that pays for itself and one that just generates clicks.
Canopy handles this specific piece: when a lead comes in, whether from a Google search, a missed call, or an old review you never followed up on, someone (or something set up to sound like someone) responds fast, in plain language, and tries to get the job booked. It's one piece of the puzzle, not the whole marketing plan, and it's worth asking any company you're considering how they handle this exact moment.
Most owners I talk to don't actually know what searches they're ranking for, or what they're missing entirely. That's worth finding out before you pay anyone anything. You can run a free search audit and see what's actually happening with your listings right now. It won't fix anything by itself, but it tells you where the gaps are, which is more than most contracts come with.
Don't sign a year-long contract on the first call. Ask for a month-to-month option, or at least a short trial period. Watch what happens to your phone, not your "impressions" or "engagement" metrics. If calls go up and you're closing more of them, that's working. If you're getting a report full of charts and no more jobs on the schedule, that's not.
The companies worth working with won't push back hard on a short trial. The ones that insist on locking you in immediately are usually the ones that know the work won't hold up past month two.
Canopy runs your website, blog, reviews, and social. You answer a text a few times a week. See what your business is missing first.
Run the free audit