Hiring an HVAC marketing agency, doing it yourself, or something in between

By Steve Meitler · 2026-09-02 · 6 min read

What a fair price is, the contract terms to refuse, the red flags in trade marketing pitches, and which pieces an owner should keep in house.

HVAC is one of the most heavily marketed-to trades in the country. A contractor with two trucks and a decent Google profile gets four or five pitches a week, most of them promising exclusive leads, guaranteed installs or page-one rankings, and most of them asking for a twelve-month agreement before a single call has come in.

Some of those companies are good. The difficulty is that the pitch from a good one and the pitch from a bad one are nearly identical, and the trade has enough churn that the bad ones never run out of new contractors.

Here is how to sort them, what things should cost, and which parts you should keep yourself regardless.

Keep these in house, always

Three things should never leave the building:

The review ask. No agency can make your tech say the sentence in the driveway. Software sends the text; the driveway produces the review. Across 46,610 contractors the median has 30 reviews and 27% have fewer than 10, which is a process gap, not an outsourcing gap. The reviews guide is the whole system.

Answering the phone. You can buy overflow coverage, but the primary line is a core function. Nobody outside your company knows your service area edges, your pricing or what your techs can actually do today.

Your accounts. The Google Business Profile, the Google Ads account, the Meta ad account, the domain and the hosting. Grant access to whoever you hire; never let them create the accounts in their own name. This is the single most common way contractors get held hostage, and it turns a routine vendor change into a two-month rebuild.

What things actually cost

Rough market rates for residential HVAC, monthly, excluding ad spend paid to the platforms:

• Google Ads management: $600 to $1,800 a month, or 10% to 15% of spend on larger budgets.
• Meta ads management: $500 to $1,500 a month.
• Local SEO and Google profile management: $500 to $1,200 a month.
• Website build: $3,000 to $8,000 once, or $150 to $400 a month managed.
• Full-service package covering ads, SEO, site and reporting: $2,500 to $6,000 a month for a shop running five to fifteen trucks.
• Missed-call text-back and follow-up automation: $200 to $600 a month including the platform.

Under $500 a month for anything meaningful means either a template or an offshore team logging into your account for twenty minutes. Over $8,000 a month for a residential contractor with under fifteen trucks means you are subsidizing an account manager, a strategist and a quarterly deck you do not read.

Ad spend is separate and it is yours. Anyone who bundles ad spend into a single number so you cannot see the split is hiding the split.

Red flags

• Guaranteed leads or guaranteed installs. Nobody controls the market. A guarantee is either priced so high that it cannot lose, or the leads are shared with other contractors, or it is unenforceable.
• Shared or resold leads. If a lead company sells the same no-cooling call to four contractors, you are in a speed race with three others for a homeowner who is already irritated by the fourth call.
• Twelve-month contracts with no exit. Ninety days to prove it out is reasonable. A year with a cancellation penalty means the model depends on you not being able to leave.
• Accounts in their name. Discussed above. Non-negotiable.
• No call recording or lead reporting. If you cannot hear the calls you paid for, you cannot audit anything and neither can they.
• Reporting on impressions, reach and clicks. The only numbers that matter are booked calls, cost per booked call, and closed revenue. A report full of impressions is a report designed to be unfalsifiable.
• Rank reports with no revenue attached. Ranking first for a keyword nobody in your county searches is a screenshot, not a result.
• A pitch that starts with a discount. If the price drops $400 because you hesitated, the first number was made up.

What good looks like

A good vendor will ask about your close rate, your average ticket, your truck capacity and your service area edges before quoting anything, because those determine what they can profitably buy for you. They will tell you which channel to fix first even when it is not the one they sell. They will show you the account, not a dashboard rebuilt to look flattering. And they will start with something small enough that you can judge it inside a quarter.

Ask three questions in the first call:

1. "Which HVAC accounts do you run now, and can I call one?" A vendor who cannot produce a reference contractor in a comparable market has none.
2. "What will you do in the first thirty days, specifically?" A real answer names the campaigns, the pages and the tracking. A vague one names deliverables like "strategy" and "optimization."
3. "What happens if I leave in month four?" The answer tells you who owns what.

Doing it yourself

Plenty of contractors run their own marketing well. It is a realistic option if you can commit five to eight hours a week and you are willing to learn one channel properly instead of dabbling in four.

The order to learn it, if you go this route:

1. Google Business Profile, completely filled out. Free, and it is the highest-return hour in this list. See the profile guide.
2. The review process. Free, and it compounds.
3. Missed-call text-back. Under $100 a month and it pays for itself in the first recovered job.
4. Local Services Ads. Simple to run, per-lead pricing, and the setup is mostly verification paperwork.
5. Website. Either build it once properly or pay for it. This is the piece most owners should buy.
6. Google Ads search campaigns. This is where DIY gets expensive fast, because the platform is designed to spend your money by default.
7. Meta ads. Learn last. The creative burden is real and it is the channel most dependent on production.

The honest failure mode for DIY is not incompetence, it is July. You set it up in April, it works, then the season hits and nobody touches the account for three months while it quietly drifts.

The middle path

Most contractors are best served by keeping reviews, phone handling and the profile in house, buying the website once, and hiring out the one paid channel that is currently costing them the most money. That is a $1,500 to $3,000 a month commitment rather than $6,000, and it fails cheaply if it fails.

Whatever you choose, insist on a trial period. There is no reason for a contractor to sign a year to find out whether the phone rings, and any vendor confident in their work can prove it in a month.

Frequently asked

Should I use a trade-specific agency or a general one? Trade-specific usually starts faster because they know the seasonality and the lead economics. General agencies can be better at creative. Either works; the contract terms matter more than the specialty.

Is it worth hiring a marketing person in house? At around twenty trucks, yes. Below that, a full-time marketer will not have enough to do and will invent projects.

How long before I judge results? Sixty days for paid channels, six months for SEO and reviews. Judging a search campaign in three weeks is guessing, and judging SEO in three months is worse.

Every service on this site is offered as a free 14-day trial, no card, precisely because a contractor should watch it work before paying. Text or call (385) 832-6175.