Morgul Marketing

    Social media for North Texas HVAC companies competing with storm crews

    Hail decides a great deal about how a North Texas HVAC company gets seen. It dents equipment in a way a homeowner can photograph from his own back step, it puts crews from out of state on the street within days, and it starts a claim that will still be open a month later. Around all of that sits ground that moves. Expansive clay lifts and drops a condenser pad through a dry summer, and the tilt shows on camera better than any explanation of it ever reads. Point the phone at those things, in the language the block actually speaks, and the account does work no brochure printed three states away can do.

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    Bent fins are the one failure a North Texas homeowner can see for himself

    Hail leaves damage on a condenser that a person standing in his own yard can photograph, which is unusual in a trade where most problems are invisible.

    A coil that has taken hail looks flattened and combed the wrong way, the cabinet is dimpled, the fan guard is pushed in. Homeowners in Plano and Frisco walk out the morning after and see all of it without anybody explaining anything.

    So film the close version. Fins before and after a comb, a dimpled cabinet next to an undamaged one, a technician with his hand on the unit describing what the airflow does now.

    Talk about what the damage does rather than what it will be worth. Restricted airflow, a system working harder for the same result, a coil that cannot shed heat the way it did in the spring. Say what is typical and stop short of predicting what any one policy will do.

    Film your own yard too. A row of dented outdoor units waiting to be scrapped behind your shop is a picture nobody who drove in from out of state can take.

    The morning after is the shoot. Everybody else posts the hailstones lined up on a patio table, which is the one image that tells a homeowner nothing at all about his system.

    A pad that moved with the clay explains itself on camera

    Expansive clay lifts and drops whatever sits on it, and a tilted condenser pad is a picture every homeowner in this metro recognizes.

    The ground here shrinks through a dry summer and swells again when the rain returns. Foundations move with it, and so does a pad poured on grade with a condenser bolted down to it.

    Put a level on it and film that. A pad leaning away from the house, a lineset pulled tight, a disconnect that is no longer plumb. It reads instantly to somebody in Lakewood or Oak Cliff who has already had one conversation about their foundation.

    Say what it does mechanically. A unit off level does not sit or drain the way it should, the connections carry stress nobody designed them for, and a pad that has walked will keep walking until the grade gets dealt with.

    Stay well away from diagnosing anybody's foundation. Homeowners will ask, because shrink-swell is the local anxiety and everybody has a crack somewhere, and the honest answer is that you work on the equipment and a structural question belongs to a structural engineer.

    Show the fix as well as the fault. Resetting a pad and re-running a strained lineset is ordinary work that almost nobody bothers to photograph, which is most of the reason it is worth photographing.

    Post in Spanish on the blocks your trucks already run

    Neighborhood business across a large part of this service area happens in Spanish, and an English-only account is not in that conversation at all.

    Oak Cliff, Garland, Irving and Mesquite are not edge cases for an established Dallas shop. They are ordinary weeks of work already on the board.

    Start with the posts that decide a booking. After-hours coverage, what happens on a first visit, what a technician needs access to, how you work in a house with people in it.

    Have a bilingual technician record it rather than running a caption through a translator. Trade vocabulary does not survive machine translation and a customer hears the difference in the first sentence.

    Say on the profile that somebody in the office speaks Spanish, then make that true at seven in the evening as well as ten in the morning. A message that arrives in Spanish and comes back in English has already cost you the job.

    Ask for reviews in the language the job was done in. A customer served in Spanish and asked in English usually writes nothing, and the profile ends up looking like it serves only part of the map.

    A hail claim runs for weeks, so the account has to still be there in the third

    Storm-driven replacement moves on somebody else's calendar, and the company still answering questions late in the process is very often the one that does the work.

    Between the damage and any money sits an inspection, a scope, a supplement and a wait. The homeowner spends that stretch reading and asking neighbors what is normal.

    Write for the wait. What an estimate is and is not, why matching equipment turns into an argument, what a scope covers, what to ask before signing anything handed over in a driveway.

    Keep the tone flat while you do it. The people reading are anxious and slightly suspicious of everybody, and a company that sounds excited about their situation reads exactly wrong.

    Keep publishing after the storm crews go. They leave when the claims thin out, and the account still explaining things in the fifth week belongs to somebody with an address in Dallas County or Tarrant County that a customer could drive to.

    The mechanics that do not change from one metro to the next, from who should hold the camera to what deserves money behind it, are set out on our HVAC social media page.

    Questions we get

    Out-of-state crews are all over our neighborhoods after a storm. Should we name them in a post?
    No. Naming competitors makes you sound worried and it ages badly, because some of those crews are perfectly good and some of them are gone by spring. Post your shop, your address, your trucks and the same faces you had last year. A homeowner comparing a door knocker against a company he could drive to will do that comparison himself.
    Everybody posts photographs of the hailstones. Is that worth doing?
    The stones tell a homeowner nothing about his system. The useful post is the next morning at the equipment: what the fins look like, what the cabinet looks like, what a technician checks first and why. Leave the weather pictures to people who want weather pictures.
    How do we film a pad that has moved without sounding like we are blaming whoever set it?
    Describe the ground rather than the installer. Clay does this to everything in North Texas, including work that was done correctly, and saying so plainly keeps you out of an argument with a company whose customers you would like to earn. Show the level, show the strained lineset, show the fix.
    How much of our content should be in Spanish?
    Roughly as much as the blocks your trucks actually run. For many Dallas shops that means a genuine bilingual habit rather than an occasional translated post. Start with the operational posts that decide a booking, record them with a technician who speaks the trade in both languages, and make sure the phone gets answered the same way it was posted.
    A homeowner posted a photo of his dented unit and asked whether it is finished. Do we answer in public?
    Answer what you can see and stop there. You can say what flattened fins do to airflow and what a technician would measure on site. You cannot say what a system has left in it from a photograph, and a guess in a comment gets repeated later as though you had inspected the thing yourself.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

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