Morgul Marketing

    Social media for HVAC contractors on both sides of Tampa Bay

    Two things decide what an HVAC company here can honestly put on camera, and neither of them is the weather. The first is water. Hillsborough County on one side, Pinellas County on the other, and a short list of crossings that decide whether a late afternoon call in Clearwater is a job or a favor. The second is what sits under and around the houses: limestone that moves, old blocks in Ybor City and Hyde Park with nowhere to put a condenser, and a base at the end of a peninsula where a phone is not coming out of a pocket at all. A feed built on those facts reads as local. One built on hurricane graphics reads like everybody else in the metro.

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    Post the hour your trucks stop crossing the bay

    Whether you cross the water, and until what time, is the question a homeowner on the far shore needs answered before anything else you publish matters.

    The Howard Frankland, the Gandy and the Courtney Campbell are the crossings, and any of them can turn a short drive into an hour with no warning. Dispatch already knows this. The customer in Largo does not.

    So publish the rule. The cities you cross to, the hours you will still take a call over there, and the point in the afternoon where a Clearwater or Dunedin address becomes tomorrow morning. A limit stated in advance costs you nothing. A limit discovered at five costs you the customer and the review that follows.

    If you do not cross, say that plainly too. A shop working Brandon, Riverview and Wesley Chapel that never goes west of the water loses nothing by saying so, and stops booking jobs it quietly cancels an hour later.

    The same post does recruiting work by accident. A technician choosing between two shops wants to know whether his evenings are going to be spent on a bridge.

    In Ybor City the question is where the equipment is allowed to sit

    Old blocks and hundred-year-old houses put a hard limit on where a condenser and an air handler can physically go, and that limit is the content.

    A brick house in Ybor City or a bungalow in Hyde Park often has no attic clearance, no chase to run a line set through, and a front elevation that gets looked at before anything visible changes on it.

    The homeowner's real question is not tonnage. It is whether the new equipment can sit where the old equipment sat, what happens if it cannot, and who ends up deciding.

    Film the walk from the street to wherever the equipment has to end up. The route is the job in these houses, and it explains a price that looks high next to a quote for a subdivision in Riverview.

    Say what you have actually done. A line set run without opening a plaster wall, a closet air handler swapped through a doorway that will not take the crate, an attic nobody above a certain size can work in. Specifics like that are why somebody in South Tampa calls you rather than the first result.

    The ground question arrives attached to a duct question

    West-central Florida sits on water-soluble limestone, and in Hillsborough, Pasco and Hernando counties a settled slab or a tilted pad is an ordinary household worry.

    A customer calling about a return that whistles has often already noticed a door that sticks and a crack across the driveway. Both come up in the same breath, and most contractors dodge the second one entirely.

    You can answer the equipment half plainly. What a pad that has moved does to a line set, why a condenser out of level is a genuine problem, what re-leveling involves, what a slab that has shifted does to duct joints running under it.

    Leave subsidence itself to an engineer who has stood on the property. Saying that out loud, in the same clip, is what makes the equipment answer trustworthy rather than salesy.

    Very little of this has been said plainly anywhere in the market. It is among the most worried-about and least answered things a homeowner here notices, and it costs you one afternoon with a technician who has re-leveled more pads than he can remember.

    Nothing gets filmed inside the MacDill fence line

    Work on a military installation produces no publishable content at all, and planning around that is easier than discovering it at the gate.

    Access to MacDill Air Force Base is credentialed, escorted and slow, and a phone coming out in the wrong place ends more than a video. Treat everything past the gate as unpublishable, and tell the crew before they go rather than after.

    It also means a piece of your best work is invisible. Whatever your people do out there stays out there, so the feed has to be built from the rest of the schedule, and a shop leaning heavily on base work can find it has very little to show.

    The households are reachable off base, and they are worth one specific piece of writing: what happens to a service agreement when a family transfers. Say whether it moves with them, whether it can be handed to whoever takes the house, and what a deployment does to a scheduled visit. Almost nobody states it, and it gets asked constantly.

    Everything else, what to film, who should hold the camera and what to do with a post that works, holds in any market, so it lives on our HVAC social media page instead of being restated here.

    Questions we get

    Can we film a job on MacDill Air Force Base?
    Assume no. Access is credentialed and escorted, photography past the gate is not yours to authorize, and the consequences of getting it wrong reach further than a deleted post. Plan the content calendar off the rest of the schedule and treat base work as revenue that never appears in the feed.
    Should we say in public that we stop crossing the bay at a certain hour?
    Yes. A limit stated up front reads as competence, and a limit discovered at five in the afternoon by somebody waiting in Palm Harbor reads as a broken promise. Publish the cities you cross to and the cutoff. You will lose a few calls you were going to cancel anyway and keep the ones you can actually run.
    A customer asked on camera whether her tilted pad means a sinkhole. How do we answer?
    Answer the equipment and stop there. What a pad that has moved does to the line set and the connections is your question. Whether the ground under a specific address is moving belongs to an engineer who has been to the property, and saying that in the clip is better for you than a guess either way.
    What should we tell a family transferring out about their service agreement?
    Whatever is actually true, in writing, on a page you can point to. Whether the remaining months transfer to the buyer or the next tenant, whether anything is refundable, and how a visit gets rescheduled around a deployment. Households around MacDill move often enough that a clear answer travels between them faster than any post you could pay for.
    A customer asked why the same changeout costs more in Hyde Park than in Riverview. Is that a post?
    It is one of the better ones you can make. Film the access rather than the price: the doorway the equipment will not fit through, the attic with no room to stand, the wall that cannot be opened. People with old houses already suspect their house is the reason and appreciate somebody showing them why.

    Rules that affect your marketing

    Florida requires a contractor's license number to appear in advertising, which includes a website and paid search creative. Efficiency and savings claims are substantiation claims: they should trace to an equipment rating or a published program rather than being asserted, and finance offers bring their own disclosure obligations.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

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