In July the heat does the selling. In October nobody does, and the dispatch board shows it. Four technicians who each need forty hours are looking at gaps, and the calls that do come in are mostly people comparing prices on a tune-up.
That’s the shoulder season, the stretch between cooling and the first hard freeze. HVAC marketing for those weeks is a different job from the summer rush, because the work has to be invited. We’d start with the customers you already have, not new ones.
What a slow October costs
The visible cost is payroll without matching revenue. A technician in the shop still gets paid, and the van payment doesn’t care whether the van leaves the lot. Cut hours and a good technician starts looking elsewhere, and replacing him before January is harder than keeping him busy now.
The cost that shows up in winter is quieter. A furnace nobody looked at in the fall is the one that fails on the first cold night, and that homeowner calls whoever they find first. If your technician was in their basement in October, there’s a fair chance it’s you.
Homeowners are also choosy about what they spend on. Angi’s 2025 State of Home Spending Pulse Report found that 71% of homeowners had postponed a planned home project that year, and 71% said they were prioritizing preventative maintenance to avoid larger bills later. That was 1,000 U.S. homeowners in April 2025, across every kind of home project and not only heating and cooling, so read it as a mood and not a forecast for your town. The mood is still useful. Big projects get put off and small preventative ones are welcome, and a heating check is a small preventative one.
Before choosing any tactic, decide what these weeks have to do. Fill forty hours for four technicians? Add maintenance plan members? Start the replacement conversations that get decided in winter? Those goals overlap, and each one calls for different marketing.
Start HVAC marketing with the customers you already have
A stranger has to notice you, trust you, and then book. A past customer has already done the first two. So the customer list is where we’d look first when the board has gaps, before spending a dollar on reaching new people.
Say a heating and cooling company in Hatfield has several hundred customers who had service in the last three years and haven’t booked a heating check since last fall. A plain email could say: “It’s getting cooler. We have heating check openings over the next two weeks. Reply YES and we’ll get you on the schedule.” No design work, no coupon. You’re offering convenience at the right moment.
The steps fit in an afternoon:
- Export customers served in the last three years with no heating inspection since last fall.
- Send one email, and one text where the customer has agreed to receive texts.
- Send a single reminder a week later to anyone who didn’t answer.
- Have someone they know phone the customers you’ve served longest.
On texting, consent comes first. What counts as valid consent is a question for your attorney, so have your list and your sign-up wording in front of them before you send anything. Settle who answers replies, and make sure you have open slots to honor the offer.
Sell the plan, not just the tune-up
A tune-up can be a tune-up, which fills a Tuesday. It can also be the first visit under a maintenance agreement that fills a day next April and next October. The fall visit should be presented differently depending on which you want.
Plan members are the customers most likely to call you first when something fails, and they’ve met your technicians before any large decision arrives. Some of those decisions are waiting. ServiceTitan’s recap of its Fall 2025 Benchmark Report lists HVAC replacement among the projects homeowners delayed, at 14%, despite that summer’s heatwaves. ServiceTitan sells software to contractors and the recap doesn’t say how the figure was gathered, so treat it as an indication. The reasoning holds either way. A system that was old in July is older in January.
Imagine a Newtown homeowner who put off replacing a furnace. When the question returns in winter, the company that inspected it in the fall can show photos of what it found.
Check how easy the plan is to buy. Is it on your website with a price and a way to sign up, or one line in a paragraph? If you have no plan yet, keep it simple: two visits a year, priority scheduling, and a discount on repairs.
Make your profile and website say “heating”
Searches change with the weather. In late September, people in the Lehigh Valley aren’t looking for AC repair. They want furnace tune-ups, heating inspections and heat pump service. If your Google Business Profile and homepage still lead with air conditioning, you’re answering last season’s question.
Google doesn’t publish a seasonal checklist, so this is our application of what its help pages say. In its tips to improve your local ranking, Google describes relevance as how well a profile matches what someone is searching for, and says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up. More reviews and positive ratings can help, and there is no way to request or pay for a better ranking. In the fall that means:
- Services on your profile that include heating tune-ups, furnace repair, heat pump maintenance, and boiler service if you do it.
- A post about fall inspection openings, with a photo from a job this month.
- A homepage whose first line is about heating, not cooling.
- A few review requests to recent happy customers, and replies to the ones you get.
Our guide on how to rank in the Google Map Pack covers the wider method. Nobody outside Google controls where you appear, but you control whether the information is accurate and current.
The slow weeks are also when to write the pages summer left no time for: heat pumps, financing a furnace replacement, and the towns you serve from Lansdale to Bethlehem. Search visibility builds slower than ads, so a page published now has time to be found before spring. We can’t say where it will rank.
A small Google Ads campaign for heating tune-ups
Paid ads fit the shoulder season when the offer, the area and the budget are clear. Someone searching for a furnace tune-up in October is planning ahead. Someone searching in January with no heat is in a hurry, and every HVAC company nearby wants that call. Click prices differ between the two, and your own account will show what each costs where you work.
A homepage still talking about air conditioning wastes the click. A fall campaign works better when it’s narrow:
- One campaign for one service, within the ten to fifteen miles around your shop that you can serve profitably.
- A short list of heating maintenance searches, with anything mentioning air conditioning paused.
- A page built for that search, with one offer, one price and one phone number that’s easy to tap.
Set a daily budget you’re comfortable with for a month and decide beforehand what would make it worth repeating. Each week, review the searches that triggered the ads and exclude parts, do-it-yourself repairs and jobs. Our lead generation campaign examples for home service providers show a few ways to structure this, and our page on digital marketing for HVAC companies explains how we work with heating and cooling businesses.
Some of this is out of anyone’s hands. An early cold snap can fill the board with no marketing at all, and a long mild fall can stretch the gap. The first year, a plan like this will probably fill some gaps and not all, because a maintenance base builds over several seasons. We can’t promise bookings or a date the board fills. We’d need your customer list, photos from real jobs, and word on which calls became plan members and which were price shopping. If you’re wondering how ongoing work fits a monthly budget, our guide to marketing packages for HVAC businesses walks through it.
Send the first email
The work belongs in late September, when everyone is tired from summer, so keep the job small. This week, export the customers with no heating check since last fall and send them one email. It takes about an hour and costs nothing if you already have an email tool.
Then tell us how many hours you need to fill and what you’ve tried in past years. We’ll look at your profile, your website and how you stay in touch with past customers, and tell you what we’d do and why. Your first consultation is free.