Being in the business of lead generation and with experience in HVAC marketing, AbsolutelyDominate set out to conquer the hottest state by average temperature in the United States. By conquer, our aim was to target the top most populous cities within the state of Florida, building HVAC websites for each major city, rank the sites high within the search engines, convert website visitors into qualified leads, and then sell these leads to HVAC companies within the respective cities.
With Florida being the warmest state on average and also boasting many large cities, the market appeared to be most competitive, but also the most rewarding. The targeted cities included Miami, Tallahassee, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Jacksonville, St Petersburg, Largo and Clearwater..
The strategy resulted in AbsolutelyDominate achieving dominant first page rankings for most of the major cities in Florida. Our strong positioning opened the door to relationships with HVAC companies interested in purchasing the leads our sites generated. Also, the seamless passing of leads directly to their call centers allowed our partners to easily manage the incoming leads without delay thus providing a great customer experience.
Our strategy proved successful as we achieved dominant rankings in the top cities of what is considered to be the most competitive state for HVAC businesses. We knew if we could compete in Florida, we could compete anywhere. Our attraction to service related business grew as we experienced more success in the realm of home service marketing. Even with our great success in Florida, we ultimately determined the pay-per-lead model, while successful financially did have a logistical downside. As part of our commitment to our partners, our team would listen to each and every call generated, marking leads and categorizing them – then billing accordingly. This billing and invoicing system had to be implemented manually. Collection of payments from partners and accounting proved to be another challenge in regards to time and accounting.
With growing success and less logistical challenges on the agency-to-client side of the business, our team ultimately decided to fully focus on our passion of helping companies directly. The pay per lead model simply wasn’t what we wanted to do long term. Though our expansion was being planned in other states, we felt confident in the direction we wanted to go. Over time we eventually liquidated our assets in Florida, effectively phasing out the pay-per-lead model and fully focused on helping business owners directly.
This direction proved to be successful, but the knowledge and confidence we gained from “conquering Florida” – the hottest and most competitive state for HVAC helped shape our strategies and business development goals giving us even more ability to help our clients succeed!
