About us
Because great service doesn't matter if homeowners can't find you.
And how they find you changed fast. A year ago, 6% of people used an AI tool to find a local business. Today it is 45%. They ask an assistant who to call, and it answers with one name.
Is it yours?
BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey, 2026. 1,002 US adults.
Our story
Hi, I'm Marilyn Ehm. Before Your Path Marketing, I spent over a decade helping organizations understand what people search for, build content that answers real questions, and grow through digital experience.
Then I watched what was happening to the trades. Private equity buying up local HVAC companies and keeping the hometown names on the trucks. Independent owner-operators, some in business 30 years, becoming invisible online while corporate-owned competitors wearing local branding took their searches.
So I brought big-brand search strategy to the businesses that actually power our communities. For an HVAC company, being found isn't a marketing metric. It's the difference between your phone ringing and your competitor answering.
Who you work with
Mark does the driving. He is the one who walks into a shop on a Tuesday morning and asks for five minutes.
I do the audits, the technical work, and the delivery. When you get a report from us, I wrote it and I can defend every number in it.
And we are not only two people. Behind us is a network of creatives we have worked with for years: videographers and photographers, graphic designers, paid ad specialists. When a job calls for something outside what I do best, I bring in someone who does it for a living rather than learning on your dime.
Fourteen years of content and search work, across about as wide a range of organizations as you can get, all of it run out of Baltimore.
My own research
Then I grew my AI visibility 380% in three months, and that turned out to be worth far more. Here is why.
Before I sold anyone on this, I tested it on my own company. I ran it on my other practice, YPM Studio.
Last year, twelve searches put my site in Google's top five. Real searches, from people shopping for exactly what I sell. Google showed my site 662 times on those twelve searches, and not one person clicked.
That was not a ranking problem. Second place should not produce zero calls.
Here is the part that surprised me:
| The searches that… | Where I ranked | Visitors they sent |
|---|---|---|
| Sent nobody at all | 3rd | 0 |
| Actually sent someone | 13th | all of them |
The better I ranked, the fewer visitors I got. That was backwards from how search had worked for twenty years.
ChatGPT and Google's AI were answering the question and naming my company inside the answer. People got what they needed without ever visiting the site.
It is called zero-click search, and it is now most of how search works.
I stopped chasing clicks and started chasing the answer.
| Over the same three months | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| My site's appearances inside AI answers, per day | about 25 | about 120 |
| AI tools as a source of visitors to my site | not a source at all | 3rd largest |
| Twelve-month retainers signed by visitors from AI tools | none | one |
That last row mattered most. The 27 visitors who came from AI tools produced the largest contract in my pipeline. The 202 who came from ordinary search produced none.
Ranking on page one is no longer the finish line. Being named inside the answer is.
Most of what I do now is built on that finding, and the reason I can charge for it is that I measured it before I sold it.
Verified August 2026. AI answers shift, so check it yourself.
Ask ChatGPT what the best Catholic K-8 school in Baltimore is. The School of the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen comes back first.
That is a client of three years through YPM Studio, a separate practice serving private schools, and the full case study is published there. Your Path Marketing works with HVAC companies only. Same person, same methods, different clients. I mention it because the HVAC-only claim holds only if I tell you where the rest of my time goes.
I will not promise you rankings. Nobody can, and anyone who does is selling you something. What I will tell you is exactly where you stand today and exactly what I would do about it.
But when a homeowner's AC stops working, they aren't calling the company they've never heard of. They're searching.
And the companies that show up first have the opportunity to earn the job. That's where we come in.
What we stand for
The best company doesn't always win. The easiest company to find often does.
You shouldn't need a massive marketing department to compete online. You deserve a strategy built with real care and expertise.
You have technicians to manage, customers to serve, and a business to run. Your partner should make growth simpler, not harder.
We work exclusively with independent owner-operators. One per service area. There are only so many top-three spots in a map pack, so taking two shops in the same towns would mean one of you paying us to lose.
Our approach
Every HVAC company is different. Your market, your competitors, and your customers are different. That's why we don't believe in cookie-cutter marketing packages.
And we keep the roster small on purpose, so your account gets senior attention every month it runs.
What you don't need
"When someone needs HVAC help in my area, can they find me?"
We help answer that question.
Find out where your HVAC company stands today and discover the opportunities you're missing.