Solar energy’s sustainability solutions have made businesses understand its importance. Solar companies facing fierce competition as more business realize the importance of cost-efficient services and fewer carbon footprints. Solar enterprises must implement powerful solar marketing strategies to stand out and perform better marketing campaigns.
The global market size of solar energy companies 2022 is valued at around $90.4 billion. By 2030, it is expected to grow to $215.9 billion, with a growth rate of roughly around 11.5% from 2023 to 2030. These stats show the potential growth in the solar industry, and it is the right time for solar companies to amplify their business.
Here are a few tried and tested marketing strategies for solar companies that work. It offers everything, from digital marketing strategies to targeted ads through physical sales campaigns for targeted lead conversions and maximize sales.
Before getting into the strategies, understand the key elements to consider in the marketing campaigns.
Key Points to Consider for Successful Marketing Strategies for Solar Companies
1. Know Your Business
Before beginning with the marketing strategies, know your brand well. You cannot promote your product, which you are unaware of. Implement the following points:
- Recognize why your brand is unique
- What are your business values?
- How do you wish to be perceived by the potential prospects?
Your business can create better services and perform enhanced sales operations with all these analyses.
2. Understand Your Target Clients:
- Recognize the client’s business and industry trends
- Identify the clients requirements
- Know the clients business’s KPIs and goals
3. Well-Defined Value Proposition:
Solar companies must communicate brief tangible benefits and results their clients can expect while using their solar products.
4. Unique Selling Proposition (USP):
The unique benefits of the solar product offered to their clients are the highlights of their USP, which helps them stand out from their competition.
It defines why your business is better than others and how your products will enhance their business with sustainable solutions.
With this analysis, USP approaches prospects and persuades them to convert them into clients.
5. Focus On Quality Lead Generation:
- “Quality matters more than quantity.” For successful lead generation, focus on generating quality leads instead of low-quality and huge ones.
- It allows your business resources to focus on nurturing and converting good-quality leads.
- This approach helps your business achieve better conversion rates and higher revenue.
6. Use of an Accurate Blend of Marketing Mediums:
Using your solar business’s historical marketing data, you can use the right mix of marketing mediums instead of implementing all the strategies that drain your valuable time.
Accurate and effective blends of marketing approaches will help your solar business achieve its sales forecast targets.
It also aids in optimum budget allotment for each marketing channel and predicts the potential for success of your marketing approach.
Solar Energy Marketing Plan – How Do You Get Solar Leads Online?
Following are a few powerful solar energy marketing plans to maximize their brand visibility and perform result-yielding tactics:
1. SEO for the Solar Industry:
SEO is the most basic yet effective way to generate organic leads by optimizing your solar business’s website.
Implement:
- Relevant high-ranking keywords
- Utilize link-building with relevant solar business sites
- Share business insights through blogs
- Ensure your site loads faster
- Most importantly, make the site user-friendly
The above-mentioned are very few SEO strategies; there are other tactics that you can make use.
2. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads for Solar Panels Leads
PPC ads can be a solution for solar businesses that aim for quick results. They help companies rank their websites on top of SERPs, increase brand awareness, and enhance conversions effectively.
To perform an effective PPC ad, solar businesses have to create a PPC campaign using Google ads. Targeting the right keywords, developing persuasive ad copy, and using visually appealing images are necessary.
3. Use LinkedIn to Generate Solar Leads
LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for generating high-quality leads. A LinkedIn profile has become essential for businesses aiming for lead conversions and increasing brand reach.
Following are a few tactics of LinkedIn to generate solar company leads:
- Optimize the business LinkedIn profile
- Connect on LinkedIn Groups related to your industry
- Build professional connections with industry experts
4. Email Marketing for Solar Companies
Email marketing allows solar businesses to communicate directly with potential clients by creating customized email campaigns. With this approach, they can promote or market their products to nurture leads and turn them into clienteles.
Create short, personalized, engaging, and tied-to-benefit messages to run your informative email campaign. The campaign will be more effective when the client understands the value your business is offering.
5. Referral Marketing
A referral marketing will help companies to bring in new prospects, get instant visibility from the place of referrals, and enhance their business growth.
Implementing this approach can help them acquire targeted prospects through the benefit of word-of-mouth. To perform this strategy, create an impactful solar referral campaign and endorse it regularly.
To increase your business’s reach, implement discount referrals, incentivized referrals (referred by existing clients who are happy with the product), and community referrals.
6. Content Marketing
Content marketing is a sustainable and cost-effective marketing strategy. Solar companies can implement it to leverage its features, such as establishing expertise, promoting their brand awareness, and optimizing their business.
Create, attract, and engage new clients and retain old ones by developing and sharing relevant content. It can be relevant to your industry articles, videos, podcasts, and other social media channels.
7. Examine Your Solar Industry Market
Market analysis allows the solar industries to make marketing decisions like:
- What solar product to offer?
- How much to charge them?
- And which prospect is most likely to buy it?
From the above analysis, solar industries can better determine their clients’ needs. Solar companies must conduct surveys and interviews or focus on relevant groups to perform this approach.
It also helps track leads’ satisfaction levels and detect areas for improvement, allowing enhanced solutions to be offered.
8. Connect With Target Clients And Industry Professionals:
A solar company can offer services to many industries that are aiming for sustainability in their businesses like:
- Commercial Real Estate
- Hospitality
- Manufacturing
- Retails
Thus, by targeting these industries via email lists, they can run an effective multi-channel marketing campaign for their business.
Many agriculture and farming organizations are considering operating their business sustainably and reducing dependence on electricity. Solar companies can reach out to the decision-makers in the agriculture industry to fulfil their requirements with appropriate solutions.
9. Building Trust and Credibility
Trust and credibility are essential factors for any business to reassure its prospects.
Create a strong portfolio highlighting your business’s testimonials, reviews, case studies, and many other sources that add credibility to your business. This will create a sense of trust and the clients might consider approaching your business to obtain your product.
10. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
CRO helps businesses that have visitors but needs to make a purchase. The reason can be the brand’s website design and other technicalities. CRO aids in modifying these tech issues to boost revenues. It aids in refining the possibility of leads taking their desired action on that site page.
CRO acts as a catalyst that combines data-driven information, forecast analysis, and automation intelligence to enable solar companies to increase their conversions.
11. Traditional Marketing Techniques for Solar Companies
Even though online marketing dominates the marketing realm, traditional marketing still holds an important place in comprehensive sales strategy. Solar businesses must recognize the value that traditional marketing strategies offer.
A few examples of traditional marketing for solar lead generation are:
- Merchandise marketing
- Direct mail
- Brochure
- Trade shows
- Mail Books
- Press release
- Pamphlets
- Vouchers
- Billboards
Benefits of Marketing Solar Business
Following are some of the benefits of marketing solar products:
- Boost in Sales: Developing marketing strategies for solar companies can increase sales of solar products.
- Increased ROI: Solar businesses can track the ROI and campaign results by marketing solar products. Using these insights, companies can change to their campaigns to ensure maximum conversions and success.
- Greater Engagement: A well-aligned marketing strategy for solar companies allows their business to better engage with their leads, promoting lasting connections with them.
- Build Brand Awareness: With content marketing and email marketing strategies, solar companies can reach wider prospects and creates a more recognized brand.
Case Study:
Consider a simple tree solar marketing case study that generated 88 commercial solar leads in three months.
About The Client:
- A commercial solar company operating across multiple states in the southwest.
- It offers solar services to schools, small-medium businesses, churches, municipalities, and non-profits.
- The client business offers an average customer life value of $500,000.
Challenge:
This solar client solely depended on in-person marketing and cold-calling to market their services and products. The firm needed to learn how to use digital marketing to run its sales campaigns, and its business website required visibility on search engines.
Though the client manufactured excellent solar products, they needed digital strategies like gathering online reviews, client data, discounts, and incentives, which caused challenges in acquiring commercial solar jobs in certain areas. They needed to be made aware to the use of solar marketing tools.
Objective:
Simple Tree wanted to analyze whether Facebook ads generate profitable solar leads.
Solution:Â
Simple Tree performed a 6-step formula to curate a suitable solution to generate leads from Facebook ads.
- First, Simple Tree interviewed the client to understand their target market for high electric use; schools, non-profits, institutions, and businesses. They could analyze that working with churches could be the ideal solution.
- Simple Tree developed marketing collaterals like FAQs, lead video testimonials, case studies, and landing pages for the client’s solar business.
- Simple Tree used a hyper-specific interest strategy to generate B2B solar leads with targeted messaging. Their aim was to use this strategy to enhance new Facebook pixels, maximize the client’s conversion data, and create lookalike leads for the future.
- They tested the lead form and landing page to understand which strategy would perform better and aid in optimum lead generation. A simple tree identified that using long ad copy to tell a story to the prospecting lead would be more powerful and offer credibility.
- They used emojis and questions to understand pain points, called out potential prospects, and highlighted how their client helped small businesses save money.
- Simple Tree also created a system that aided in continued Lead nurturing and Follow-up to maintain the clients.
Result:
The client gained the following benefits with this solar lead generation campaign:
- Simple Tree generated 88 leads in just 3 months, with an average ad cost of $20 per day.
- The average CPL(Cost Per Lead) was $24
- The client gained relevance scores of 9s and 10s.
- The campaign invested $1 million in new revenue and three closed installs.
- The client spent $2,136 on ads.
- The success of the campaign encouraged the client to hire a new salesperson.
- The client considered implementing a CRM system to help them track their expanding sales pipeline.
Getting leads has become challenging in a competitive industry, especially solar company businesses. Solar companies must adapt to rising market trends and create diverse lead generation sources to stand out and stay ahead.
Conclusion:
The growing demand for sustainable businesses has boosted the solar energy industry’s requirements. However, high competition has also made it hard for companies in this industry to stand out.
However, with effective and successful marketing strategies for the solar company mentioned above, you can create impactful marketing campaigns that will aid you in increasing your business reach.
Remember, in the outlined marketing strategies, include content representing your brand and speaking directly to your potential prospect’s needs. Use SEO and LinkedIn to optimize your business, generate more leads, and increase your organization’s profits. An effective and powerful strategy in place will increase the chances of your solar business thriving in the market.