Are you new to the solar industry and looking for solar marketing strategies to stand out in the market? Then you have come to the right place.
The future of the solar industry is bright. With lower electricity bills, government subsidies, and minimal to no carbon emissions, both residential homes and commercial businesses across the U.S. are switching to photovoltaics and solar power energy.
In fact, according to an official report from NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory), only solar power will account for 45% of the nation’s electricity generation and home lighting in the next 30 years. But this also comes with a particular condition: the solar energy system needs to be fully decarbonized.
Furthermore, every solar company guarantees their customers the best solar services. So, have you ever given up the thought of what would set you apart from them?
Well, the answer is just right in front of you – the right solar marketing. To unlock the full potential of the solar business, companies need to include certain marketing strategies that can help them reach their potential target audience and make the most of it.
In this beginner’s guide to solar marketing, we will share the best tried and tested solar marketing strategies that will aid you in reaching your prospective customers especially if you are a rookie and generating revenue for your business.
So, let’s dive into them!
Table of Contents
Targeting the solar market: how to do it?
Marketing is the foundation of any successful solar business or brand. With the right solar marketing, you can get results fast and effectively. However, before you start your journey down this road, it is important to know the basics of solar marketing:
Define your target audience
The first step in any solar marketing strategy is to define your target audience.
- Who are the people or businesses that are most likely to be interested in your solar products or services?
- What are their needs and pain points?
- What are their demographics?
Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, you can tailor your marketing message and choose the right marketing channels to reach them and convert them into sales.
Understand your target market
Next comes the targeted regions. You just can’t make an effort in random directions. You need to understand who your target market is. This can include homeowners or residential regions, businesses or commercial areas, and government entities. Each of these groups has different needs and preferences, so you need to tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.
Know your competitors
Having a competitor analysis helps you understand the gap between what other solar companies are already offering and what they are not. Knowing these two parameters will enable you to assist your customers in finding what they are looking for at competitive prices and services. Moreover, in the early stages of establishing your solar company, you can avoid making the mistakes your rivals made. Thus, it helps prevent wasting your efforts, time, and resources.
Create a strong brand identity
In a crowded market like solar, it’s important to differentiate yourself from the competition. Creating a strong brand identity can help you stand out and build trust with potential customers. This includes developing a compelling brand story, creating logo and tagline using a professional logo maker, and using consistent branding across all your marketing channels. When you create a logo that resonates with your target audience, it becomes a powerful symbol of your brand’s values and offerings, helping to solidify your place in the market.
So, the above are the foundations of any solar marketing. Now that you have an in-depth analysis of all four, we will move forward to the best tried and proven solar marketing strategies that will help you take your solar business to the sky. Additionally, exploring tools such as an AI logo generator can aid in refining your brand identity, allowing you to craft a logo that authentically represents your solar company while appealing to your target market.
Best solar marketing strategies: learn how to generate solar leads online!
We live in a digital age. This means that everything from searching for the right kind of product or service to actually enrolling in one is taking place online. This applies to solar businesses too. Therefore, it is imperative to implement the right kind of online marketing strategy to reach out to your prospective customers and generate revenue for your business.
Here, we will share 3 powerful solar marketing techniques that you can take advantage of and can actually turn your potential clients into loyal customers.
Let’s get started!
SEO and Content Marketing
The terms SEO and Content Marketing go hand in hand. SEO, also known as search engine optimization, is the practice of optimizing your website in such a way that it ranks higher in search engine results pages.
As an example, when a customer looking for “solar panel services in San Francisco” types in the Google search bar, your website appears at the top of the search results. It then increases the likelihood of someone clicking on your webpage, which is also known as the CTR (Click Through Ratio) in SEO. This way, you drive more traffic to your site organically, which increases your site’s visibility online.
However, optimizing your website consists of a whole bunch of practices, which include keyword research, creating high-quality content (a part of content marketing), building high-quality backlinks from other authentic websites, local listings, proper interlinking between web pages, and more.
Let’s discuss SEO solar marketing strategies one by one.
Read More- 10 Proven Methods to Generating Solar Leads in New York
Keyword Research
The foremost effective step to any solar SEO strategy is proper keyword research. It will help you determine what kind of keywords people are using to find solar services like the one your company can offer.
For that, you can use different online tools available online, such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, or Ahrefs, that can give you helpful insights based on the search volume, competition, user intent, ranking, and difficulty level.
Another way of doing keyword research is to put yourself in the shoes of customers and try to think about what you would type if you were looking for solar services.
Local SEO
Do you know that 50% of mobile users and 34% of tablet and computer users who have conducted local searches for a particular service are more likely to contact you? All of these statistics are taken directly from Search Engine Watch’s report.
In the present time, building a Google Business Profile and optimizing it as per the local service area is crucial for an effective SEO strategy. For instance, fill in your website name, working hours, contact number, and address. This way customers looking for solar services in nearby areas might contact you.
Build a professional website
Your website is often the first point of contact between your business and potential solar customers. It’s essential to have a website that is easy to navigate, visually appealing, and provides all the information that your customers need to make an informed decision. This includes information about your products or services, pricing, financing options, and customer testimonials.
Creating high-quality content
Do you know that, as per a Statista report of search rankings, 24.6% of SEO professionals globally accept that well-researched, high-quality content is the major parameter for the success of an SEO strategy?
The best way you can integrate this practice into your solar marketing strategy is by creating high-quality landing pages that promote your services and products. While designing one, make sure it is relevant to your targeted audience and contains all the information that your customers are looking for.
You can also include an FAQ section, which answers the most frequently asked questions. This way, you can save a lot of time for you and your customers.
On-page Optimizations
By knowing the fundamentals of keyword research, you have already taken a step toward on-page optimization. However, now is the time to integrate those keywords. Here is a piece of advice. While integrating the researched keywords into your blog or article, make sure that they come naturally into your phrases. And not forcefully, which in SEO is called “keyword stuffing.” This is considered bad from a search engine’s perspective.
There are some other practices included, such as title tags (the recommended length is 50–70 characters), meta descriptions (which appear beneath the title in search results and have a recommended length of between 50–160 characters), URL slugs, and additional metadata.
So, these are all the SEO practices that solar companies can implement to establish their business in the market. However, this kind of strategy takes a lot of time to produce results. It is ideal only for companies that are limited in their budget and resources but have ample time.
But if you are willing to spend on solar marketing services, then the next solar marketing strategy is just right for you.
Harness the power of social media
Today, social media is the most powerful marketing tool to reach out to your probable customers and generate solar leads. There are 302 million social media users in the United States alone, with 90% actively using it. However, the key over here is posting quality content, including posts, reels, or going live on major popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others. And let your audience engage in some meaningful conversation and raise awareness about your brand.
You can fully utilize social media as part of your solar marketing strategy by following the steps below.
Identify the right platform
Before you start directly promoting your solar services on social media, it is important to first know which platform will work best for you.
As an example,
- Facebook has a wider audience in terms of demographics,
- Instagram has a more youth-based and creative audience,
- TikTok again has popularity among a wide age range of people,
- YouTube has a wide age range audience and is a dedicated video-based platform,
- and Linkedin, Reddit, or Quora have a separate audience base where people are more professional and more inclined to answer the questions asked.
Now, all these platforms have a wide range of untapped potential that can be used as a way to raise awareness regarding your solar services and thus generate leads.
Create platform-specific content
Once you have decided how you are going to use these platforms, the next step is content creation accordingly. This is the most important part, where you need to unleash your creativity. Create content that appeals to your audience and not for the sake of numbers.
For example, you can make solar educational videos on YouTube, listicle posts on Instagram, a lengthy blog post on Facebook, or Linkedin, and a variety of other things. Initially, creating content could take time, but don’t worry, be consistent, and always focus on quality over quantity.
Join social media groups
With rising global temperatures and deteriorating environmental conditions, more people are opting for a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. Sustainability and a preference for renewable energy sources have become hotly debated topics among many groups.
In fact, you can find different educational groups on different platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn talking about the latest innovations in the solar industry. To promote your services, you can become a part of such groups and educate people there, as well as get yourself updated with the current trends.
Connect your website to all your social media accounts
If you have a solar website, then connect it to all the social media handles. This way, you won’t only generate organic leads but also open the door to providing more valuable information to your visitors or readers. Here, they can learn about the services or products you are willing to offer. If they find everything suitable as per their requirements, they might proceed with it further, which would result in generating qualified solar leads.
In our eyes, social media is the best organic solar marketing approach for solar companies that are looking for qualified lead generation. Here, you can reach out to your audience in the most simplest way. At the same time, your potential customers can connect with you and ask any questions related to solar services. Furthermore, companies don’t need to spend a lot of money on additional marketing strategies if they know how to use them properly.
Invest in paid ads
Well, we have already discussed the organic solar marketing strategy via SEO and social media. Although both of these methods can guarantee solar leads, they both require a significant amount of work, and no one can guarantee the timing.
However, if you have the money to spend and want to get faster results, then investing in paid ads can be the best route to take. These ads are further categorized into the following categories:
Google paid search ads
You may pay to appear in front of clients who are actively looking for companies just like yours by using sponsored search advertisements. Google, for instance, is the most commonly utilized online search tool. So, for example, people are actively looking for your services when they type “solar panel installers in Texas” into a search engine. Because of their “strong intent,” these leads will probably convert at a considerably greater rate, making them worthwhile to invest in. Google is aware of this and provides Google Ads and services to assist you in getting there.
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a highly effective way to reach potential customers who are actively searching for solar products or services online. By creating targeted ads on search engines like Google and Bing, you can attract highly qualified leads to your website. This includes creating compelling ad copy, targeting specific keywords and phrases, and optimizing your landing pages for conversions.
Paid social ads
Nowadays, so many ads are running across every social media platform that, at some point, it seems like a regular post that catches no attention. Or you can call it ‘advertisement blindness”. This means our brain is not able to locate them, as there is nothing unique or different about them. This is why it is important to personalize the advertising experience.
Read More- How a Reliable Solar Lead Source Can Reduce Your Cost Per Action
Personalize social media ads
Personalizing social ads depends on a lot of factors; for example,
- the platform these ads will be running on will differ, as the ad running on Instagram (a platform for creative things) won’t be the same as the ad running on Linkedin (a forum for professional talks).
- the demographics, which include age, cultural aspect, gender difference, and financial independence.
- display it to the appropriate audience; for example, disabling solar ads for people looking for refrigerators is illogical.
Facebook ads
Facebook’s Ads Manager helps you manage your complete solar ad campaign from a single location if you’re curious as to how to sell solar on the social media site. To guarantee you don’t pay more than you can afford, Ads Manager offers comprehensive tools to help you choose your target, define goals, develop advertising, and establish precise budgets and schedules.
Twitter ads
Twitter is exceptional in that many trends have their start there before spreading to other platforms. This benefit is leveraged by Twitter’s ad platform, which lets you have a chance to engage people at the beginning of fads and events. More than 25 product alternatives are available on Twitter for you to exhibit your goods or services.
The platform also offers strong targeting features to assist you in making an impression on the people who matter most. Moreover, Twitter’s robust analytics tools let you see how your ad campaign’s impressions, interactions, and cost per result perform overall.
Linkedin ads
According to LinkedIn, it is the best medium for generating leads between businesses. LinkedIn is a fantastic way to promote if you’re aiming to reach companies or professionals. Using LinkedIn for B2C interaction might be problematic because it has the most costly advertisements on this list.
Best solar marketing strategies: learn how to generate solar leads offline!
Besides the aforementioned online solar marketing strategies, there are some offline approaches too that can yield fruitful solar leads. Here are the following:
Host events and webinars
Hosting events and webinars can be a great way to engage with potential customers and showcase your solar products or services. This includes hosting open houses, attending trade shows, and offering webinars on topics like solar panel installation, financing options, and the benefits of solar energy.
Offer financing options
Many homeowners and businesses may be interested in solar energy, but may not have the upfront capital to invest in a solar installation. By offering financing options like leases and loans, you can make solar energy more accessible and affordable for a wider range of customers.
Leverage email marketing
Email marketing can be a cost-effective way to reach out to potential customers and keep existing customers informed about your products and services. This includes creating an email list of subscribers, sending out newsletters and promotional offers, and segmenting your list to target specific groups of customers.
Use video marketing
Video marketing can be a highly effective way to showcase your solar products or services. By creating engaging and informative videos, you can demonstrate the benefits of solar energy and build trust with potential customers. This includes creating product demos, customer testimonials, and educational videos about the benefits of solar energy.
Online or Offline: Convert your visitors into your prospective solar customers
We have shared all of the necessary solar marketing strategies to generate qualified solar leads, from going door-to-door pitching your solar services to customers to directly promoting your solar services online.
However, you need to understand that creating a presence for your solar business in such a crowded market takes time. You need to be consistent and persistent in your solar marketing efforts. Also, choosing the right platform at the right time for promoting your services is key. As an example, you can go for the social media strategy first, and once you have a robust platform, you can go for the SEO strategy.
Furthermore, if you want to hire a solar marketing company that can handle all your social media accounts and website work, you can also opt for them.
Having said that, we are taking a break now.
If you have any questions or doubts, please leave them in the comments section below or contact us directly. We would be glad to assist you.
