More people are becoming aware of renewable energy systems and the demand for solar products is also growing. However, this doesn’t mean that your solar business will also start growing automatically. This is because the competition is also stiff. It doesn’t matter how good your products or services are, if you cannot promote your solar business with the necessary marketing strategies, your business will have a hard time growing. This article has listed down key marketing strategies for a solar business that can definitely help you make a big shift in the growth of your business. These strategies are:
1) Make These Changes to Your Website
Setting up a basic static or dynamic website for your solar business is very simple and most business owners are under the impression that once their website is developed, it will start giving them leads but this belief is far from reality. If your website receives 100 monthly visitors but only 4 of those visitors make phone or email contact with your company, then your website’s conversion rate is a meager 4%. Hence it is important for you to increase this percentage because the more the conversion rate the higher will be the business profits. Some simple ways to increase your conversion rates are as follows:
a) Have a quick consultation booking option on your website.
b) A call-to-action phone number should be prominently displayed on the homepage of your business website.
c) Website should be mobile device optimized to ensure that when clients access the website on their mobile devices, they shouldn’t face any problems.
d) Website should be lightning-fast in its loading time as it helps in reducing the bounce rate of users.
e) Success stories, awards, recognition, media coverage, and testimonials need to be highlighted on your website to foster greater trust.
2) Capture Targeted Search Engine Traffic
Do you know that the top 3 results get up to 75% of the search traffic, so if your solar website does not appear on the first page of Google it won’t receive much traffic (i.e. visitors)? You must therefore look for techniques to get your website into the top 10 Google rankings. However, a lot of factors must be taken into account to achieve such rankings, which is popularly known as “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). There is no scarcity of free online resources from where you can learn more about SEO. Most of them are readily available on YouTube and popular blogging sites. Contracting out the work to any SEO agency is also a secure option for improving the overall SEO of your website and consequently getting high-quality leads due to improved visibility of your website on Google.
3) Start Posting Solar-Related Content Frequently
The more content you publish on your website, the more frequently search engines will index your website for a variety of keywords, and this in turn will lead to more visitors and sales for your solar business. This explains why posting content regularly is so important for your company. To begin with content marketing, you can start researching different topics and questions associated with solar business and must start creating blog posts on these topics. By doing so consistently, you will be able to see a significant rise in search engine traffic to your website after a few months.
4) Show Up For Local Searches on Google’s Local Listing
The majority of local searches performed on Google return results that include listings taken from “Google Business Profile” or “Google My Business (GMB)”. This is why you must also make a GMB page for your solar business. You need to make sure that the Google Business Profile page that you build has all the relevant information filled in, such as the company name, opening hours, address, phone number, etc. These results that you put up on your GMB page are presented not just in the search results on Google but also on Google maps. Since Google My Business offers a new marketing channel for the growth of your solar business, you should not only create a business profile on GMB but must also optimize it so that your business information displays more often than your competitors.
5) Explore Full Benefits of Press Release Marketing
Though the primary aim of a press release is to make new announcements, businesses that know the varied benefits of a press release use it as an efficient marketing strategy to generate visitors, improve search engine visibility and raise brand awareness. When press releases are sent through networks that have big and high-end distribution, a business easily gets its name and content published across mega trafficked and reputed sites like Associated Press, Digital Journal, Fox News affiliated sites, etc.
6) Influence More People With Influencers
On social media platforms, those people who have a good enough following of people are called influencers. Any message or posts published by these influencers get broadcasted to all their followers and this phenomenon opens a great advertising opportunity. To utilize the potential of these influencers for the growth of your solar business, you can send them a proposal for collaboration. The most important thing to note here is that the influencers chosen by you must be having a great percentage of followers from your targeted region else there is no use in promoting to people living in a different location.
7) Use Top Advertising Networks to Gain Leads
Paid ads provide an easy way for businesses to market themselves quickly. Paid ads on all platforms don’t yield the same quality of results. Google Ads is the top paid advertising network for businesses that need high-quality leads, followed by Facebook Ads. You should grasp the basics of ad management and must become familiar with the different ad platforms before getting directly into paid advertising. Instead of gaining profits from paid ads campaigns, you can even make loss if the ads aren’t optimized properly. If you need help in your paid advertising efforts, better hire a digital marketing agency for the right operation and management of ads.
8) Go Social and Grow Your Network
If you have the patience to develop a following on social media platforms, then social media can turn out into a massive, free resource that can generate a lot of leads for your solar business. But this won’t happen overnight or in a couple of months since people won’t be interested in engaging with your profile until you take the time to create good & interesting content over some period of time. Devoting some time daily to interacting with people over such networks and joining local groups are also additional methods to build your follower base. After getting a few thousand followers, you can step up your marketing efforts on these social media sites.
9) Devote Time to LinkedIn to Get Big Clients
LinkedIn has professional members in almost all countries and regions worldwide. So no matter where your target audience is living, you can associate with wealthy clients (top management officials) for your business through LinkedIn. Various premium services are also available on LinkedIn for exploring more options to make connections which may further increase your chances of closing more business deals. All these factors only prove one thing i.e. LinkedIn is a far more professional network than any of the social network sites, such as Facebook and Instagram, and as a result, it is the most preferred platform to promote your solar products and services directly to high-end clients.
10) Start Increasing Your Referrals
In the advertising segment, one of the best-considered advertising methods is word-of-mouth advertising and your business should also try to make full use of it. A very old way to encourage word-of-mouth advertising is by asking your customers to let their friends and relatives know about your business. However, for effective word-of-mouth advertising, the best way out is to come up with some form of rewards that your current customers can get if they promote your solar business to their friends and relatives. These rewards can be in the form of discount coupons, gift certificates, referral coupons, etc.
11) Reward Free Custom Printed Items
The distribution of low-cost products (like mugs, jars, balloons, pencils, pens, pocket diaries, etc) with your business name printed on them is an extremely simple step to make your customers remember your business. An added benefit of this mode of marketing is that these products will also be able to gain the attention of other people who would see these items being used by your customers, thereby giving more visibility to your business name.
12) Sell More With Email Marketing
Some people automatically associate “email marketing” with the practice of sending unsolicited messages to thousands of people. In contrast, email marketing is a strategic and professional approach to reaching a wider audience for the purpose of growing business revenues. Your business can amass a list of emails of thousands of people if it actively works towards collecting the email addresses of existing and potential customers that visit your website. After building up a good enough email subscriber list, it becomes extremely easy to bulk announce your new offers and services. In spite of the fact that gathering email addresses takes some time and work, the payoff is substantial. As a result, you should build up email opt-in forms followed by putting them in all digital assets that receive traffic.
13) Get Listed on High Performing Directories
Not only do business-owned websites tend to rank highly in Google, but so do numerous authoritative directories and sites, such as Yelp, Nextdoor, Manta, Crunchbase, etc. You can build a business profile for your solar business on these high-ranking websites to generate new marketing channels. Most of these high-ranking websites provide the opportunity for a free listing of your business and a few premium options for greater exposure.
14) Upload Videos On YouTube
The big authority of the YouTube platform gives immense potential to Youtube videos in terms of achieving higher and faster ranking on Google. As compared to your website, your videos can make it faster on Google for various keywords associated with your solar business. If you want to rank better, faster, get more views, and generate more leads, then you need to create and upload videos that answer long-tail keywords (5, 6 words and higher). As more of your business videos get uploaded to YouTube, your chances of generating leads will increase proportionately. As an added benefit, the brand awareness of your solar business will also grow.
15) Supplement Your Marketing With Offline Advertising
Although it is a well-established fact that businesses are now allocating more budget for online marketing, the perceived value of offline marketing is still higher than online advertising in people. Further, an added advantage that your business can get by doing both offline and online advertising together is that the brand identity of your business will become more established. However, as offline marketing has the main drawback of being less targeted and more costly, you can use them if your marketing budget is not an issue.
16) Maintain Positive Feedback Online
The practice of checking the legitimacy of a business/service online is growing owing to more and more people accessing the power of the internet. So if your potential customer sees that there are positive mentions for your business, then this increases the chances of sales for your business. However, if negative reviews are discovered by potential customers online, it is more likely that this will scare away many potential customers. Therefore, it is advisable that you request online reviews from each of your clients, or offer discounts or gift cards to encourage them to put feedback online. By doing so, you can also grow the online reputation of your business.
17) Reach Local Newspapers for Renewable Energy Content
Send emails to the editors of local newspapers to enquire about the opportunities to contribute articles related to renewable energy. Once you get a green signal from them, you can then periodically contribute articles related to renewable energy and can thus promote your solar business side by side. When more people will come across content written by you in such newspapers, getting more trust and sales is inevitable.
18) Hold Seminar on Reducing Electricity Bills
By holding seminars where you can dispense information related to saving money on electricity bills, you can make the seminar participants aware of your solar business as a good alternative to their current electricity system. Utilizing such seminars, you can also announce various plans by which the participants can get a solar system installed in their homes with a low downpayment or in installments.
19) Provide Financing Option for Solar Panel/System Installation
One of the biggest hurdles that prevents a significant number of people from adopting solar energy is the big upfront cost that is involved in the installation. If you can reduce the upfront payment by coming up with good financing on EMI options, many more people will get interested in getting solar energy systems installed in their homes and/or office.
20) Hold Awareness Campaigns and Contests Along with Promoting Your Business
You can hold awareness campaigns in partnership with non-profit clubs related to renewable energy to promote your business. You can announce such awareness campaigns and contests through local newspaper ads followed by promoting your solar energy systems as good renewable energy and cost-saving source.
21) Get More Clients with Free Solar Light Installation in Crowded Places
Reach out to your local municipal council and offer to erect solar lamps and street lights in some of the most crowded locations in your region. Paint these street light poles with your business name so that your solar energy business will be exposed to more people and this will, in turn, land you more sales.
22) Offer Free Solar Cost Calculator
Find a good application developer and ask him to design a calculator through which people can get an estimate of the installation cost of solar panels using various parameters. For every person who uses this calculator embedded on your website, you can expose them to your solar power installation services. This method can, therefore, make your solar business more popular which will assist you in getting more sales.
23) Help a Few charities and Get Their Help to Promote Your Business
Help out a few popular charities either with monetary support or with your products/services to make a communication link with them. After this, you can utilize their connection network to get your solar portfolio advertised to many more businesses or to offer coupons to all businesses that contribute to these charities. This process can thus help you out with more sales.
24) Get More Exposure by Distributing Coupons at Events
For all prominent events taking place in your region, contact the event organizers to hand out free coupons for your business to the event attendees. You can also get it done by incentivizing event organizers to do so or can put up your own stall in such events to give away coupons. With this strategy, you can land more clients.
25) Make Relevant Partnerships to Get More Referrals
Associate all such businesses that are more likely to get clients in your target segment. These can be electricians, electric shops, builders, etc.
26) Advertise Using Free Solar Powered Transport
Sponsor a few vehicles for public transport or introduce solar-powered public transport with minimal or no charges. In these vehicles, distribute your marketing materials or announce any other type of offers related to your solar business.
27) Comedy Show for Promoting Your Business
Humor is a great way to attract a crowd. Hosting comedy shows and sponsoring such shows along with inserting jokes about saving on electricity bills can be a creative method to introduce your business and benefits to more people.
28) Get More Affiliates, Get More Sales
Affiliates are those people who promote products/services for commission. You can open an affiliate program and can offer good commissions to affiliates to promote your products. Alternatively, you can join any affiliate network as an advertiser which can, in turn, get your affiliate offer exposed to thousands of affiliates of such affiliate network.
These marketing methods can pave the way to generate more sales for your solar business/service. To ask any questions or to share your inputs, kindly make use of the discussion option below.
