You Ask, I Answer: Online Lead Generation for Solar Companies?

In today's episode, Megan asks, My company recently had to lay off their canvassing department, so now they are trying anything to get leads for virtual consultations for solar sales. Right now, they're aimlessly boosting Facebook posts, and I was hoping to get some insight to lead them in the right direction. Any suggestions? Tough time to be doing that, uh, but I can totally understand with uh everything going on that uh some companies have cut back on their uh door-to-door uh physical humans. And honestly, it's not a bad way to go because the targeting you have available to you is so much better online.

So a couple of things to think about. First, do you have the right audience? Uh when you look at the people who are connected to your Facebook page, how many of them are actual buyers? Do you have a sense of that? You would know that based on uh your Facebook traffic and how well it converts uh to people setting up appointments and and calls uh using Google Analytics, using goal conversions.

So that would be the first place I would start. If your audience does convert, if your Facebook audience is representative of your customer base, then you want to look at what does that audience have in common. So you would fire up Facebook audience insights and look at that audience and say, okay, what are the common demographics, the common interests, the sorts of things that indicate that people are buyers of solar energy. Remember that there's gonna be different segments, right? There's gonna be some folks who are like the the off the grid preppers, they wanna be independent, they want to stick it to the man.

There's people who are uh environmentally conscious and and want to reduce their carbon. There's people who want to make money with it, you know, buy a system that'll pay for itself in five years and and then they're they're making money instead of paying money. So you're gonna have all these different segments. It's important to have some clarity in your own database as to which segment your company tends to serve and be able to isolate that based on things like data you can get out of Facebook Audience Insights. Somebody who is a prepper is going to like solar energy as an interest, but also like uh you know all sorts of you know military surplus and and uh and and fun interests like that.

Um somebody who's super environmental, they're gonna be looking at you know global warming and cr and climate crisis interests and in there in that cohort. So you'll want to try and tease apart those cohorts and figure out who you serve most. From there, you need to create what are called lookalike audiences uh to find similar audiences, people who have similar profiles as the audience you're looking at, and that's who you advertise to. That way you're getting the right message to the right people. Remember that we use uh Bob Stone's 1968 direct marketing framework for a lot of advertising.

List, offer, creative. Do you have the right list of people, the right audience you're trying to talk to? Do you have the right offer for that list? And then do you have the right creative? If you are advertising to the money-making crowd, like that wants to use solar energy to make money, the offer had better be about you know, here's how fast you can uh break even, here's the ROI on the system.

That's a great offer to that list. You try that offer with the prepper crowd, they'd be like, I don't care. I want to be, you know, I want to be ready for when the black helicopters come for me. Um and so you have a very different offer for that group. And then of course the creative would reflect that offer.

Once you know that information from Facebook, then it's time to repeat that on systems like Google Ads, repeat that on uh uh Stack Adapt, repeat that on on the Instagram and Twitter and Pinterest. Uh there are terrific targeting options on each of these platforms, and you'll find different audiences there. The crowd on Pinterest is going to be really different than the crowd on Twitter, right? Just anecdotally, um the crowd on Pinterest tends to lean more heavily female and tends not to be as much, although there is a substantial subset of the community, but not as much into the whole, you know, prepper off the grid, uh preparing for the end of the world kind of thing. There is some of that.

So again, you'll have to look at each of the networks that are available to you for advertising and figure out who's got my audience, or uh, can I create different offers and different creatives for those different audiences on each of those platforms? And again, you'll want to use the power of lookalike audiences whenever you can for those individual networks. Third, you want to do custom audiences. Custom audiences is how you retarget your existing pipeline. Your salespeople should be taking that list of uh prospects that they have from before the the current crisis.

You take those emails, you encrypt them, and then you load them into systems like Facebook, like Google, like Twitter, and you can show ads just to those people. And again, if you've got that in your CRM and you've got it well segmented, you can say, okay, this is this is our money making crowd. Let's make sure that we retarget them with messages saying, hey, still paying too much for electricity. Uh, and you get them to re-engage with you. All of this stuff is not it's not easy, but it's very straightforward.

Segment the audience, advertise the audiences that look just like it, retarget the existing audience that you already have. That's the direction I would go, and not just boosting Facebook posts. Now, here's the catch. To run all these programs successfully does require effort and it does require a budget. If you've laid off a bunch of people, um, you should have some spending money to be able to invest in advertisements.

So you'll make sure that uh you are doing you are realcating those funds, you're not just taking that money and and holding on to it because you're gonna get no growth, you're not gonna get any sales because you're not building that audience. When it comes to Facebook ads, the other challenge that's tricky is um very often in on Facebook in particular, like warm warm intro stuff works better than than hard pitches for a lot of people to download a free PDF, or in a solar company's case, because you have or you should have the Department of Energy's uh solar index for uh at least in the United States, uh there's there's a database down to like the square foot or the square yard of how much solar energy each uh square foot of the country receives. You can create a wizard saying analyze your street address and figure out you know what's what amount of energy do you get uh as part of an initial assessment. So it's something free, it's not a hard sell to talk to a salesperson, it's a try out this wizard and see if your your property is a good fit. You know, do you have a south facing roof, for example?

So there's the creative and uh the offer and the creative that you have to tune for again for each of those audiences and making sure that it's aligned with something that's easy for people to try and fun for them to try out as opposed to a hard pitch to talk to a salesperson. That will require some patience on the part of sales because they'll be like, where's our leads? Where's our leads? And like they're not ready yet. Uh we gotta, you know, you you plant seeds today, you're not gonna have crops to harvest tomorrow.

You gotta be a little bit patient. So those are some suggestions for this particular industry. It is uh timely. It is there's a lot of interest in it. So just having the right list offer and creative and segments in those lists is what's going to make you successful with uh your digital advertising efforts.

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