How do you make your solar company more visible, more authoritative, and more attractive to potential leads? Digital marketing.
Through a combination of different online marketing strategies, you can promote your solar business, generate more traffic to your website, and use your website as a tool to capture information on potential leads.
Throughout this blog, we’ll cover the best ways for solar companies to practice digital marketing, especially when it comes to the following inbound bound lead generation strategies:
For complete insight into solar lead generation best practices, read our blog here.
Make a Website That Helps Buyers Quickly Find What They Need
There are countless marketing strategies you can use to generate leads and good press for your brand, but all of them are going to connect to your website in some way. Most of them will be directly linked to your website, encouraging people to visit it so they can engage with your content.
Like solar energy, a good website is a renewable source of leads. The more trustworthy and persuasive your website is, the more leads you’re going to generate. And because this website is at the center of all the rest of your online marketing strategies, it deserves to be one of your highest priorities.
Effective web design, technical optimization, and persuasive copywriting can all get you better results. But you’ll also need to think about the user experience of your website and how easily people can find the information they’re looking for.
These are some of the most important pages you’ll need to work on:
- Home Page – On your home page, you’ll introduce your solar company, your offerings, your business philosophy, and other general information. It’s a way to set the tone for your website, link visitors to other pages that may interest them, and form a good first impression.
- Solutions – On your solutions, products, or services pages, you’ll cover your business’s core offerings. For example, you might list out different types of solar systems that you can install and the maintenance services you offer.
- About Us – On the About Us page, you’ll briefly describe your business, including how it was formed and what it sets out to do.
- Why Us – On the Why Us page, you’ll list your unique differentiators so people understand the advantages of working with your solar business over any other competitor.
- Blog – Every solar business should also have a blog where you’ll publish news and articles on a regular basis. This is going to be the central hub for your content marketing strategy.
- Contact – And of course, your visitors will need some way to contact you For more information or a free quote. Make sure your contact page is easy to find and that your contact form is easy to complete.
Additionally, solar businesses often benefit from having a dedicated page for frequently asked questions (FAQs), providing commonly sought information to the people who need it.
Create and Share Helpful Solar Industry Insights on Your Blog
Let’s talk about content marketing, which has become one of the most popular marketing strategies for solar organizations.
Content marketing is an inbound marketing strategy, meaning the goal is to naturally attract people who are already interested in solar products, energy efficiency, or related topics. Additionally, for many businesses, it may simply be marketing them cost savings, ways to increase profit margin and tax incentives or write-offs where applicable.
In pursuit of this strategy, you’ll develop strong pieces of content that provide authoritative information on the subject of solar energy. These can be blog posts, eBooks, white papers, or other assets.
Once you publish and promote these pieces, you’ll begin bringing people to your website across any channels you use for content promotion, including search engine results pages (SERPs), social media, and even email marketing.
The benefits of content marketing include:
- SEO value – Content is the heart of SEO. It gives you an opportunity to optimize for specific keywords while simultaneously building your authority. If you produce content specifically with search optimization as the goal, your web pages should climb the rankings of SERPs and generate more organic traffic for your brand.
- General utility – SEO isn’t the only digital marketing strategy that benefits from content. You can also use content to fuel your social media marketing strategy, attract people to your email newsletter, and more.
- Thought leadership potential – When people seek solar panel installations, they want to hire people who are knowledgeable, authoritative, and innovative. How do you prove that you’re a thought leader in the industry? Content. If you’re consistently leading the pack in terms of ideas and expertise, you’ll gain a competitive advantage.
- Conversion optimization – Blogs are also a lead generation opportunity. In each blog post, you can include callouts that encourage readers to contact your business for a free quote or consultation. If these calls to action (CTAs) are persuasive enough, they can generate a steady stream of leads for your business.
- Inexpensiveness – Also keep in mind that content marketing is a low-cost digital marketing strategy. Most types of content are relatively cheap to produce—and they last forever if you choose “evergreen” topics.
Your content needs to be well-written and authoritative. If you’re already intimately familiar with the solar industry, you should have no trouble writing as an expert. But you’ll still need to be strategic and write on topics that your target audience will find valuable.
Here are some things you could do:
- Research and analyze keyword possibilities. Ideally, you’ll optimize your content for keywords that are relevant to your target audience, high in search volume, and relatively low in competition. How do you choose those keywords? You can start with simple brainstorming, but eventually, you’ll want to rely on objective data pulled from third-party SEO keyword research tools.
- Generate ideas from existing clients. You can also get topic ideas from your existing clients. What are some things they wish they knew at the beginning of their journey? What topics are they still confused about? Are there any pieces of content they’d like to see on your blog?
- Watch your competitors closely. Identifying a big player in the industry, seeing what topics they are writing about, and identifying which ones you feel are also relevant to your users. Feel free to get inspiration here, but remember that you need to produce original, unique work if you want to be successful.
- Be willing to adapt. Keep gathering information from surveys, comments, and other forms of reader feedback. You need to be willing to adapt if you want your content marketing strategy to thrive.
Respond to Prospect and Customer Inquiries on Social Media
Get active on social media. It’s easy and free to claim your profiles, and it doesn’t take much time or effort to make posts on a daily basis. From there, your main priority should be engagement. You need to directly interact with your prospects and customers. When people ask you questions, answer them publicly. When you see public conversations about solar panels or solar installations, get involved. Eventually, if you speak with authority and prioritize interaction, you should be able to build a loyal following.
Optimize Your Solar Marketing Strategy With Local SEO and SEM
Local optimization is ideal for solar installers. Focusing on a specific area, rather than contending with your competitors on a national level, increases your relevance and decreases the intensity of your competition. You can optimize for local keywords, purchase local ads, and even get involved in local events to increase your local relevance.
Completing your Google Business Profile can get you started on your local SEO journey. It’s a free and quick step that feeds information on your business to Google directly, so it can be provided to search users looking for a business like yours. It’s also important to write and publish content with local keywords, and – as we’re about to see – collect tons of reviews from your customers.
Encourage Happy Clients to Review Your Solar Installation Services
Do you have a list of satisfied customers with active solar projects? Ask them for reviews.
Getting more reviews and better reviews is beneficial for your business in several ways. It increases your visibility, improves your local SEO optimization, and helps to build your reputation online. It’s also an opportunity to improve your business, since reviews often contain valuable pieces of customer feedback.
The trouble is, most people don’t leave reviews without an incentive or prompt to do so. Ask your customers directly and make it worth their while to leave you their feedback.
Key Takeaways
Marketing relies on a wide variety of strategies and tactics to work. Establishing an easy-to-navigate website with persuasive calls to action (CTAs) should be your highest priority and your first strategic move. Once that website is in place, you can build around it, using strategies like SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, and local targeting to drive more people to your domain.
The solar industry is a highly competitive one, but you won’t have to worry about your competitors if you’ve mastered the fundamentals of digital marketing. With the help of a digital marketing partner, you can perfect your website, develop better content, build a better following on social media, and dominate your local area. Ready to get started? Contact us today to kick off your solar digital marketing strategy!
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