Generating solar leads is crucial in today’s booming solar industry as more homeowners and businesses seek clean energy solutions. With stiffer competition than ever, it can be a struggle to attract potential clients.
Having collaborated with countless solar energy companies, we know their one-of-a-kind marketing demands like our own solar system. Join us for an in-depth look at various strategies and tools for generating solar leads to make sure your business is ahead of the game.
Challenges to Generating Solar Leads
Complex Eligibility Criteria
With clean energy in such high demand, why does it seem so hard to generate solar leads? Part of the challenge is the complicated eligibility process for solar energy. To qualify, a lead must be a homeowner with a decent bank credit score. The roof of the home must also meet specific standards, like being made of suitable materials, lacking dormers, and having little to no shade.
Brand Recognition—or Lack Of
Many solar companies lack the capital to put into brand awareness. Yet solar sales thrive on innovative branding. And installers must position themselves as reputable companies to capture the market. Doing this can mean investing significant time and money in marketing and PR.
Closing Sales and Load Balancing
Closing solar leads proves to be one of the most demanding tasks in the sales game. This requires a unique omnichannel approach to inspire the prospect’s confidence.
Assessing a home’s condition requires an in-person visit, which can make reaching out to potential customers challenging. Additionally, sales reps may be occupied with other leads or encounter no-shows.
A solar company’s customer management must be efficient and balanced against multiple clients dealing with online interactions, phone calls, or in-person meetings.
Innovative Solar Lead Generation Tactics
List Your Business on Solar Directories
Directories offer a trustworthy and impartial platform to share your solar energy business’s information. They should also link directly to your website, boosting visibility among search engines. Although it’s not likely to generate a flurry of solar leads, listing in directories is still regarded as a necessary activity for every business.
However, if budget allows it, you can consider running ad campaigns on directories to yield more targeted solar leads, gaining an edge over competitors in the process.
Make Sure Your Website Is User-Friendly—and Include a Capture Form for Solar Leads
To succeed in today’s digital age, establishing a website that is both user-friendly and current is an absolute must for any brand.
As an example, a brand may use strategies such as directories and social media pages with paid ads to drive traffic to their website. Upon arrival, users anticipate an intuitive layout, visually appealing design, and a clear display of the brand’s value and offerings.
Adding a visible, relevant call-to-action on high-traffic landing pages increases the chances of lead generation and improved ROI.
Lead capture forms and contact forms are not just ordinary features on landing pages. They play a crucial role in user engagement, lead generation, and conversion optimization. Along with allowing visitors to reach out to you when seeking answers, contact forms offer a compelling alternative to overwhelming customers with lots of information. Not to mention they create a golden opportunity to offer a lead magnet and collect their email address.
Include High-Quality Visuals of Your Product
Offer a budding lifestyle to your solar energy prospects through elegant looks and real-life photos and videos of your products—rather than just black panels. A smart way to move forward is by creating informative videos covering the installation process, estimated installation time, energy saving prospects, project cost, and home suitability. Cover all such queries answered in one place. Your solar panels become a part of your customer’s home, after all, so let them envision life with it.
Collect Property Intelligence
Leverage the tools available to conduct property intelligence research and target more qualified leads. Google Project Sunroof is one such tool that enables you to pinpoint suitable residents within specific zip codes while also identifying the best areas and homes for solar installation—even in countries without consistently sunny climates. Property Radar takes it a step further by narrowing down financially prepared solar leads and finding newly developed neighborhoods that lack mature trees.
Target Residential and Commercial Solar Leads
Develop unique sections on your webpage to cater to residential and commercial solar buyers. With this strategy, you can efficiently target each group without creating separate websites.
Since residential and commercial solar purchasers have different motivations and requirements, customizing your message for each type is imperative. Their budgets, solar incentives, tax benefits, and buying processes are different.
The optimal approach to engage each type is by developing unique materials for them. This includes separate landing pages, learning resources, and lead magnets that speak to their unique motivations and pain points.
Include Savings Calculators
Introducing an energy cost savings calculator on your website is a masterstroke in securing trust with homeowners who are thinking of switching to solar panels. At the touch of a button, they can quell any concerns they might have. They’ll see everything, including the size of the solar installation, cost estimation, potential savings on their utility bills, and how much power the solar installation would generate.
Not only does this tool offer an organic advertising alternative, but it will also earn brownie points and free consultation forms from highly-impressed users.
Prioritize Content Marketing
Creating original content is a long-term strategy that can significantly boost your brand’s solar leads. While solar products can be complex, making the effort to educate prospects can pay off big time.
To captivate your audience and generate organic leads, create content that speaks to your buyer personas. Consider their age, demographics, income, interests, and more when developing relevant topics.
Persuade potential solar customers by focusing on key motivators. These could range from cost savings to environmentalism.
But beware—it’s not enough to simply generate content that adds value to your brand. You also need to distribute that content to dynamic spaces. By using social sharing, guest blogging, micro-blogging, and link building, you can optimize your content’s potential and see significant returns.
Segment Your Old Solar Leads
Solar products are in high demand across the globe. But many inquiring prospects take their time to make a decision due to the upfront costs associated with this big-ticket item.
To keep your lead data secure, use a CRM (customer relationship management) tool to store all communication history. This will allow you to easily access the information from anywhere, at any time.
Stay proactive by having your sales team follow up with a call or email campaign that offers discounts on solar panel installation, or e-newsletters with useful and informative content.
By segmenting your leads as cold, warm, or hot based on their response, you’re ensuring that those solar leads are nurtured appropriately, resulting in more conversions.
Take Advantage of Social Media
Having a sound social media presence presents a tremendous opportunity to engage with prospective clients while establishing your authority as a solar expert.
To achieve optimal results, it’s critical to determine where your target audience spends their time on social media. Instagram or Facebook would be an ideal platform for residential clients, whereas commercial clients can be more commonly found on LinkedIn.
Creating a comprehensive social media strategy can yield optimal results. For instance, implementing lead generation ads can be an efficient way to acquire client information without wasting their precious time.
Use SEO to Rank Locally
Search engine optimization (SEO) can help you rank at the top of search engines organically by optimizing your content with keywords that people are already seeking. This approach produces results when search engines begin to recognize a particular company as an expert in a particular subject.
To become an authority, however, you must provide useful information that your potential customers will want to read. This necessitates identifying the keywords that your prospects utilize to find your or your competitors’ business online. To obtain the most highly-targeted keywords based on their search volume, use keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush. Additionally, Google offers several keyword phrases that prospects have searched for.
To “Sun” It Up
As competition in the solar energy market only continues to increase, solar lead generation tactics are becoming more essential than ever. Tackle this challenge head-on with these high-performing tactics for generating solar leads.
