9 Strategies to Capture More Solar Leads using Social Media Marketing
Solar energy has grown from a fad into a very promising alternative energy source for homeowners and businesses.
If you are a solar brand, have you considered selling solar using social media? If not, then you should.
You can generate high-converting inbound leads from social media.
And that’s why more than 92% of US marketers already use social media for marketing purposes.
Image via Statista
Social media has evolved into a buzzing marketplace where businesses of all kinds and all sizes can market their products and engage with their potential customers.
Solar is a niche industry and you can garner immense brand awareness if you learn to harness the power of social media as well as you harness the power of the sun.
In this post, I’ll focus on how social media can help solar brands connect with their audience online. I’ll also share actionable strategies for using social media to generate solar leads and capture solar leads.
Let’s dive in and explore.
Shortcuts
- Why Do Solar Brands Need to Invest in Social Media Marketing?
- Top 9 Strategies to Capture Solar Leads Using Social Media Marketing
- Optimize Your Social Profiles
- Invest in Paid Social Media Ads
- Create the Right Content Mix to Increase Awareness
- Leverage the Power of Influencers
- Establish Social Proof
- Provide Great Customer Service
- Join Niche Groups
- Analyze Your Competitors’ Marketing Strategies
- Encourage Employee Advocacy on Social Media
- Get Ready for Selling More Solar Goods Using Social Media
Why Do Solar Brands Need to Invest in Social Media Marketing?
Socsial media marketing is an integral part of digital marketing if you want to see your solar business grow to its full potential.
And if you’ve not made your presence felt on social media yet, you’re likely missing out on a huge number of potential customers waiting to be hooked.
In fact, social media even makes it possible to sell solar panels from home.
So, if you haven’t explored what benefits social media may hold for your business, don’t write it off yet.
Here are some top advantages of investing in social media marketing:
Let’s take a look.
1. Boost Brand Awareness
As a solar brand, if you want to build brand awareness, there is no place like social media. It gets your brand in front of a large target audience in a quick and effective way. With a good content mix, you can engage with users to generate great visibility.
2. Understand the Needs of Your Target Audience
Social media users often discuss their opinions and expectations without any bias. This raw data is a great source of customer insights for your marketing team.
If you want to sell solar using social media, understanding what your potential customers are looking for is very important. And this data helps you with exactly that.
3. Generate Website Traffic
Social media marketing can not only help you engage your target audience but can even drive highly-targeted traffic to your website.
By sharing relevant information through your posts, you can build up your authority and push your audience to visit your website to check your products out. This can directly impact your bottom line.
4. Improve Conversion Rate
A lot of social media users follow brands on social media and even use it for product research. With an amazing social media marketing strategy, you can capture the users who are genuinely interested in buying PV systems and improve your conversion rate. This can help you grow your revenues from selling solar.
5. Keep Your Audience Updated About Your Products
Nearly 23% of social media users use it for seeing content from their favorite brands.
Image via Hootsuite
That makes it a great platform to inform your audience about the latest updates and products coming from your business. When you do so, it’ll help engage your audience and also promote your products to them in a subtle manner.
6. Build Brand Reputation
When you are using social media, remember you are also building a reputation for your brand. Publishing high-quality content on social media can help you establish your brand as an authority figure in the industry. This makes it a great way to start standing out from your competition.
7. Gain Valuable Insights
With the help of social media marketing tools, you can gather valuable insights into how your campaigns are performing, how followers are interacting with your brand, and how your competitors are leveraging the platforms. All this can help you strategize better to capture leads using social media.
Top 9 Strategies to Capture Solar Leads Using Social Media Marketing
Now that you know the benefits of using social media to generate solar leads, you must be curious to know the strategies you can use to harness the power of social media.
Following are the top social media marketing techniques that you can leverage to grow solar leads on social media.
1. Optimize Your Social Profiles
Before you plan on using social media for selling solar, you need to build a strong social profile and get these elements right in it.
- Add your brand name
- Set a high-definition logo as the profile picture
- Write a strong bio with all relevant business information
- Add a CTA button leading to your website or to get in touch with you personally
- Provide a Google Map link to your store
Take a look at how Blue Raven Solar company has optimized all these fields in their Facebook profile.
Image via Facebook
A well-optimized profile will make your solar business look professional and credible. The information provided here can also help your potential customers reach out to you in a hassle-free manner, driving your lead generation and sales up.
2. Invest in Paid Social Media Ads
Social media ads are one of the quickest ways to put your brand before the audiences that matter to you. They can help you generate awareness, engagement and even improve sales leads almost instantly based on how you plan the ad campaign.
For instance, if your goal is to generate leads or divert more traffic to your website, your ad content and CTA need to be created accordingly.
You can use images and videos in your social media ads to promote your services better and explain their features with ease.
The visuals need to stay true to your brand and the message you want to communicate too. You can combine captions and visuals to tell a captivating story about your solar products and push viewers to want to learn more about them.
Social media marketing tools can help you create, manage, and analyze paid ads with utmost efficacy. See how to generate leads on Facebook.
3. Create the Right Content Mix to Increase Awareness
The one thing you should never be on social media is boring. Social media users love fresh, informative, and valuable information that is delivered in a fun and enjoyable way, so you need to make sure your content ticks all the right boxes.
It may take a while for you to find the right content mix, but you can get started with these popular content types:
- Image-based posts
- Infographics
- Branded videos
- Live videos
- Testimonials and reviews
- Announcements
- Memes
- Curated content
- User-generated content
You can use a digital marketing platform to create and publish this content on social media platforms to drive your brand’s growth online.
You can take some inspiration from this quick video by NextEra Energy. It shares just the right information to get its audience excited about its future offerings.
Image via Facebook
Think out of the box to present your solar energy-related concepts, case studies, products, etc. in a way that excites people.
4. Leverage the Power of Influencers
Not sure if influencer marketing will work for your solar business or not?
In a survey conducted by Influencer Marketing Hub, a whopping 90% of respondents said that influencer marketing is effective.
Image via Influencer Marketing Hub
When strategized well, influencer marketing can play an important role in helping you to generate fresh leads from different social media chanels.
Why does influencer marketing work?
Because a majority of influencers are everyday people who have risen to be authoritative voices on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.
They are genuine, trustworthy, and operate in a particular niche. Over a period of time, they have garnered a huge volume of loyal followers who trust the influencer’s recommendations more than branded content.
You can leverage the power of influencer marketing by collaborating with top micro-influencers (10K-100K followers) advocating an eco-friendly lifestyle, clean energy, and living in harmony with nature.
They can make a video to build awareness about your brand, promote your products, run contests, and even engage with your audience. This can build your brand reputation and even generate leads and grow your sales.
5. Establish Social Proof
As a brand that is looking to use social media, establishing social proof is essential. The power of word-of-mouth is immense and it can help you generate high-quality leads.
One of the best ways to establish social proof is by sharing customer testimonial videos and reviews from happy customers. These come across as authentic as they’re coming right from the customers.
You can request your existing customers to share their reviews on their social media profiles and tag you. These social media feedback posts can be reshared on your profile to build your reputation and drive sales for your solar business.
What’s more?
You can also add social proof to your landing pages by collecting testimonials from social media using a tool. These can help boost your conversions too.
6. Provide Great Customer Service
Social media is not only a platform to promote your solar products, but it can also be used to provide great customer service. Doing so strategically can also help you attract new clients.
Modern-day customers regularly reach out to brands on social media for any concerns that they have, and they expect quick responses.
So, if you want to impress your prospects and existing clients, a timely and satisfying response is what you need to deliver. You can start by deploying best AI chatbots to answer your customer queries instantly. And to support chatbots, you can even have agents.
The key is to respond to any post by a customer and then take the conversation away from the public eye.
Let’s say a user comments on your Instagram post with a query or seeks more details about solar panel installation changes. You can request them to connect with you on Facebook Messenger and take the conversation forward there.
This is especially important when you’re dealing with angry or frustrated customers. Having the conversation in public might get potential customers to turn away.
7. Join Niche Groups
When you want to use social media for selling your solar products, you need to have both short-term and long-term plans.
For instance, social media ads may generate some quick leads, but being a part of a community will help you stay in the competition in the longer run.
Facebook has several communities that talk about alternative energy, green energy, environmental awareness, and several other topics that you can relate to.
Image via Facebook
You can sift through a long list of public and private groups and find the ones that are most relevant to you. The main intention here is to build a community and establish yourself as a brand that cares for the environment.
The advantages of joining such niche groups are plenty. First of all, this is where your target audience is. When they discuss a variety of issues, you get to understand their pain points, and expectations from a solar brand like yours, and understand what is the best way to serve them.
You can even create your community from scratch to establish your brand as an authority figure in the industry.
8. Analyze Your Competitors’ Marketing Strategies
It goes without saying that we operate in a highly competitive digital market. Your competitors are working equally hard to generate a huge amount of leads and grow their businesses.
If there is something your competitors are doing exceptionally well, don’t hesitate to draw inspiration from them. Competitor analysis is absolutely vital.
While you don’t want to copy what your competitors are doing, there are several things you can learn from them. Find out what kind of activities they are doing on social media. How are they driving engagement? And how is your target audience responding to your competitors’ campaigns?
A comprehensive competitor analysis will give you insights into what you can do differently to engage with your target audience more effectively and improve your sales.
What’s more?
When you employ any of your competitors’ strategies, you can leverage sales platforms to figure out if they’re working for you or not. Based on that, you can tweak them up.
9. Encourage Employee Advocacy on Social Media
Your employees are a great asset for you to build your brand reputation on social media. Go ahead and build a strong employee advocacy program where your employees and associates can promote your brand and products.
It is a great way to market your business, amplify your reach organically and generate high-converting leads.
Your employees can share your posts, write about you on their personal page and in relevant groups, and they can even send direct messages to their connections about your solar offering
They serve as internal influencers from your organization and even help in humanizing your brand.
To maintain brand voice, you can provide certain guidelines and templates for your employees to work with. Based on these, they can craft content in their own style and drive engagement for you.
Get Ready for Selling More Solar Goods Using Social Media
There you have it — the top techniques to effectively use social media to generate and capture solar leads.
You need to start by developing a complete profile on social media and then creating quality content to build an audience and start generating leads.
You also need to work on providing good customer service to them through social media. It can go a long way in helping you get more customers.
Go ahead and start working on these strategies right away. When executed effectively you will be successful in selling more solar. Endless opportunities await.
About the author.
Gaurav Sharma is the founder and CEO of Attrock, a results-driven digital marketing company. Grew an agency from 5-figure to 7-figure revenue in just two years. He also contributes to top publications like HuffPost, Adweek, Business 2 Community, TechCrunch, and more.