How i’d start solar marketing from scratch in 2025

▶ 0:00Good evening, it is January 2nd and earlier today I had a discovery call with an absolutely lovely chap. Guy that's primarily doing subcontract work, doing solar installations on behalf of other businesses. He's looking to continue to do that and keep doing that to the best quality standard possible. But he's also looking to start to develop his own residential lead generation, basically.

▶ 0:22His own demand, his own brand, actually building up the face of the business and how the business looks to the public eye. Rather than just having one or two really big clients that he often works for. So I thought it'd be a good idea to get on camera to do a whistle-stop tour. Very, very basic this one. So this, if you're already a very established installer that has done marketing campaigns before and things like this, this might not be for you.

▶ 0:44But if you're coming into the market, you're an electrician that's looking to bring solar into their service offering. You're coming from an adjacent field and you're looking to start a solar installation business. This will get you to the top 10% of installers from a digital marketing perspective. So many installers just don't even have the basics checked off.

▶ 1:04Okay. And I'm not talking about the ones that are really killing it, that are really established. You know, the people that are in the solar nation, all of that kind of thing. I'm not talking about those installers. I'm talking about the masses. So if you just follow this, you can get this done in like six weeks, then you'll be absolutely golden to enter the market and actually have a chance to compete.

▶ 1:23Even given how competitive it is and how competitive it will continue to be and how competitive it will become when the grants come in. Hopefully they do come in later this year or early next year. So without further ado, let's crack on. So this is exactly how I'd approach it. Okay. So first I would set up my Google business profile.

▶ 1:43So your prospects and customers are already searching for you on Google. There's only two ways around it. You need to make sure that they see you in your best light on this profile. It needs to be optimized for keywords. It needs to have nice imagery on all of that kind of thing. And you need to make sure that they can actually find you full stop.

▶ 1:56You know, so many businesses, you search up the name and they don't rank number one and people can't even find who they're looking for. Even if you've got such a high intent searcher that is searched for you specifically by brand name and they cannot find you in order to get in touch. And you will lose people like that.

▶ 2:12You think that they're going to crawl through 10 search results just to find you because, you know, they might recognize the logo that's in the little icon on the left. No chance. No. If they don't see you right at the top, you've probably lost them. Okay. So next up, we look at reputation. So load up those reviews. It is near impossible to find you online without being able to see your reviews or the lack thereof.

▶ 2:36You know, when you search up your business, your Google business profile is going to show up on the right hand side or at the top if you're on a mobile device. And right there, very prominently in a color that is very different to the rest of the profile, you will see the reviews. And it's a bloody good job that all of our customers, I mean, literally all of our clients have basically full five star.

▶ 2:55It's incredible. And we really do try to pick the best installers to work with possible because it's just, firstly, and I'm going on a bit of a tangent, I know, but it's an important point. Firstly, it's so much easier to get them results because they're actually delivering a fantastic quality service and that comes across in the sales discussions and all of that kind of stuff.

▶ 3:14Secondly, we know that the end customer is actually getting what they wanted and they're going to get support, advice, proper consultations, not be pressure sold to anything like that. And the actual work that we do is having a positive impact. And thirdly, it just comes again back to the fact that they're just so much easier to get results for because people will see a messer ad.

▶ 3:35They'll go to Google, search the business, they'll see the reviews. If you've got three stars, two stars, one star, you're stuffed. I'm sorry, you're stuffed. The only way to overcome that is to flood it with positive reviews. And I don't mean spam or fake reviews. I mean to actually just give hundreds of people positive customer experiences.

▶ 3:52That's the only way you can overcome that. So, yeah, we basically pick the best clients to work with based on their reviews. So, if you're a new installer, you might be thinking, you know, this is going to take me forever to get these many reviews. I don't even have 100 customers. Okay, fine. All hope isn't lost. Okay, but you need to go one step further.

▶ 4:10You have to make up for that. You can't just accept it to be a fact and then give up. You need to make up for that shortcoming, essentially. So, the customers that you do have, ask them for a video review. Five video reviews from your customers where they've recorded it themselves. It's very authentic. It's very raw. It's not scripted or anything like that.

▶ 4:29That will allow you to put up a fight against a company with 100 Google reviews. So, the video reviews are so much more rich and trustable and actually people feel like they can relate to the people that are in those videos. They're literally worth their weight in gold and we're seeing smaller installers with these video reviews consistently outsell the ones with really, really strong reputations that they've built up over years.

▶ 4:56Just because you're leveraging that reputation, just because you're leveraging that reputation in a far better way. And this is some examples. Your customers basically become your sales team and you might think it's difficult to get these. Yes, it is difficult to get these, but it's not that difficult if you give a stellar service and you essentially incentivize it a little bit as well.

▶ 5:17It's very, very possible and very achievable. Infinite Energy sent out a request to 20 of their customers and they got six of these video reviews back. Now, Infinite Energy give an absolutely fantastic service. So, that is going to be a massive factor as to why they were able to accomplish that. But it goes to show that it is possible and people are willing to get on camera to help you grow your business.

▶ 5:37Okay. Next, website. They've seen you go in reviews. They're going to want to see your work. So, they'll head to your website. You need to make sure that your website shows up how you show up in person. Okay. So, if you only have pictures on there that are from years or even decades ago, it looks like they're the best that you have and you haven't done any work since or that at least you haven't been proud enough to take pictures of that work and to showcase that online, which isn't a good story to tell.

▶ 6:01So, you need to make sure that it's super easy to reach out via the website and please test your contact forms are actually working. You will not believe the amount of discovery calls I get on. Every time before I do a little test on the contact form, so many of them are broken. And literally, people going onto your website, you've done all the hard bits to get them to actually want to speak to you and then they get to the point that they're actually putting in their information and you just say, basically, go do one.

▶ 6:29Because I don't care. We haven't even put the care in to check our contact form, right? The mechanism that we're hoping you get in touch with us via. Ridiculous. Okay. Check your contact forms. So, obviously, we've built hundreds, well, not hundreds, but tens of these solo websites and these are some of the examples. All of the examples I showed above are solo websites.

▶ 6:50So, yeah, if you want a website, you know what to do. So, leads are coming in for your lovely new website and your Google sheet is starting to become disorganized. Your paper pad, you're forgetting which lead is which. Do you need to follow this person who wanted battery storage? I thought they wanted solo as well. Or, oh, they said they're so like, oh, it's such a mess.

▶ 7:08I don't know who's who, right? It's time to get a proper CRM in place with features like pipeline management, automation capabilities to take some of the work off your plate. And this isn't a choice. This is a necessity. If you're going to be generating leads via social media, which I'm going to go into in a second, then you are going to have a volume that you really just cannot deal with manually without some sort of system in place.

▶ 7:33And maybe if you have a natural, well-organized Google sheet, it will work for you. But most people just have a sheet that just has like the contact details, like maybe a comment on the lead. It's not going to work. Trust me. We've seen many clients come in that have been running with that approach. They start using the CRM and it's like night and day.

▶ 7:51They are so thankful for the tool because it allows them to grow their business and to be less stressed as well. It's organized, right? So now the foundations are in place, you're utilizing your CRM, your website's portraying who you actually are. It's time to ramp things up a notch. Get yourself on camera, weave in some of the video reviews that you collected earlier.

▶ 8:09You combine all of that, combine the videos you made with some image ads for cheaper clicks and basically the ability to really quickly test what angles work. Because on an image ad, you can very easily just change the headline and you can continually test and see what is working best in your specific area. Combine that all together and you've got a willing formula for running your ads on social media and generating your leads.

▶ 8:30But how do you actually collect the leads information? Well, you need to set up a funnel. If you send them to your website, then there is far too much distraction. There's too much going on and your conversion rate will be very low. So instead, you send them to a mobile optimized funnel like the one you can see above. So you need to make sure that you use a tool, for example, Perspective, that will give you an easy to understand analytics page to see what is really happening with the traffic that you're acquiring.

▶ 8:55Okay, so where are people leaving the funnel? What percentage of visitors are actually completing the form? What questions are causing people to drop off? Is there a way that we can ask the question better? Is there a different order that we can ask the question? Remember, we did a test where we literally just changed the first question on the funnel and we doubled conversion rate, i.e. we halved lead costs.

▶ 9:15Okay, it's really important that you have visibility over this. Even if you're not going to do tons and tons of testing, when you come to the point where you need to do testing or you hire someone like us to come in and run your marketing campaigns, if you have that data available, you're going to be off to a flying start compared to someone that doesn't.

▶ 9:32So, once that's all set in place, you're ready to launch the campaigns and now you can watch the leads basically roll in, stay organized, stay on top of your CRM and make contact quickly and add more and more automations on the back end to make sure that no lead goes unserved. A hack for this is to basically record a very quick video of you saying something like, Hey, it's Jude here, thanks so much for getting in touch.

▶ 9:52Please feel free to share any more information that may assist us with your inquiry. We'll give you a call back as soon as possible and basically that's all it has to be. This is an example. This is just Tom up on a roof and he's basically just doing a very casual video. This is unedited, by the way, because we want this to feel as natural and authentic as possible.

▶ 10:10And then that gets basically sent to the lead automatically when they come into the CRM. And the important thing with this is if your face is on the ad, they will see you on the ad. They will see you on the back end in the WhatsApp message. There is an instant connection between the ad and the WhatsApp. And that's very, very important because as soon as they enter that information into your ad, they are going to be slammed with other solar advertisers.

▶ 10:33And the likelihood is they already engaged with one of those other solar advertisers. And that's the reason they're seeing your ad because they're now getting slammed with all the other ones. So you need to make sure that there's a connection there because otherwise they just won't even remember what ad they engage with and what they're receiving on the back end if it's just a plain text, for example.

▶ 10:51So you've now got more leads than you know what to do with. Your efforts are going to those who are ready to buy now, which is how it should be. You should be allocating your time and eventually your sales team's resources to those hot, hot leads, okay? However, this means that leads are slipping through the cracks and those that might have been ready in six weeks' time with the right kind of communication and nurturing are going cold.

▶ 11:13So you need to get some nurturing in place. You can do this through email sequences, WhatsApp sequences, and maybe even some organic social media content if you wish. By the way, make sure you're continuing to advertise on meta to these longer term leads so that you stay top of mind. It will take some of your budget, but it will increase your close rate massively because they will continually be shown the video reviews on their social media feed.

▶ 11:35They'll see installation overviews. They'll see the other ads, which may prompt them to think about other reasons to go solar. You need to keep showing them until you've converted them basically as a customer. There's no reason to stop. Even if you've already had a survey, you need to stay top of mind, okay? So this is an example of one of those emails you could send, and this is the automation that actually makes that happen on a 30-day basis.

▶ 11:55And it also allows people to do things like reply with the word skip, and then it sends them to the next day so that they can really quickly go through the entire sequence and almost self-nurture themselves and self-serve, which is pretty cool. So now you've pretty much got everything in place. You need to start reinvesting.

▶ 12:12This is where you scale up your campaign. So you start to add other channels. You could add Google ads to diversify your traffic sources, and that will allow you to do clever things like using the Google ads to get the really high intense search traffic and then retargeting that traffic with cheaper advertising mediums such as the meta ads, okay?

▶ 12:29Then you're going to want to build out your website further with the capability for new team members to contribute and add resources so that the website scales with you as a team. Then you're going to start to rank for competitive terms in the local area because of the advice and the guidance that you're putting out into the world.

▶ 12:43You should then start to make partnerships with other companies so that you can serve them and they can serve you from a digital marketing perspective. For example, you could make a deal to show Powerwall in your advertisements. Could be a good one. Then you want to introduce other services that you can provide to customers.

▶ 12:58For example, a full energy consumption and loss assessment for their individual needs so that you can basically give them the best solution every single time. Okay, then you want to scale up a bit more, help a shed load of people save on their energy bills, reduce their carbon footprint, collect just as many reviews, and customer case studies as people you've helped, then branch out into the commercial sector where there's higher margins, leveraging the reputation you've already built, utilize the exact same strategies before collecting customer interviews, and writing out extensive project breakdowns and case studies.

▶ 13:26Then sell the business to someone or a company that you know will uphold the values you have built, and enjoy.