Residential vs commercial solar intent isn’t what you think

▶ 0:00Morning, quick one today, we're going to talk about the nuances between residential and commercial solar intent when advertising online. So obviously, there's a really easy stuff like you want to be targeting terms like business solar. But beyond that, you have to start getting a bit more creative about how you can refine your campaigns so that if you're advertising for commercial intent, you're getting rid of that consumer intent that is typically cheaper. And if you're advertising for consumer intent, and you've got a page that's specifically tailored towards residential solar and stores, you're going to be trying to actually get rid of the commercial intent, because that's going to massively spike up your cost per click. And you wouldn't have a page on the back end that

▶ 0:38would actually convert that intent because it's all tailored towards residential. So there's two sides to it. So the main point is when advertising for your solar business, you need to make sure that you're actually putting yourself in the shoes of the person you're advertising for. So I work with a company called Assisted to run all of Sustain's digital marketing campaigns. And in this case, Sustain only want leads of a commercial nature. That's the only type of lead that they actually service. So Assisted have got a huge amount of experience in advertising for B2B, and have already got a lot of data, information, experience, etc. But have also continued to do analysis on the campaign as we've been running it to essentially filter out that consumer intent and get as much business

▶ 1:16intent as possible. And so far with that campaign, we're on a 47 times return on ad spend, which is pretty unreal if you ask me. So they really do know what they're doing. So I'm going to break down a few of the things that we've noticed. So firstly, mobile versus desktop devices. One of the things we noticed was the mobile devices had far more consumer intent than the desktop ones, typically because as you can imagine, if someone is inquiring in a business sense, they're probably on a work laptop, they're probably in the office, they're doing working hours. So they've got access to a laptop, tablet, rather than having to use their phone. If someone's searching on a consumer intent, they're much more likely to be using their mobile. As we know, you know, a huge portion of web traffic now

▶ 1:56is mobile based. So that one was pretty clear when, but the next one was days of the week. So we wanted to look at whether advertising during weekdays was more effective than weekends. And the hypothesis was that obviously, during the work week, there's going to be higher commercial intent. And that was what I imagined and why we started testing that. But when do business leaders, decision makers who are typically absolutely stacked during the week, we're just putting out fires, dealing with team members, etc. When do they actually get to sit down and think about things that are going to move the needle forward, business strategy, investments, reducing costs, it's actually outside of typical working hours

▶ 2:34when they're not stacked back to back with meetings. So what we found was that actually, although the hypothesis was kind of sound, the actual specific person that we really wanted to reach was actually doing a lot of searching in that kind of nature during the weekend. So the point is, you start the hypothesis, and then you confirm that with the data. And obviously, you got to be careful, it's not correlation by causation. But if we'd have basically just assumed and ran with the weekdays idea, then at this point, we'd have missed out on well over seven figures in commercial solar pipeline. In fact, we literally on last week on basically midnight on Friday, or 10 past midnight on the

▶ 3:13Saturday morning, a massive one to two megawatt solar lead came through with potential for a huge EV charging infrastructure. And if we weren't targeting or advertising during that period, we would have completely missed that lead. And that could be a huge one, there'll be, you know, potentially more than seven figures in deal value in itself, right? The next thing is a lower cost per click is not necessarily better. And we always harp on about this on the meta side that you want to you shouldn't use your cost per lead as your North Star as the one thing you want to always just decrease because that has no it gives no reflection on the actual quality of the leads you're generating, right. And that's why typically,

▶ 3:50when we run ads for our clients, we have a far higher cost per lead than most other advertising agencies kind of aim for. And we're fine with that because we know the progression of our leads, especially given that their social media leads is just surreal, because we know exactly how to find those kind of skim off the top of the market and of the leads that are available to get the absolute best ones that our clients can call up and can very easily channel through to a survey into a deal.

▶ 4:16So a real example is assisted and I've been actually increasing the cost per click that should say cost per click rather than cost per lead, as the consumer intent traffic is basically the cheaper end of the scale, the higher business intent that you get, and the high value business intent you get, the cost per click typically goes up. So it's actually the cost per click has gone up 400% since we started the campaign. And the goal will be to decrease the cost per lead over time.

▶ 4:39And of course, the cost per acquisition, which is the main that should really be the North Star, that should be what you're tracking with the most intensity. What does it cost me in Google ad spend to close a deal? And of course, it's not just the cost per acquisition, because of commercial solo, the deal size varies so so much, it's more a return on ad spend. So you're looking for a ratio. So 47 times is the ratio we're currently on. And then it's also not just targeting. So we initially used a multi step form on the website as the primary contact method.

▶ 5:08And I think it had three or four steps, it had the ability for someone to say if they had multiple sites, an optional field to upload energy bills. And we did this to get more information from the lead so that we could basically make that first phone call when someone goes to book the appointment, more valuable because they have more information. But we actually ended up swapping this for a very stripped back contact form and results basically doubled overnight. Because residential intent inquiries, quite often they need quite a bit of like handholding to go through the process. And you can do clever things like if someone has started a quiz by answering a very simple first question, they've

▶ 5:44then got a bit more buy in and you kind of increase the chance that they're going to give their contact details at the end. So there's some psychology around it. But for commercial, you're dealing with business owners and decision makers made the decision already that they want to inquire with you. So they just want to give their information as quickly as possible and just get the process started.

▶ 6:01So you basically just want to get out of the way as much as possible. Their time is incredibly valuable. And to go through a multi-step form, it's almost like their time is incredibly valuable. And to go through a multi-step form, it's almost not respecting their time, because especially if some of the questions like, is it is the business multi site, you can get that information by just doing a quick Google search, most likely. So the sales team have to put a little bit more extra effort in or do some initial research before that first call. But it means that you're going to increase the number of leads you get to speak to because you are going to get drop off from commercial and take inquiries when

▶ 6:36they realize they have to go through an eight step multi-step course, it was done with the best intentions. But you have to test with data and make experiments so that you can see what really works. The next thing we're going to do to carry on with that theme of basically reducing friction is actually putting that contact form or a very similar one on the page they originally land on, as opposed to them clicking a call to action like make an inquiry or contact us. And then going through to this form, it will literally just be on the page. And that again, is to basically just encourage people that it doesn't take long to actually start this process, you've got to input, you know, four fields, right,

▶ 7:09can be done in 30 seconds, you don't have to answer a long list of questions. So hopefully that was helpful. I will continue to update you on the progress of this campaign as it goes on to really exciting ones, sustain a fantastic business, deliver a fantastic service. I mean, look at that set of inverters, they're absolutely beautiful. If you want to get a copy of this document as we're building it out, a lot of people have started to express interest and enter their information to get this. It's now on like a website format, because it's on gamma, it's basically just a link. So as soon as you enter your information to that link, I will check that you're actually a solar business, and then I will send you this document. And then if you want the implementation of

▶ 7:43everything that we talk about, then you're going to basically just go to the same link, carry on. There's more questions about your business that will basically qualify you for certain offers to work with us. And then we can get a discovery call booked in. Awesome. Have a great week, and I will catch you in the next one.