What we’ve actually been doing to generate solar demand

▶ 0:00Hello, welcome back. It's Jude from solaronstellers.com. I haven't done one of these, like, I've done videos quite recently, website launch videos, but I haven't done content content for an absolutely, well, for a whole minute. I think the last video I did was about a residential solar website wireframe, and I think that was about almost a year ago now. So excited to get back on camera, and basically this video is just going to be us kind of talking through what we've been up to over the past kind of year or so, helping solar installers scale.

▶ 0:30specifically from a marketing and demand generation perspective. The reason we're creating this video is because we're basically going to be making a, what we're calling a magnum opus of everything to do with demand generation for solar companies, and we're going to make this massive long document, and hopefully if we stick to the plan, we're going to document and kind of create videos to explain each part of that as we create it, which will, you know, be really, really useful.

▶ 0:56And at the end, if you go ahead and go to the link and, you know, opt in and all that good stuff, you'll get access to this document, and you can even watch us build it live if you want. So click the link somewhere in this post, and you can enter your info and get this document. So, I mean, there's nothing valuable on it yet, but there will be.

▶ 1:12So, that being said, I'm not going to go into detail on our offer in this video. If you are interested, go check out our landing page and watch the video on there. If you need a reason to check out the video, I'm sitting almost stunned by how good your video came across. I can't ignore you. It's 100% on point, and I would love to find out more. By far, you hit 10 or more of my wants and desires in that one video.

▶ 1:33So, that's from a residential solar installer that we reached out to. So, hopefully that gives you enough persuasion to go check that out and see what it's all about. But there is a problem. Dun, dun, dun. We've been delivering really fantastic results for our clients almost entirely under the radar since we presented at Solo and Storage Live early this year.

▶ 1:52So, that means no ads. We've been running, obviously, our clients' ads, but no ads for ourselves. No content. Only recently started with a cold outreach campaign, which is what that email was from. And we've actually got to a point now where, simply because of the results and people kind of recommending us and referring us, etc., that we're starting to actually have to turn away installers that don't meet our specific requirements.

▶ 2:14So, you know, it's things like a certain amount of reviews if they're a residential installer, MCS, all of that kind of thing. So, but we still really want to help those installers that potentially aren't there yet and especially don't qualify for our kind of hero offer where we cover the ad spend for the client. Spoiler, if you want to learn more, go check out the video.

▶ 2:35But we still want to help those people and help them, you know, help make the pie bigger, essentially. And this document, the whole purpose of it is that that is what it will aim to do. And we will leave no stone unturned and we will essentially sell the implementation of this document as opposed to the strategy itself.

▶ 2:54This is the plan. We're going to make this magnum opus of solar demand generation. Go get a copy from this link. This is a bit of a overview of what this might look like, the kind of categories and topics. We're going to go over everything to do with trust and reputation, everything to do with ads, specifically meta ads for the time being.

▶ 3:12A little bit on Google ads, but not so much yet. We're definitely more specialized on the meta ad side. Conversion, how you actually convert social media leads, you know, in a way that actually generates high quality leads as opposed to just leads. Websites and how primarily how you can present client transformations or customer transformations in the best way possible on your website.

▶ 3:33Nurturing, how you can actually keep leads warm and therefore you can attract leads that are higher up in the funnel. And because of the nurturing processes you've got in place, you can get them for cheaper, but they're still just as good leads. They just need more time and they need more education. And if you've got the automatic processes in place, that doesn't necessarily mean that that is time that you need to put into nurturing those leads that can be done automatically.

▶ 3:56So then we're going to go on to sales. And to be honest, we're just getting most of this information from our clients. Obviously, we've done our own research and things, but our clients have given us absolutely fantastic insights into what is working in the market from a sales perspective. And then just automation to kind of keep it all together.

▶ 4:13Cool. So first of all, let's go into what have we been up to. So to be honest, this video is going to be just a breakdown of what we've already been doing. There's not really going to be many insights in this. So if you're looking for value, probably switch off. But it's good to give the context, especially if someone's watching one of the videos that come later and they're like, well, you know, how can I trust what these guys are saying?

▶ 4:35Then come back to this video and hopefully it will give you enough kind of, you know, evidence to say that we know what we're talking about. So Infinite Energy, we're basically the first client to take us on with the full approach and our kind of unique mechanism of covering ad spend. And the key thing that we try to do is essentially decommoditize you as an installer.

▶ 4:57Solar, there are 5,000 MCS solar installers in the country and solar installation in some ways has become a commodity service, a commoditized service, but it doesn't have to be. There are plenty of installers that have such a way of delivering service and they use the highest quality products. They give the best quality customer experience that it doesn't have to be a commodity service and you can really separate yourself from the crowd.

▶ 5:24And that's what we do. So let's go straight into the numbers. Infinite are rocking an eight times return on ad spend at the moment, all with zero upfront cost and zero ongoing cost. In fact, we covered the ad spend for the entirety of this period, 52K in revenue, 22K profit on just 6.5K of ad spend that we covered. And then their overall profit, 15.4.

▶ 5:48And this is, you know, one of the installs that they did as a result of that. Their campaign is going from strength to strength. So they actually closed three deals last week from the meta ads and that's only on 2K a month meta ad spend. And obviously it's not three deals every week. I don't want to set that expectation.

▶ 6:04But three deals closed in one week on 2K a month spend is pretty impressive, especially coming in. Well, what was the last week of November? So how did they do it? They went all the way. All credit to them. They basically took everything that we suggested and were like, yeah, let's do it. So we threw everything at the wall and basically saw what sticks.

▶ 6:24So first of all, we started, we implemented a brand new website. Again, no upfront cost for this website. As you can see, it's really clean, really conversion focused. You've got one of the big things that we really emphasize is the case studies. So you've got really nice detailed case study pages and the presentation of results in a way that customers actually understand.

▶ 6:48And then, of course, just things that, you know, nice conversion touches. Then we focused on reputation. So Infinite Energy already had an absolutely stellar reputation. But there's a lot of things you can do to leverage or present that reputation in a better way. So when we take on an installer, we'll say that they, to qualify for our primary offer, they need to have a certain amount of Google or Trustpilot reviews because that puts them in a position where more often than not, they're basically, they have everything ready to go, but they're not leveraging it as much as they otherwise could do.

▶ 7:22So what we do is we do a campaign to reach out to your existing lead or customers, or more specifically, people that have given a review in the past or you think would give a review. We reach out to them and we basically get them to become your sales team. So we will send them a link to a custom page that has got the ability for them to record a video review for you.

▶ 7:46And it can be 30 seconds long. It can be 20 seconds long. It can be three and a half minutes long. And they basically become your sales team. So we found this is the closest we can get to that in-person referral effect without doing things that can come across a little bit unauthentic. So like big referral fees or an affiliate program, these video reviews are basically as close as we can get to that without just sticking a big £200 referral fee on it and it all feeling a little bit pyramid scheme-y type of thing.

▶ 8:20So the idea is I'm going through as an overview of what we did to get the results that we got. And then in each of these videos going forward, I'm going to be going into one of these topics in significantly more depth. So I will do an entire module on video reviews and how to collect them, why they're so important, what the difference between video reviews and video interviews are, which might not seem like much, but it's a huge difference and they have different use cases.

▶ 8:47One, actually, you can see how excited I get because I'm just about to go into a spiel about the difference. But you're going to have to watch that video to find out why we use them and where we use them in different places. So next up, we absolutely just scrapped their existing ad strategy. So they were working with an agency previously to run their meta ads.

▶ 9:06They were running ads like this one. I'm sure this looks very familiar. And you can probably imagine what kind of leads they were getting from an ad like that. They were getting leads that thought they were just getting a free EV charger with no solar involved whatsoever, because that's basically small print at this point.

▶ 9:27They were entirely price focused because the reason they inquired in the first place was nothing to do with infinite energy. It was simply to do with the fact that they were getting a supposedly free EV charger. And basically, they just got tons of leads that they had to waste time calling. And none of them actually closed over three months of advertising with equal spend to what we're spending.

▶ 9:49They've already closed like six deals. So very, very different. So first of all, if we just do a direct comparison with the single image ad, if we create single image ads, we take an entirely different approach. Thus far, we have never put a price on a single image ad. And I don't think we will do into the future. And Joe's going to do a video on that.

▶ 10:10And we actually run ads that say things like, considering solar, you'll find cheaper, but not better. We won't be your solar quote. Five star rated install. That's a bit more typical. But then your energy, your energy company versus a local solar installer. And these comparison ones do really well. And then this is, yeah, probably the best one.

▶ 10:29Want cheap solar? Find someone else. And obviously, you are going to almost immediately disqualify a large proportion of the leads that are browsing Facebook that are looking for the best price. But unless you're really just trying to tick through volume at a breakeven margin, do you really want leads that are just interested in price?

▶ 10:53And they have no interest whatsoever in who actually installs their system. All they care about is that they can get that nice 5995 or that their energy company is 250 quid more if you're really trying to cut your margin by that much. So videos are our specialty. So we create video ads like the ones that you can see kind of in a preview GIF here that have a really, really strong hook that stop the click and get that first engagement.

▶ 11:21But most importantly, they have either a member of your team or ideally the owner of the business front and center as the actor. So we actually go around and we're going to visit Infinite Energy tomorrow, actually. And we go film these assets with you. So we'll come to visit one of your installs and we'll get the camera out and start filming one of these.

▶ 11:43In fact, I think all of these were filmed by the client, but that's something that we've introduced because having the phone kind of moving a little bit actually really helps with how, you know, authentic it feels, how natural it feels. So we've introduced that into our offer. So we come and film for you now. Then we show, so you'll remember the video reviews above, we show those to the warm audiences.

▶ 12:05So as soon as someone engages with one of these ones at the top, they are immediately hit with a relentless barrage of these retargeting ads that primarily feature your customers. So this one on the left with Paul, Paul, you can see that it was originally three and a half minutes. We basically snipped it up, did some editing.

▶ 12:24You know, I can mute it there. Did some animations and all that kind of thing to just keep it really engaging. And that's our best performing creative yet. We're not going to, you know, try to hide that as a secret. It's just fantastic. It couldn't be more simple. No one told Paul what to say. There was no script. There was no guidance.

▶ 12:47It was basically just, Paul, do you mind hopping on video with your own phone or selfie camera and talking a little bit about your experience with Infinite Energy? Paul chatted away for three minutes and that has generated Infinite Energy a significant amount of revenue. So, and it's all thanks to Paul. So it's a really fantastic combo.

▶ 13:08Then we've got to start thinking about how do we actually convert those leads. It's all well and good having all that traffic and interest. But if you're just going to send them to a lead form, you're still going to struggle. So native meta lead forms are absolutely terrible. The main problem comes from just how easy they are to actually complete.

▶ 13:26You know, Facebook even allows you to also fill the information, your contact details and anything else. It's just too easy. People do it without even thinking. Quite often, you know, kids will do it on their parents' phones and all that kind of thing. And because they're so common, not only is it too easy to complete and there's not enough friction, but you look exactly like everyone else.

▶ 13:46And even if your ad is completely different, the way that you convert that person is exactly the same as everyone else. So the process just feels, you know, unoriginal. It just feels like you're just churning out these leads as opposed to actually giving someone a more bespoke experience. So to combat this, we essentially build out these custom landing pages with quiz funnels on them.

▶ 14:10And you can see a little demo here. These are absolutely fantastic for qualifying your leads by asking questions that are really valuable to know before that first call. By actually helping them envision the benefits of solar and other renewable technologies. So, you know, you get them to choose a service. But then what appeals to you the most?

▶ 14:31And firstly, that's great because they look at the options and they go, oh, wow. So solar has all those benefits, savings, environment, property value. But then secondly, you get on the phone and you can immediately say, oh, I noticed, you know, I know you're looking to reduce your carbon footprint. What was the motivation for that?

▶ 14:49So it arms you with information that you otherwise wouldn't achieve. And you can see a few different examples of that. And of course, we personalize them. So when someone enters their first name, we then utilize that through the rest of the form. And it makes it feel really quite nice, actually. A really nice tailored experience.

▶ 15:06So since starting that with Infant Energy, we're basically constantly iterating. And this is just a spreadsheet we're using to kind of keep track of the progression and the impact that adding another question or a specific question has. Obviously, no prizes for guessing that, you know, asking for the phone number is quite a significant drop off.

▶ 15:26But that's fine because anyone that isn't willing to give their phone number probably isn't a very high intent lead. And with this setup in particular, we're very much looking for ready to buy leads. We're not really looking for the top of the funnel kind of leads. So Infinite were ready to blast their pipeline with leads.

▶ 15:45And that can only go well, right? You know, that can only be a positive. But without a proper sales CRM in place, very quickly, you're going to lose track. And you're not going to maximize the returns of the leads that you're making. And therefore, your cost per acquisition is going to go sky high through the roof when in reality, if you just kept organized over everything, it may have actually been quite sensible.

▶ 16:10So we implemented a CRM for them built on Lead Connector. I'm not going to bore you with all the features, but we are going to do a video basically comparing different solar CRMs so that you can check that. And the main point I want to state with the CRM is that when well utilized, it creates a stacking effect. That is the entire purpose of a CRM.

▶ 16:34So even if you're consistently generating 10 leads per week, this is what that starts to look like in terms of total leads. And then this is what that looks like in terms of deals. I don't know why it's saying fruit, but you can see that the deals start off quite slow. You're only getting one a week, for example. And then it goes up to two and then it goes up to two again and then four and then five a week.

▶ 16:58Because your leads are starting to stack in the pipeline and their sales cycles are, you know, they vary. So you might have one person that was generated in week one, closed in week two. Another person generated in week two, closed in week seven. Because it takes time for someone to progress through the process. So you really want to fill out the front and ensure that every single person that can does go all the way through.

▶ 17:25Of course, it's also the foundation for anything that's automatic, any automated nurturing. So what we do is we have a 30-day email nurturing campaign. This is an example of one of those emails. Again, very transformation focused, very customer focused. And then we also have a WhatsApp video greeting that gets sent automatically that basically just says like, thanks so much for your inquiry.

▶ 17:48We're currently out of office at the moment, probably crying at the leads match. And we'll get back to you as soon as we can. In the meantime, feel free to share some additional info about what you're looking for. And it's really simple, but it does the job. And it builds, again, it just, it's another really warm, natural touch point.

▶ 18:05As opposed to just sending, we're going to do a video on this actually, where basically Joe and I just inquired to like 50-odd solar companies to just figure out what people were doing in terms of, you know, giving customers or leads, I should say, prospects a good experience when they inquire. And it was just hilarious.

▶ 18:27Like one company in particular, we got, we literally, all we got back was an email with an inquiry number on it. Like, as a customer, how does that make you feel? You're literally just a number in a system in a, that's the, all you've received is something automatic. There's got no care put into it. It's got none of the information you even entered and submitted, put into it.

▶ 18:48It's just basically a ticket number. I just thought that was really poor personally. But yeah, so, so all of this is prepared with basically these four principles in mind. So you've got rapport, education, clarity, and urgency. And if you can get all of those right, even without the urgency, it's only going to stack in the pipeline and people will go through eventually.

▶ 19:11Then, of course, we basically just repeat. We collect assets from the installs that are generated, including the video reviews, and then we refuel the advertisements with those new assets. And obviously, we're constantly testing the first few minutes, or sorry, few seconds of each ad, because that's the most important.

▶ 19:31And then that's what we're going to be doing tomorrow with Infinite. We're going to be basically doing, recording a few new ad scripts that we think could outperform the best performers that we're currently running with. This isn't just working for Infinite Energy. I know it's been the Infinite Energy show so far, but NYE booked two surveys within 24 hours of launching and closed their first install in the first week.

▶ 19:53On a completely fresh ad account with no existing advertising data. So when a lot of people say it's going to take three months to consistently generate results, there's an element of truth in that because there's no conversion data on the ad account, which essentially is just basically information that tells Facebook the person that you're actually kind of looking for.

▶ 20:14But even without that, just because of the way we kind of script the ads, the way that we do the targeting. So for example, Chris from NYE, in the ad itself said, homeowners in Derbyshire, stop scrolling. I've got something for you. And then went on about solar. So at the very least, we know that the people that are stopping scrolling are homeowners likely in Derbyshire.

▶ 20:37And that kind of, it's a bit of a shortcut to get you to the people that you want to be showing the ad to. And Facebook picks up on that, right? Whereas if you just started with, oh, what's the classic? Why don't homeowners in England have solar? It's because they don't know about the UK government grant. Oh, just awful.

▶ 20:57It's not as tailored. It's not as specific to the audience. And then, of course, we do exactly the same approach. So video ads that have got a really strong hook to start the process and then video interviews or video reviews to nurture and actually ideally get that conversion. It typically takes someone, you know, at least two, three times of seeing your ads to actually convert and to take an action.

▶ 21:22So it's really important that we have a really nice collection of materials to show them in the retargeting. What about the commercial sector? I know there'll be a few commercial solar businesses watching this right now. Our primary focus right now is the residential sector, apart for one or two very specific clients. But for those clients, one of them, we've generated over £800,000 in deals closed so far on only £17,000 of ad spend, which is pretty huge.

▶ 21:51It's a 47 times return on ad spend. And that's just deals that have already closed. There are a lot in the pipeline, seven-figure deals that have not closed yet. So that's very, very exciting. And here's just a few of the, you know, this is the lead tracking spreadsheet. You know, you've got a 388k deal, 299, 71, 20k deal, but 10 properties.

▶ 22:16Yeah, really good stuff. We also do a lot of work supporting Royal Energy, who do commercial solar cold email. So we build out all of their landing pages for their clients. There's quite a few more on here, but the landing pages haven't launched yet. So we've got to keep those quiet for the time being until those launch.

▶ 22:33But that's been good fun and has been really helping the performance of the cold email campaigns. Because obviously there are a lot of people that are just right on the edge of replying to the email and booking a call. And they just need a really tailored page that is really conversion focused. So these pages, they only have one conversion event, which is the book a call button.

▶ 22:53They just need that to basically push them over the line or even just to encourage them to actually reply. So what happens next? We're basically going to be running this content sprint. If you're still watching this, then major props to you because it's basically just been an update to give context for people that are going to watch other videos later.

▶ 23:12I promise there will be more value in the subsequent videos. But all of the content is going to be 100% free. Obviously, yes, it's blocked behind an email kind of opt-in to get access to this full document. We also don't fulfill it automatically. If you put your email in and you don't get it, we'll send you an email. But we're only going to be sending this to actual verified solar business email addresses for good reason.

▶ 23:40There's a lot of very valuable material in here that we kind of want to keep under wraps. And of course, all the content is going to be 100% specific to solar because we only work with solar companies. So we can be really, really niche. And we've already mapped out over 100 content ideas. And these are all very specific topics that should provide a lot of value to solar companies, to marketing directors in solar companies.

▶ 24:09I will leave you with this. You'll remember from our solar and storage live presentation. If you haven't watched that, definitely go watch it. It's got a lot of good content in there. That every solar business has a customer acquisition staircase. And that basically takes someone from unaware of you all the way up to having their system installed.

▶ 24:28And you need, so basically, the way this kind of like maps out in my weird and wacky head, is that you need nurturing to prevent a gap in your staircase. So quite often, when you work with an agency or even run ads yourself, you'll have your offer and your ads. And then someone becomes a lead, but there's this massive gap.

▶ 24:49There's no email nurturing. There's no WhatsApp nurturing. They didn't get a text like confirming it. They didn't go through a landing page. They haven't really been exposed to your brand. They've just gone straight through a meta lead form. There's lots and lots of steps that basically create this gap that makes it so much harder for someone to jump from actually converting on the paid ad side to becoming a high intent lead.

▶ 25:13Similar situation if you buy from lead aggregators, except you didn't do the paid ads or the offer. So it's even worse. You're missing the whole front end of the staircase, which is how the model works. They take control of that. But you pay a price for that, not only in terms of how expensive the leads are, but also from the perspective of the leads are going to be much harder to progress because they haven't been generated through your materials.

▶ 25:40They've been generated through a third party. And then finally, the last thing you want to do is rent out your staircase altogether, which is what's happening a lot with a lot of partner programs with a lot of potentially kind of tech first companies that are really software companies that are obviously having a big impact on the solar space.

▶ 26:00So be careful if you're doing that. Obviously, good luck if they ever change their conditions or if you ever get a bad review from a difficult customer as part of their scheme, because they've obviously got very, very long queues of installers waiting to take your spot or if they go bust, which I don't think is very likely with a lot of these, but it's a possibility.

▶ 26:21So, join us for the next month and we'll basically catch you up to scratch and build your bloody staircase. And of course, got to do the mandatory pitch at the end. If you want to get a copy of this document as we're building it out, so it's literally got nothing on it right now. It's just got what I talked through today, but it will become incredibly valuable over time.

▶ 26:44Then go to this link. It will be on this piece of content somewhere. And if you want the implementation of everything that we've shown, then that's a different matter. But go to the same link and basically just answer a few more additional questions and we will be in touch if you're qualified. There's questions that ask you things like, you know, how many installs are you doing a month?

▶ 27:05Are you MCS certified? Do you do residential, commercial, etc.? If you're qualified, you'll get the opportunity to book a call with us and we'll basically see how we can help. But yeah, thanks so much for watching. This has been a long one. The next ones are going to be much, much shorter because, to be honest, it took way too long to put together as well.

▶ 27:25So I really need it to be much shorter so that I can actually go back to doing some work. But yeah, excited to put this out into the world and hopefully it helps a lot of companies grow. So cheers. I will catch you in the next one.