Why organic content still matters for solar installers

▶ 0:00Good evening. We're going to talk about organic content today. So we don't actually sell any organic content or organic social media marketing services. So you are 100% safe from a pitch tonight. You're going to get one tomorrow though, don't worry. So organic content is incredibly important. And we always recommend it to clients when they're running their paid media campaigns. We don't personally think it should be your priority, especially as a newer installer. Maybe if you've got a bit more of an established base, then you start to really invest in organic content.

▶ 0:29I've seen Spirit Energy do some actually fantastic organic content. Kimball Tech, great content as well. If you're at that stage, then that's great. If you're a newer installer, you should probably be focusing on your paid ads and then you start doing your organic content to supplement it. So I'm going to take you through a real example from our side of how things have gone since I started really focusing on pumping out content.

▶ 0:52And I've done a video every day for over a month now. So this is my average followers on LinkedIn charted out over the course of 90 days, this chart, okay? And you can very clearly see when the content started. And I didn't quite anticipate this, but it seems like there's almost a bit of a stacking effect going on where I post one video here, one here, here, here, here, here.

▶ 1:17And they're actually starting to, those videos that were from early on are still getting traction and engagement and impressions. And therefore, the amount of reach that I'm getting in the audience I'm building is growing over time. Hello, by the way, to everyone that's new. This, obviously, followers is a vanity metric.

▶ 1:35Who cares, right? But the importance of this cannot be overlooked because these followers aren't just followers or numbers. These are real people that 90% of which, because I've gone through all of the following and connected with a few people, 90% of which are decision makers in businesses that we would love to work with.

▶ 1:52So, all of those people are now, not every day, because of the algorithm and things, but they are periodically being shown the content that I'm putting out over and over, right? And gradually, I hope, building a positive association with me and the content that I put out and the value that I try to provide. So, this stacking effect is actually quite expected because it's just building up over time.

▶ 2:22And people are getting used to the value that we provide. If you drill down to the last 30 days, you can see it almost just a bit more of a zoomed-in level. And you can see that I've gained 10 followers on average per day this month. So, 300 followers a month, roughly, is the current rate. But if you look at the past kind of week or so, it's gone absolutely crazy.

▶ 2:41And some of this will be because everyone was off over December, apart for us because we're absolutely nuts. And some of it will be the stacking effect. Why is this important to you as a solar installer, right? So, when you're running your paid media campaigns, you're going to get quite a few people that follow your social media account.

▶ 2:57When you post organically, you can show them an ad for free or, you know, a piece of content about your business for free. And you don't need to pay Meta or Google for that viewership, essentially. So, you can do this when you're literally just at an installation, just chat through the installation, post it. Don't need to edit it whatsoever.

▶ 3:18We're a huge fan of really authentic content. So, yes, we do edit our ads sometimes. You know, we'll turn up the playback speed a little bit and we'll add some captions and icons and things. But the core priority is actually making the message really clear. Especially with organic content, if you just post it completely raw and authentic, it will actually feel a lot nicer to the audience.

▶ 3:38Whereas, if you're a small installer and you try to look really big by getting some editor or Fiverr to do fancy effects and stuff, it just comes off as cheap. And the editor you get probably isn't actually that good. So, it's just going to look worse than if you just left it be. The other piece to this is that when you create these assets, you record yourself at different installations, all this kind of stuff.

▶ 4:00You're building up this bank of sales assets. And especially with organic content, because you can so easily just link to it. You can copy the link to a Facebook post, an Instagram post, LinkedIn post. When you're having these sales conversations, you can utilize those assets to further the sales conversation. So, if you're always recording a video when you do an installation or when your team does an installation, you're going to gradually build up a library of different types of properties, different hardware that you've installed, different setups, different maybe even retrofit systems.

▶ 4:33And if you explain those well, then when you have a lead coming through that meets a certain type of criteria, you can send them that very specific video that's really relevant to that. That's something we're trying to really work on ourselves as well. So, we're building out this huge Airtable asset library. And what that's going to allow us to do is to tag and categorize certain videos so that our clients can very easily go into their database of assets.

▶ 4:57And instead of having to look through different Google Drive folders, they just search, okay, I want a three-bed house. I want it to have JNCO solar panels on it. I want it to have a Tesla Powerwall 3. Every single asset that is tagged to any one of those categories is going to come up. And immediately they've got those assets ready to send to a customer, ready to use it in an ad, ready to put on the website, ready to post it.

▶ 5:23That's a great idea. So, an idea that I've just come up with myself. When you're posting organically, you can post a creative that you may plan in the future to use as an advertisement. And if it performs well organically and gets good engagement, gets comments, people like the content, people find it useful and valuable, then there's a very high likelihood that that is going to perform well as an advertising creative.

▶ 5:46Especially if you use our strategy, which is very much, we kind of steer away from offers and prices and stuff. And we actually just focus on you as an installer and what your attributes are and USPs are. Another idea that's just popped into my head from a completely random source is that followers give you authority. So, when you start up a paid advertising campaign, especially on Meta, some people would advise you that you actually run a specific paid campaign to get more followers.

▶ 6:13Because when people click onto your profile, having a few hundred followers or up to a thousand looks really nice. It looks like you've got people that keep up to date with your page and all this kind of stuff. If you do this with organic content, it's even better because those people are actually interested. And that follower count is real.

▶ 6:29And it's not just something that you kind of bought for cheap on Meta, right? He's riffing them off now. Can you just sit here? And the final piece to it is that with organic content, you can hit someone over and over and over and over and over and over. That with organic content, you could hit someone over and over and over and over again without having to pay and use your advertising budget that you would otherwise with your retargeting.

▶ 6:57So, bit of a roundup on content. Again, we don't offer organic content services and we probably never will because Joe will have a heart attack if I sell that. But it is something that you should definitely be doing as almost at the very least a tick box exercise, just getting a post out every single week, stuff like that.

▶ 7:14Cool. That's all for now. I will catch you in the next one.