Can Online Advertising Grow Your Solar Installation Business?

will often turn to the Internet to find a reliable installation service. With environmental consciousness a hotter theme than ever before, now is the perfect time for you to start with online advertising to grow your solar installation business. It is incredibly important to optimize your online presence in order to stand out from the competition. That may seem intimidating from the get go, however the benefits you can reap from online advertising far outweigh any time and effort you have to put in.

In this article, we list out several different ways online advertising can grow your solar installation business.

Invest in Professional Web Design

The first step is to ensure that your website is professionally designed and easy to navigate. Have you ever come across a shoddily designed website without useful tabs which you can use to navigate? If so, you will not want to replicate such a terrible user experience. A professional web design not only adds to the brand image you are trying to convey, it gives customers the message that you can be trusted and know what you are doing. Even if the products and services you are offering are of high quality, nobody will get a chance to find that out if the first impression you make is far from positive.

Besides containing important information about your company and services, your website should include photos and content that will help the visitor get a better understanding of your business. You can also include customer testimonials and an online form they can fill up within seconds to get in touch with you. Once you have finalized your website design, you will need to start focusing on the content you produce, which will inform your SEO strategy.

How Google’s algorithms work is that the longer a visitor stays on your website, the more “useful” Google ranks your website as. This makes sense: if a visitor is leaving your website within seconds, this tells Google that the content on your website isn’t very useful and bumps down your rating. This is why a professional web design is so important for your solar installation business.

Produce Engaging and Educational Content

Now that you are satisfied with your web design, it’s time to take a look at the content you can produce. Solar energy is still a pretty new thing for most customers, which naturally means they have lots of unanswered questions. This is where you are at an advantage as compared to businesses in other industries: unanswered questions can be turned into engaging and educational content such as blog posts, infographics and videos.

When you address an issue customers face regularly, you are engaging with them and building trust. Positioning yourself as the “market expert”, customers will build a personal connection with your brand if you can give them the answer or solution they are looking for. You can explore further with content by producing infographics, shooting videos where you interview industry experts, host webinars and more.

This has the benefit of retaining visitors for as long as it takes them to read one blog post or watch a video. When this happens, similarly, Google rates your website as “useful”, which in turn, boosts your SERP ranking. Furthermore, if visitors find your content useful, they are more likely to share it with friends and family, resulting in increased traffic to your website.

Re-Engage Existing Leads

Always engage with existing leads who have somehow run cold. Do not underestimate their potential – oftentimes, customers are lazy and do not engage until the need is urgent. Or you could have contacted a lead at the wrong time – a perfectly timed email can make the difference in their choosing to engage your services or that of a competitor’s. Keep old leads warm by constantly re-engaging them through fresh content, such as an email newsletter.

You can even run ads targeted towards your existing customer base, such as offering a discount code for customers who have not engaged your services for a fixed period of time, say, six months. By getting visitors to your website to enter their email to receive regular updates, you can keep customers in the loop regularly and conveniently. An incentive such as a one-time discount off their first purchase can help to get visitors to sign up to your email alert service.

Get on Social Media

There’s no easy way to say this: if you are not on social media in the 21^st century, you are missing out on a huge base of potential customers. Whether it’s a Facebook page, Twitter account or Instagram account, get your solar installation business online immediately. The benefits of social media are multifold: not only can you share links to your content on your page, your viewers can immediately “share” this on their own pages or privately to friends and family. With such a wide network of referrals, you can expect your customer base to widen significantly when you get on social media.

Additionally, social media makes it easier for customers to interact with you and one another. If they have any questions about your products or services, they can simply drop you a message instantly. If they are pleased with your services, they can leave a positive review or comment which can then be viewed instantly by potential customers looking to make the leap to conversion.

Analyze Your Data to Obtain Actionable Insights

Once you have decided how you want to go about your online advertising strategy, it’s time to put it into action! But the hard work doesn’t stop once you have launched the different aspects of your online advertising such as designing your webpage and starting a blog. To find out whether your strategy has been effective, you will need to analyze the data garnered from your advertising campaign. Fortunately, you can assess this data through Google Analytics. The real hard work comes in making sense of it and deriving actionable insights that can help you improve your strategy and remove aspects that don’t seem to be working.

You will be able to see how many visitors were at your website during a certain day and time period, how they got there – be it from a search engine result, link from social media or more – as well as how long they spent on your site. And that’s not all. However, this is a good enough start for you to discern if your online advertising strategy is working or needs significant rework.

If you are looking to grow the customer base for your solar installation business, it’s time to adopt some of these online advertising strategies. Making your online presence known is an ongoing task, which means that even after you have taken steps to implement your strategy, constant monitoring is needed to keep it going. This is where spending some time to review and analyze your data and deriving actionable insights from it can go a long way. Do not underestimate the importance of online advertising in today’s world – you are missing out on a huge customer base if you do not pay attention to it.

If you are feeling daunted or stuck for ideas, remember that you know the ins and outs of your industry better than anyone else. Furthermore, you know your customers and what they want, hence you are in a very unique position of being able to give them what they are looking for. With a superb online advertising strategy, you can sit back and watch your solar installation business grow by leaps and bounds.