As a solar system installer, the success of your company depends on your ability to generate the best solar leads, aka. prospects that showed interest in installing a solar system in their house or commercial property.
Generating solar leads can be a black box for many solar business owners, and they are right. How many agencies out there are trying to make you buy solar leads that end up not converting?
In this article, I will give you 10 marketing hacks and strategies to generate solar leads, either you are a beginner in lead generation or more advanced. You won’t even need a website.
Solar leads: buying vs. organic
Should you buy solar leads, or generate them organically for free? Let’s break down the pros and cons of both options.
Buy the best solar leads
Buying solar leads consists of paying for the contact details of a prospect that showed interest in installing a solar system. Agencies specialize in selling solar leads. They use their own marketing strategies to acquire leads that they resell to solar companies.
Here are a few considerations to keep in mind when selecting a solar lead agency.
What to consider when buy solar leads?
Shared vs. exclusive solar leads: shared leads are sold to several solar companies. Although they are cheaper, they are harder to close due to the large amount of quotes they receive from all the other solar companies. On the other hand, exclusive leads are more expensive, but show a higher closing rate due to the fact that you may be the only company quoting them.
Lead Age: This important metric is often disregarded by solar company owners: When did the lead express an interest in installing a solar system? Was it 1 hours ago, 1 month ago, 1 year ago? You see, Lead Age impacts significantly your chances to close. Make sure to ask the Lead Age to your leads provider, and if he can’t answer this question, you expose yourself to a batch of old leads with low value.
Qualified Leads: before buying a lead, understand how the lead was qualified. Meaning, what filters did he passed through before being sold to you. For example, was the lead asked the “what’s your budget” question? If not, you will buy leads that may not even be able to afford your solution. Ask your leads provider the filters that have been applied to the leads.
What is the average cost of a solar lead?
The cost of a solar lead varies greatly depending on: quality, exclusivity vs. shared, lead age, region.
For example, an average lead cost per sale is $225 in North Dakota, $300 in Ohio, while it skyrockets to $1,929 in California, and $1,357 in New York (source).
Where to buy quality solar leads?
Here is a selection of the popular solar lead generation agencies. Make sure you do your due diligence before selecting any:
RGR Marketing: offers high-quality, validated solar leads that are real-time and specifically targeted to customers interested in installing solar panels. Their service stands out with a focus on lead accuracy and customer satisfaction, ensuring businesses can connect with prospects ready to take action.
CraftJack: specializes in lead generation services tailored to the solar industry, delivering high-quality, phone-verified leads that are more likely to convert into sales. Their platform offers these leads at an affordable price, ensuring solar businesses connect with customers actively seeking solar installation.
LeadGenius: is a prominent lead generation service that offers diverse solutions for solar businesses. However, since they provide general leads across various industries, some solar companies may find that these leads are less targeted to their specific needs.
Clean Energy Experts: offers a comprehensive solar lead generation service that provides high-quality, real-time leads with no upfront costs or contracts. Their leads are rigorously verified, ensuring that businesses receive only interested and qualified prospects, helping companies grow while optimizing their marketing efforts.
Is it worth buying solar leads?
In short, yes. When done properly, buying solar leads will make you gain new customers in a profitable way. The difficulty lays in finding the right leads (at the right price) that will resonate with your offer. And it may take a few trials and errors. With perseverance, you will be able to successfully add paid solar leads in your marketing mix.
Organic solar lead generation
What to consider when generating organic solar leads?
Organic solar leads come from the marketing content that you post in your different marketing channels.
Pros:
- Organic solar leads are free
- Exclusive leads: the leads that contact you directly are exclusive. They won’t be submerged by dozens of quotes from competitors.
- Inbound leads: the leads that come directly to you have a higher conversion rate due to their clear intent to receive a quote from your company
Cons:
- Creating content (videos, articles) takes time
- Delayed results: Mastering the skill of content creation takes time. Your content competes with other content creators for the views of your audience.
Is it worth generating organic solar leads?
100%. Generating recurring organic solar leads has a great competitive advantage: high ROI, no marketing cost, control over your lead generation. It just takes time and a curious mind to learn and improve constantly, but that’s worth the investment.
Marketing strategies to buy solar leads
You are considering buying solar leads? Great decision!
If you don’t know from where to start, here are my 6 marketing strategies that will maximize your chances of success.
There are 2 ways to buy leads: either you buy them from a third party (lead gen agency) or you pay for your own leads (by running ads).
Let’s consider each case.
Buy solar leads from a third party
Pros:
- Fast delivery: get leads instantly
- Easy to forecast results: ROI, costs, and revenue
Cons:
- Competitive: leads can be shared
- Expensive: you pay a premium since you have to pay for the marketing costs, the staff, and the profit margin of the third party agency
- Quality: You can’t be 100% sure of the quality controls agencies put in place
Here are 3 marketing hacks to maximize your chances of success when buying solar leads to a third party.
- Buy aged solar leads: Aged solar leads are individuals or businesses that previously showed interest in solar installations but did not commit immediately. These leads, ranging from 30 to 2000 days old, are typically more affordable and provide valuable customer information, making them an efficient option for companies looking to enter the solar market. These leads can provide a higher return on investment (ROI) because solar buyers often take longer to decide, allowing businesses to acquire pre-qualified prospects who have already shown interest in solar solutions. Lead cost can drop as low as $0.25. Check UpLead to find aged solar leads.
- Buy qualified solar appointment: Buy scheduled meetings with potential customers who are already interested in solar solutions and have met specific criteria. These appointments are pre-vetted, ensuring higher chances of conversion and saving businesses time in prospecting. Check Solaraml to get pre-set appointments.
- Pay-per-sale solar leads: businesses only pay for a lead once a sale is successfully made. This approach ensures that companies are only investing in leads that convert, offering a cost-effective solution with minimized risk.
Buy your own leads
Pros:
- Better ROI (in the long term)
- Controlled acquisition: you don’t depend on an external company to acquire leads
- Exclusive leads
- Quality: you decide what filters to apply when generating your own leads
Cons:
- Higher upfront costs: it takes a few trials and error before getting it right
- Delayed results: Due to higher upfront costs, you delay the acquisition of the necessary volume of leads to generate business
Here are 3 marketing strategies you can use today to start buying your own leads.
Run Local Service Ads
Google’s Local Service Ads (LSAs) are a paid advertising feature that allows businesses to appear at the top of Google search results when users look for services in their area. People call your number directly. You don’t even need to have a website.
Because LSAs are local ads, they tend to perform better than regular Google ads. They are also super simple to set up:
- Simply create a Google Ads Account
- Select the category “Solar energy contractor”
- Add your company’s details (name, phone number, etc.)
- Make sure to cap your budget
And you are set to start receiving phone calls from people in your area interested in your services.
Run Facebook ads
Despite what we may hear about Facebook, it remains one of the best platform to generate leads.
The setup is a bit more advanced than the LSAs’, but still simple:
- Create a Meta Business account
- Create a Lead Generation campaign
- Select your audience: demographics, locations, interests
- Upload your ad: think about a strong hook. Videos perform better.
- Make sure to cap your budget
Since Facebook has its own built-in lead generation tool, you don’t even need a website. Start your ads and watch the leads coming in.
There is a learning curve here as well. So if your first few ads don’t perform, don’t stop here. Make some tweaks in your audience and hook, and try again.
Track the source of your leads
When you have several ads running from different channels: Google, Facebook, emailing, etc. you want to track where your leads are coming from.
So when a lead transforms into a paid customer, you want to be able to loop back this sale to the specific ad that generated it.
That’s what Leadsources.io allows you to do. Leadsources is a simple lead source tracking software that tracks the source of your leads.
Select a channel below to see what lead source data is provided by Leadsources when a new lead fills out your form:
Start your free trial today!
Marketing strategies to generate organic solar leads
Generating free organic leads month in month out is the holy grail for all businesses. But just a few are actually doing it. If you don’t want to let these customers fall into your competitors’ arms, these marketing strategies are for you!
Create a Google Business Profile
As the owner of a local company, you have to have a Google Business Profile. Google Business Profiles appear in Google’s Local Pack, a dedicated section for local searches, boosting visibility for local businesses.
According to BrightLocal (2023), 87% of consumers have searched for a local business on Google, making it the prime platform for local businesses seeking visibility.
This aims to boost your business’s visibility in search engine results for geographically specific queries such as “solar installer New Jersey”.
46% of Google searches have a local intent, making Google Business essential to capture potential customers.
Post regularly on Instagram
Instagram is the perfect social media for your solar company:
- Your ideal customer profile is on Instagram (as opposed to TikTok – although it’s debatable)
- Instagram provides a decent reach for content creators
Here is how the customer journey works on Instagram:
- Someone sees your video in their Instagram feed
- They interact with your content: like, comment, share, follow
- Instagram shows them more of your content
- When they are in-market, you will be the first company they will contact
During the process, you also have built trust with your potential customers, and may have answered some of their questions already. They will tend to convert better than cold leads.
Creating Instagram videos is an art that can be learned. If you are new into content creation, I would advise to purchase a digital product from a mentor. It will save you a tremendous amount of time.
Launch a YouTube channel
YouTube is a great platform for solar companies where they can take the time to educate their audience about their industry, services and products. Building trust with a large targeted audience as a result.
An easy way to start in YouTube is by answering the most asked questions in a concise video (4-8 minutes).
Here is a YouTube video creation process:
- List your 12 most asked questions (1 question = 1 video)
- Create the outline for each video: intro, part 1, part 2, part 3, call to action
- Shoot 1 video a month: no fancy equipment, a smartphone and a good microphone are enough
Launch your first 12 videos without paying attention at the views. Almost everybody get low views during the first 6-12 months. And do not forget, YouTube has a learning curve. Simply try to improve with each video: thumbnail, hook, content, etc.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the practice of optimizing a website or online content to increase its visibility and ranking on Google.
This is the only marketing strategy in this article that actually requires a website.
- People search your service on Google
- You appear in the top search results
- They click on your website
- They fill out your contact form
Since people search for your service on Google, they usually have a higher purchase intent than on other marketing channels.
To get started with SEO:
- Identify what keywords people in your industry search (use a keyword research tool such as AhRefs)
- Group your keywords into topics
- Write one article (or one landing page) for each topic –> Write quality and engaging content
- Use hyperlinks to link your articles/pages with each others
- Register your business to the local and industry-related directories (make sure to add the URL of your site) –> This will push your pages up in the search results of Google
You will start generating organic visits in your site. For every 100 visits, expect to have at least 1 lead.