Your solar inbound marketing strategy contains many tools to generate leads, boost sales, and expand you social media reach. For today's purposes, we'd like to hone in on the handful of inbound-related tasks and deliverables to help your firm generate the most bang for your buck. A cheat sheet, if you will.
Create or revisit your buyer personas. Simple stuff. If you don't know whom you're marketing to, how can you deliver compelling content that resonates? Therefore, sit down with your team and brainstorm around your solar buyer personas. Consider basic demographic information and other things like their work/life balance, community involvement, interest in environmental sustainability, and overall exposure to residential or commercial solar.
Optimize your blog. Set up Google Alerts that push keyword-driven solar content to your inbox on a daily basis. Make sure solar blog posts range from 500-750 words, include two to three keywords, and are informational, rather than commercial, approximately 80 percent of the time. Position your firm as an expert while making sure your blog's "voice" speaks directly to the prospect and customer.
Implement a solar style guide. We recommend solar firms create solar style guides to provide some structure around content creation and marketing. Solar style guides should include clearly state objectives, useful reference points around grammar and voice, uniform in-house verbiage, and other tips and tricks. Whether your team uses in-house writers or a marketing agency, this guidance will prove critical for establishing consistency and communicating your brand.
Create unique and targeted content. Solar leads will be interested in different types of content depending on their position in the solar sales funnel, whether it's top of funnel (eBooks, white papers, how-to videos), middle (demo, FAQs, data sheets), or bottom (free trial or consultation/estimate.)
Don't forget strong CTAs... Good news: a lead is reading your blog post or visited your site. Now you need to guide them through the solar sales funnel, and a great way to do it is by leveraging effective solar calls-to-action (CTAs.) CTAs should stand out visually, be crisp and with minimal characters, and have strong-action oriented verbs like "discover" or "learn."
...and killer landing page content. OK, the lead clicked on your CTA and is now on a landing page. But will they stay there or better yet, fill out a contact form? Once again, make sure the landing page content maps to the lead's position in the purchasing funnel.
Ultimately, thanks to the wealth of valuable content out there, solar firms are well positioned to make the most of the promise of inbound marketing. The main challenge comes not just from attracting leads, but effectively guiding them through the sales funnel so that they convert.
That's our opinion. What's yours? What element of inbound marketing did we neglect to mention? Has solar inbound marketing lived up to the hype?
Looking for more ways to generate high quality leads? Download our Lead Generation eBook.
