Creating sustainable campaigns in the renewable energy market

It’s pretty obvious that we’ll soon be relying on renewable energy as our main source of power. You only have to look at how Saudi Arabia is pumping $2-trillion into weaning itself off oil; or at how the heirs to the Rockerfeller fund recently withdrew all their investments in oil. Yes, fossil fuel is gradually becoming a thing of the past, and renewables are taking over.

With the renewable energy industry expected to grow over the next few years, I think it’s time we take a look at some of the ways you could pull in a ton of high-quality leads in this hot, emerging industry.

Here are a few things you can do to get first mover advantage in the renewable energy arena:

Position Yourself at Potential Traffic Sources

We don’t often recommend standing in the way of oncoming traffic, but when it comes to lead generation, it’s a fundamental principle – especially when it is a new or emerging industry like renewable energy. The trick here is to work out the different places, sites and services where your future audience might be hanging out, and then positioning yourself there and developing a few marketing angles for capturing leads.

Of course, any good surfer will tell you that if you can’t feel the “wave”, you’re in the wrong place. Stay sensitive to what’s happening at these potential traffic sources, and keep ready for any signs of movement. If you’re positioned correctly, you’ll be ready to soak up the entire load once the industry hits at it's peak.

At this stage in the product audience lifecycle they will most likely be in the early majority. Finding out all about the early majority and where they are surfing online is vital to developing your marketing angle around.

Test Your Early Data Accuracy

Almost as important as feeling out potential traffic sources, is testing the accuracy of the early data coming from these sources.

It’s all about ensuring that your vision is not being clouded by false reporting metrics. If you get over-excited about early ripples, and try to scale up without properly testing for accuracy first, you could be setting yourself up for a massive financial failure. You need to be truly confident about a data source before scaling up. Making sure data is accurate plays a massive role in this.

Harness Your Leads with Sustainable Follow-Up

You need to be able to consistently follow-up with each lead you generate. Where possible, you should have systems in place allowing you to do this on a custom and personalized level.

Without sustainable follow-up, scaling becomes useless. Sure, you’ve generated a ton of great leads, but if you’re not doing anything meaningful with them, what was the point?

Reinforce Your Message with Retargeting

Retargeting is always a big part of lead generation and marketing, but with an emerging industry like renewable energy, it plays an even bigger role. This is because new and emerging industries require greater levels of education. On average, your leads will not convert as quickly in an emerging industry, because they know less about it.

The education process is important. A new industry like renewables is a lot to take in for most regular consumers with busy lifestyles, and so you should aim to set up sequences of retargeting for your earlier leads who may not have opted in yet, but who are slowly warming up to the idea. Patience is the virtue, here!

In any case, taking an educational approach to lead marketing is one of the best ways to generate serious customer loyalty, and get lifetime value out of more prospects.

Introduce a Refer-a-Friend Program

One of the problems with new and emerging industries like renewables is that a lot of prospects will be very reserved and cautious. After all, it’s new and they haven’t “tried and tested” it themselves yet, so why should they believe that it is going to benefit them?

The renewables industry suffers from this problem more than most, and many potential prospects have mental “road blocks” that prevent them from accepting the benefits. This is largely fueled by outdated notions about ineffective and expensive technology from the earlier days, which leads to banner blindness about the industry as a whole.

One way people get over these hurdles is by talking to people they trust, who act as ambassadors for the product. For example, they may not have tried solar panels themselves, but if their next door neighbour Steve recommends it with enough confidence, chances are they’ll be more willing to give it a try.

Introducing a referral program can help you to foster this kind of behaviour, and knock down the biggest mental road blocks that are stopping a lot of your prospects from letting you in.

Make Sure Your Condition Sets are On-Point

Much of the targeting currently around renewable energy sources depends largely on the geographic elements of where a prospect is located. Having a system that allows you to specifically target just the people who are a suitable candidate for the requirements to run your technology can save you serious barrels of time and money, and make a huge positive impact on your profits.

Set up condition sets that are relevant, and that work in real-time. Anything that is corrected after the lead has already entered your funnel is taking up resources that don’t need to be used.

Work with Ethically Sound Partners

If you are working with aggregators, choose ones that source ethically. This can give a huge boost for the conversion rates on your back end.

Aggregators using unethical data sourcing methods will use strong pull headlines, and CTAs that cannot be delivered. This does more than just make a bad impact on your conversion rate – it makes a bad impact on your professional image. You will become associated with misinformation and you will lose a lot of trust and respect.

Making sure that you work with the best people is once again absolutely key to scaling up without screwing up.