Why not take advantage of Facebook solar ads in your marketing?
Are you spending your marketing budget and not seeing results? Maybe you tried forms of online advertising in the past and they did not work.
You might already be doing Facebook ads. You might be spending a few thousand dollars a month on content, doing your best to target it, and maybe you're not seeing the results you want to see. Maybe you don't think it's working, and maybe you're convinced it isn't worth your company's time, effort, and investment.
Could all of that be because you're not doing it correctly? Facebook advertising for solar is a totally different beast than any of your other advertising channels.
Facebook Ads work if you do them the right way. Right now, businesses are still discovering Facebook ads—especially in the solar industry—so it is the perfect time to put your stake in the ground before your competitors do.
If your solar company is using digital advertising we can help you build your own solar lead generation system.
People come to Facebook looking to enjoy themselves and to learn. Think about Facebook as a potential opportunity to get these people into the top of your marketing funnel.
People are clicking around on Facebook all day. When you use targeted advertising, your target demographic will see your ads in their news feeds or in the sidebars of the site. Engaging imagery, language and offers gets people's attention, and they will click on your ad. Now you have new leads.
If you're curious in knowing how Facebook sets the prices for it's ads, there is a good overview tutorial they put out that explains how the bidding works.
The costs of running a targeted Facebook campaign can be significantly lower than other forms of advertising, including Google AdWords. If you haven't yet done Google AdWords, we put together five questions to ask when considering if Google AdWords is worth it.
Research done by Moz.com compared the costs to reach 1,000 people and found that on average these were the costs for the ads: newspaper ads ($32), radio ads ($8), Google Ads ($2.75), LinkedIn ads ($0.75) and Facebook ads ($0.25).
As you can see, Facebook ads are the cheapest way to get in front of 1,000 people.
However, there are things you must keep in mind so that you show the right ad, to the right people so that you don't waste your marketing budget. Below we go in detail how you can successfully run Facebook solar ads.
If you do it right, you can get interested prospects in front of your sales people using Facebook solar ads.
The Facebook advertising platform has evolved. It allows for very specific ad targeting of the type of people you're looking for—allowing you to drill down to the exact demographic you're trying to target, and making sure you're only paying for those people to see your content.
We're now way beyond simple demographic targeting. You can target the 30-year old male interested in personal finance, who is married and living in a single-family home in your zip code who makes $100K a year. Here are some of the targeting options.
What you must think about is that customers do not buy directly from an ad–especially in solar where they will first look for information on whether solar is right for them before they pick up the phone to ask for a quote. Your customers don't purchase from the place that digital ad takes them, either, be it your homepage or a landing page specific to your Facebook advertising efforts. Worse yet, they might even leave your website without doing much at all.
Before going to a specialist doctor, wouldn't you want to know that he or she has the right experience to solve your problem? Wouldn't you check him or her out beforehand? Of course you would. Yet, so many solar companies ask potential customers to put in their personal details or upload their utility bills just to get a quote.
You need to have the right marketing funnel in place to build trust with your prospects and educate them.
Many solar companies stop too early in their advertising efforts.
There is a proper way of doing Facebook solar ads to get the most out of them. We have studied and tested the best practices around, and we've implemented them again and again for our clients.
Usually, clients come to us when they have either tried managing Facebook ads by themselves or have had another vendor do it for them. The problem they have is that they just couldn't make it work and assumed that Facebook ads don't work in solar. That's not the case.
You can learn how to use Facebook ads for solar lead generation on our free training.
Facebook is a very visual medium, so leveraging your collateral from your solar installations or pictures of your products can help get people's attention. It is especially critical to think about the type of targeting you're doing to make sure you're using the collateral with the highest impact for that audience.
In the example to the left you can see that the picture used was of a real house. So many times we speak with solar companies that have great pictures on their website, or even Facebook, but they don't do anything with them. Use your best pictures in the Facebook solar ads you're doing. It is another way to showcase your high-quality work.
When you're doing Facebook ads the trick is to make sure you craft your messaging so that you attract truly interested people into your funnel (and not just the ones who are perusing Facebook looking for a distraction).
When prospects click on your ad, they should be immediately taken to a landing page—not your homepage—that is filled with content that answers questions or solves problems. Your leads begin to feel that you understand their needs and can fix the issues they have, and you start to build trust.
Even then they might leave your site, and that's where the next level of Facebook lead generation comes in.
You should be using retargeting on both Facebook and AdWords to get prospects to come back to your website. This is very cost-effective and only targets people who have previously come to your site or even a specific landing page.
Even if you're selling solar installation and services strictly for B2B, you can still leverage Facebook's powerful targeting.
Facebook allows you to upload your customer list and market only to that group using something called Custom Audiences. It can also show your ads to people who are demographically similar to your customer list. Both of these allow for super in-depth niche targeting.
We've found that even if you upload a list of other businesses in your industry, you can still achieve a more than 60 percent match for the people on your list who use Facebook.
Interested in learning how to do this? We talk about this at length in your Facebook Ads training.
If your solar business is doing any form of advertising online, you can't miss the juggernaut of Facebook ads. I know all of us will go on Facebook at some point today, and that just proves how important the platform is for getting your brand in front of potential customers.
If you're not in front of all these people, you're missing out on a large market share…especially since customer acquisition costs are pretty high and solar (and still rising)—so don't miss the boat.
We're hosting a free training on how solar companies can leverage the ideas in this article. Just sign up below to get access to the training and start implementing it right away.
How to get Business from Facebook?