Good evening. It is January 2nd, and earlier today I had a discovery call with an absolutely lovely guy who’s primarily doing subcontract work — doing solar installations on behalf of other businesses. He’s looking to continue to do that, and keep doing it to the best quality standard possible, but he’s also looking to start developing his own residential lead generation — basically his own demand, his own brand — building up the face of the business and how the business looks to the public eye, rather than just having one or two really big clients that he often works for.

So I thought it’d be a good idea to get on camera to do a whistle-stop tour. This one is very basic. If you’re already a very established installer who has done marketing campaigns before, this might not be for you. But if you’re coming into the market — you’re an electrician looking to bring solar into your service offering, you’re coming from an adjacent field, and you want to start a solar installation business — this will get you into the top 10% of installers from a digital marketing perspective.

So many installers don’t even have the basics checked off. And I’m not talking about the ones that are really killing it, the people that are well established — the ones in Solar Nation and all that kind of thing. I’m talking about the masses.

If you follow this and get it done in about six weeks, you’ll be absolutely golden to enter the market and actually have a chance to compete — even given how competitive it is, and how competitive it will continue to be, and how competitive it will become when the grants come in. Hopefully they do come in later this year or early next year.

So without further ado, let’s crack on. This is exactly how I’d approach it.

First, I would set up my Google Business Profile. Your prospects and customers are already searching for you on Google — there’s no two ways around it. You need to make sure they see you in your best light on that profile. It needs to be optimized for keywords. It needs nice imagery and all that kind of thing. And you need to make sure they can actually find you, full stop.

So many businesses — you search the name and they don’t rank number one, and people can’t even find who they’re looking for. Even if you’ve got a high-intent searcher who’s searching for you specifically by brand name, if they can’t find you to get in touch, you will lose them. You think they’re going to crawl through ten search results just to find you because they recognize the little icon? No chance. If they don’t see you right at the top, you’ve probably lost them.

Next up: reputation. Load up those reviews. It is near impossible to find you online without seeing your reviews — or the lack thereof. When someone searches your business, your Google Business Profile shows up on the right-hand side or at the top on mobile, and right there, very prominently, you see the reviews.

It’s a bloody good job that all of our clients have basically full five-star — it’s incredible. And we really do try to pick the best installers to work with. Firstly, it’s easier to get them results because they’re delivering a fantastic quality service, and that comes across in sales discussions. Secondly, we know the end customer is actually getting what they wanted — support, advice, proper consultations — not being pressure sold. The work we do has a positive impact. And thirdly, again, it comes back to results: people see a Meta ad, they go to Google, search the business, and see the reviews. If you’ve got three stars, two stars, one star — you’re stuffed. I’m sorry. You’re stuffed.

The only way to overcome that is to flood it with positive reviews — and I don’t mean spam or fake reviews. I mean giving hundreds of people positive customer experiences. That’s the only way.

Now, if you’re a new installer, you might be thinking, “This is going to take me forever. I don’t even have 100 customers.” Fine — all hope isn’t lost. But you need to go one step further. You have to make up for that shortcoming. So the customers you do have, ask them for a video review.

Five video reviews from your customers where they recorded it themselves — authentic, raw, not scripted — will allow you to put up a fight against a company with 100 Google reviews. Video reviews are so much richer, more trustable, and people relate to the people in those videos. They’re worth their weight in gold.

We’re seeing smaller installers with video reviews consistently outsell bigger ones with strong reputations built up over years — simply because they’re leveraging reputation better.

Your customers basically become your sales team. You might think it’s difficult to get these. Yes, it is. But it’s not that difficult if you give a stellar service, and you potentially incentivize it a little bit. It’s very achievable.

Infinite Energy sent out a request to 20 customers and got six video reviews back. They give a fantastic service, so that’s a massive factor — but it goes to show it’s possible, and people are willing to get on camera to help you grow your business.

Next: website. Once they’ve seen your glowing reviews, they’re going to want to see your work. So they’ll head to your website. Your website needs to show up how you show up in person.

If you only have pictures from years — even decades — ago, it looks like that’s the best you have, or you haven’t done any work since, or you haven’t been proud enough to take pictures and showcase it online. That’s not a good story.

You also need to make sure it’s super easy to reach out via the website. And please test that your contact forms are actually working. You would not believe the number of discovery calls I get on — every time beforehand I do a little test on the contact form — and so many are broken. People go onto your website, you’ve done all the hard work to get them to want to speak to you, and then at the moment they’re entering their information, it doesn’t work. It’s basically telling them to go do one because you couldn’t be bothered to check your contact form. Ridiculous. Check your contact forms.

We’ve built tens of solar websites, and all the examples I showed above are solar websites. If you want a website, you know what to do.

Now, leads are coming in from your lovely new website and your Google Sheet is starting to become disorganized. Your paper pad — you’re forgetting which lead is which. Do you need to follow up with this person who wanted battery storage? I thought they wanted solar as well… it’s such a mess. You don’t know who’s who.

It’s time to get a proper CRM in place with features like pipeline management and automation capabilities to take work off your plate. This isn’t a choice — it’s a necessity.

If you’re going to be generating leads via social media (which I’ll go into in a second), you’re going to have a volume you cannot deal with manually without a system in place. Maybe a naturally well-organized Google Sheet can work for you, but most people have a sheet with just contact details and maybe a comment. It’s not going to work. We’ve seen many clients come in using that approach. They start using a CRM and it’s night and day. They’re so thankful because it lets them grow and be less stressed. It’s organized.

So now the foundations are in place. You’re using your CRM. Your website is portraying who you actually are. It’s time to ramp things up a notch.

Get yourself on camera. Weave in some of the video reviews you collected earlier. Combine the videos with some image ads for cheaper clicks. That also lets you test angles quickly because with an image ad you can easily change the headline and continually test what works best in your specific area.

Combine that and you’ve got a winning formula for running ads on social media and generating leads.

But how do you actually collect the lead information? You need to set up a funnel. If you send them to your website, there’s too much distraction and your conversion rate will be low. Instead, send them to a mobile-optimized funnel like the one shown above.

Use a tool like Perspective so you can see what’s happening with the traffic: where people leave the funnel, what percentage complete the form, what questions cause drop-off, whether the question order needs to change. Remember: we ran a test where we literally changed the first question and doubled conversion rate — i.e., halved lead costs.

It’s important that you have visibility over this. Even if you’re not going to do tons of testing, when you eventually need to test — or you hire someone like us — having that data means you’ll be off to a flying start compared to someone who doesn’t.

Once that’s set, you’re ready to launch campaigns. Leads roll in, you stay organized, stay on top of your CRM, make contact quickly, and add more automations so no lead goes unserved.

A hack for this is to record a quick video saying something like: “Hey, it’s Jude here. Thanks so much for getting in touch. Please feel free to share any more information that may assist us with your inquiry. We’ll give you a call back as soon as possible.” That’s all it has to be.

This is an example — just someone up on a roof doing a casual video. It’s unedited because we want it to feel natural and authentic. That then gets sent automatically when the lead comes into the CRM.

The important thing is: if your face is on the ad, they see you on the ad, then they see you in the WhatsApp message. There’s an instant connection between the ad and the WhatsApp. That’s very important because as soon as they enter their info, they’re going to be slammed with other solar advertisers. They likely engaged with another advertiser already — that’s why they’re seeing your ad. So you need that connection, otherwise they won’t even remember what ad they engaged with.

So now you’ve got more leads than you know what to do with. Your efforts go to the people ready to buy now — as they should. You should allocate your time, and eventually your sales team’s time, to those hot leads.

However, that means other leads slip through the cracks — and some might have been ready in six weeks with the right communication — but they go cold. So you need nurturing in place: email sequences, WhatsApp sequences, maybe organic social media if you want.

Also, make sure you keep advertising on Meta to these longer-term leads so you stay top of mind. It takes some budget, but it increases your close rate massively because they’ll keep seeing video reviews, installation overviews, and other ads that prompt them to think about solar. You keep showing them until you convert them. There’s no reason to stop — even after a survey, you need to stay top of mind.

This is an example of one of those emails you could send, and the automation that makes that happen on a 30-day basis. It also allows people to reply with the word “skip” and it moves them to the next day, so they can go through the sequence quickly and almost self-nurture and self-serve, which is pretty cool.

Now you’ve pretty much got everything in place — you need to start reinvesting. This is where you scale campaigns and add other channels. You could add Google Ads to diversify traffic sources. That lets you do clever things like using Google Ads for high-intent search traffic and then retargeting that traffic with cheaper Meta ads.

Then you’ll build out your website further so new team members can contribute and add resources, and the website scales with you. You’ll start ranking for competitive local terms because of the advice and guidance you put out.

You should then make partnerships with other companies so you can serve them and they can serve you from a digital marketing perspective. For example, making a deal to show Powerwall in your ads could be a good one.

Then you introduce other services you can provide — for example, a full energy consumption and loss assessment for individual needs, so you can give the best solution every time.

Then you scale more: help loads of people save on energy bills, reduce their carbon footprint, collect as many reviews and case studies as people you’ve helped.

Then branch into the commercial sector where there are higher margins, leveraging the reputation you’ve built. Use the exact same strategy: customer interviews, extensive project breakdowns, and case studies.

Then sell the business to someone who will uphold the values you built — and enjoy.