Happy Sunday evening. Today we’re going to talk about why top-of-funnel advertising can be a fantastic long-term play for an established installer that wants cheaper solar leads.

When you’re advertising solar, you’re typically looking for the really hot leads—the active buyers. The feedback we get on our leads is usually: “They’re great because they’re ready to buy. They’re ready to move forward.”

And for some businesses, that is the right approach in its entirety—especially if cash flow isn’t strong. You want to recoup ad spend as quickly as possible. Ready-to-buy leads give you the shortest sales cycles, so you can turn that spend around and reinvest profits back into advertising.

However, only 3% of the market is actively buying at any one time.

So if you only target that bottom-of-funnel audience, you’re ignoring 97% of the market that’s available.

Not only is that a small portion of the market, but almost all of your competition is bidding for that same 3%—the hottest, most qualified leads.

If you move slightly up the funnel, you start targeting people who aren’t actively buying yet, but they have an intent to change. They want to reduce bills. They want to improve sustainability. They’re exploring renewables, but they haven’t decided solar is the answer—yet.

They probably won’t buy in two weeks. They might not buy in four weeks. But they will buy eventually.

It might be someone who’s moving house or planning to buy in the next six months. They want to make a change, but they’re not ready to act.

Even further up the funnel are people who have a need but can’t act yet—maybe it’s cash flow, maybe it’s timing. In six months, that could change.

Now, to be clear: the leads in that 7% and especially that 30% are not the same quality as active buyers. But when you run the numbers over a long enough time horizon, it can start to make a lot of sense.

Here’s a simplified example.

If you only target ready-to-buy leads, you spend £10,000 and get around 250 leads. From that, you might close 30 deals. If each deal is worth, say, £8,000, that’s around £240,000 in revenue.

If you target top-of-funnel leads instead, you might spend the same £10,000 and get 2,500 leads because the cost per lead can be 10% of the price—especially if you’re advertising a free guide or a valuable resource.

Those leads are not “high intent” in the traditional sense, and that’s the point. They go into a separate pipeline with a completely different experience than your ready-to-buy leads.

From those 2,500 leads, maybe only 20% ever engage with your core service. But that’s still 500 people. And if you close at the same rate, you could end up with 60 deals—double what you got from the 250 active buyers—meaning you’re looking at £480,000 in revenue.

This is why energy companies that can operate on a two-, three-, four-, or five-year time horizon get such an advantage. They can invest in acquiring these leads cheaply, nurture them for longer, and win on scale.

In some cases, they can even make little or no margin on the install because the real lifetime value comes from the tariff. That’s where they make their money.

So how do you actually put top-of-funnel advertising into practice without attracting terrible-quality leads who never act at all?

First, you reduce the barrier to entry.

Instead of “get a quote” or “book a survey,” which are high-intent actions, you move to low-friction offers:

• Free guides

• Free assets

• Lead magnets

• Non-buying-specific ads

It should never start with “speak to a team member,” because that’s high friction. It should be “download this,” “access this,” or “get this free resource.”

Second, you need a seamless way to move people into your core service pipeline immediately.

For example, you run an ad for a free energy-saving guide:
“Get your free guide to saving up to 80%.”

That’s where you capture contact details.

Then—before you send the guide—you pre-empt the core service you’re eventually trying to sell and ask the first step of that process.

In our case, that might be:

• First name

• Do you own your home?

And what we’ve found is that we sometimes get higher throughput by doing it this way—getting them in with the guide, then transitioning them into the next step—than we get on the primary service funnel itself.

These leads are lower quality than ready-to-buy leads, but you’re getting a much higher volume. That’s the trade-off.

And if you click the link on this post, you’ll experience exactly that process yourself.

You’ll access the Solar Magnum Opus— the document you can see on screen—and I’ll send it to you manually as soon as you enter your details.

Then you’ll go to a page that asks: “Do you want the implementation?”

That page is essentially a carbon copy of our primary funnel—the one we’d normally run ads to. So you can see how we get you in the door with a high-value free asset, then transition you quite seamlessly into: “The asset is great, but this is far better.”

Finally—and this is not optional—you need automated nurturing.

If you’re going to take a top-of-funnel approach, you must have a strong backend to handle the volume and ensure:

1. the leads aren’t wasted, and

2. they don’t waste your team’s time.

Because that’s the danger. If you suddenly get 2,500 leads instead of 250 and you use the same process, you need 10x the resources to handle it.

Nurture through email, WhatsApp, SMS. It doesn’t have to be cold messages. It can be a WhatsApp video, for example. But you should always share something of value—useful or even just entertaining—something they’d appreciate receiving, rather than a constant pitch for the core service.

So when should you do this?

Not if you’re brand new.

You do this once you already have a steady flow of ready-to-buy leads—the ones with short sales cycles that let you reinvest profits back into ads and scale consistently.

Once that bottom-of-funnel machine is working, then you start thinking strategically:
How do I reduce lead cost over six months? Over 12 months?
How do I build pipeline for January 2026 while everyone else is still bidding for January 2025?

Because ad costs are always going up.

If you can stack your pipeline now with leads you have long-term consent to contact, and you have automated nurturing in place, that becomes a huge asset.

A big email list of people who have expressed interest in reducing energy bills is valuable operationally—and it also increases enterprise value if you ever want to sell the business.

If you’re looking to sell to a larger company or private equity, they’ll look at assets like that and think: “What juice can we extract from what these guys have built over the next three to five years?”

If you don’t have an email list, that’s a real asset you’re missing.

Finally, if you want a copy of the document and want to experience this for yourself, go to the link on this post.

You’ll access the Solar Magnum Opus, enter your details, and then you’ll see the “Do you want the implementation?” step. That will ask a few questions about your business, qualify you, and allow us to figure out the best way we can help you.

Hope you’ve had a lovely weekend, and I’ll see you in the next one.