Solar companies have all the traditional means of advertising available to them and each of them has their pros and cons. As advertising continues to change, these avenues of marketing are constantly shifting, enabling solar companies to take advantage of these opportunities as they change.
Traditionally, marketing of solar panels focuses on two major aspects. Both of which are an appeal to home and business owners’ sense of saving money. The first prong of that focuses on the amount that a person can save each month on their energy bill when converting to solar panels. The second focuses on the amount of value that the addition of solar panels adds to the property.
This marketing approach has worked for many years and still does work on certain demographics. What worked with this method is that is particularly high concept. Much like solar itself, a monetary saving or added value is difficult to quantifiably visualize.
For quite some time, solar companies have been trying to make these concepts visual. This is often done by talking about the acreage of trees that solar panels equal in carbon emissions offset or the equal number of cars that solar panels “take off the road” through their use.
Both of these show how important the visual medium has become to consumers. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all have made electronics users incredibly more visual. This is both as a time saver and as a cultural shift towards visual stimulation.
This brings us to the most frequently underused marketing channel by solar companies: Instagram.
Instagram is unique because it is for the most part, purely visual. Solar has the incredible combination of being high tech, unique looking and in strange places: all very visually appealing. For most home owners, their rooftops are something they see from the street and maybe twice a year for holiday decorations.
This is what makes Instagram photos of installations so fascinating. It is a foreign place that is just overhead with an amazing piece of technology. This sense of wonder and excitement can motivate home owners to convert to solar very easily!
So the take away here is to make sure you are getting rooftop photos from your solar installations and post them all over social media. As an added bonus, get photos of the home owners as well because this helps build a sense of a solar community.
The more photos you take, the more collateral your marketing department has, leading to more installations you will do (and track)!
