Many small solar companies start a Facebook page instead of a website because it’s free. But this strategy has big hidden costs. Photo: Christopher/Flickr CC.
Solar companies are discovering that traditional solar marketing — cold calls, door knocking, direct mail, ads, trade shows — isn’t helping them make sales like it used to.
Really, today it’s the opposite. While the price of solar panels has dropped dramatically over the last decade, the cost of getting new solar customers has remained steady or even increased, according to GTM Research.
That’s because solar panel technology has made great progress. But solar sales and marketing has been stuck in the past, say the 1950s or 1970s. And that’s a problem because old-school solar marketing produces low quality sales leads. And bad leads make it more expensive to close new customers.
Trying Digital Marketing for Solar
As more solar companies recognize that their marketing is broken and outdated, they want to start updating their outreach by getting online.
[Download our free e-book on how to build a great solar website]
To do Internet marketing of any kind, a solar company needs a presence on the Web. With the advent of social media, there are lots of ways to set up a location online.
Of course, you can launch a website, but unless you have the skills to do it yourself, you’ll have to spend money hiring a Web designer. When cash flow is tight at the beginning of your business, you may be tempted to forgo a website to save money and instead, just create a free page on a social media service. The most popular is Facebook. Let’s consider the pros and cons of this approach.
Why Facebook is Attractive
Facebook is free to start and to use. Unless you count the hidden costs. Photo: H.L.I.T./Flickr CC.
The first reason to use Facebook – it’s free to get started and free to use. It’s got lots of tools that are easy to use so that any solar installer can put up their own text and photos without any technical knowledge.
And with those easy tools, you can put up everything you need your buyers to see: your company description and location, phone numbers, a basic list of products and even a few customer testimonials. Then, you can post updates about your new products and services and your special offers, whether it’s 90-days-same-as-cash financing or your big 25% off sale on all parts and labor.
You can even build an audience by asking people to like your page and become your fans. Then, whenever you have a new product to sell or a new special offer, you can let them know about it, by posting new announcements. The more fans you recruit, the bigger your audience and the more potential buyers.
And did I mention that it’s free?
But if you want to spend a little money, you can reach a larger audience on Facebook through buying ads.
There are even a couple of guys online who help independent solar salespeople set up a Facebook page and then get traffic through buying ads. These guys claim that they can get you six or more new solar installations each month, which would cover the cost of hiring them.
Good Enough for the Short Term
Yard sale! If you want to liquidate old solar panels at a one-time event, Facebook is great. Photo: IntangibleArts/Flickr CC.
If you are an independent solar sales rep and you’re only planning to do business for a few months, then building your online headquarters on Facebook might be good enough.
For example, maybe you’re just going to run a liquidation sale for last year’s PV panels out in a parking lot one summer between July 4th and Labor Day. In that case, a website might be overkill.
After all, you’re not trying to build anything for the future. You’re just trying to sell some deeply discounted solar panels for a few weeks, get your cash, and get out.
Maybe next summer you can start another Facebook page and then liquidate some other product out on the parking lot, say, Lay-Z-Boy recliners or steel-belted radial tires?
I’m being a bit snarky here, but here’s my point. If you’re planning to be in the solar business for the long term, it’s not good enough to rely on a Facebook page as your online presence.
[Download our free e-book on how to build a great solar website]
Hidden Costs of Facebook
Though it starts out free, because you have to buy ads to promote it, very quickly a Facebook page can become more expensive than building your own website, but with few of the advantages.
Facebook is pretty good for promoting one-time events. Though to get any traffic to your event, if you don’t have an existing page with fans already recruited, you may need to buy ads to get in front of people. And even if already have an audience of fans on a Facebook page, you may still have to buy ads to get visibility in your audience’s Facebook news feed, since the service’s algorithm may decide that your event announcement is not really relevant to everybody who’s a fan of your page, and so Facebook may never show it to them.
In fact, to encourage businesses to buy more ads, in 2015 Facebook changed their algorithm to make it harder for businesses to get their free updates in their fans’ news feeds.
You can hardly blame Facebook for trying to squeeze money out of the free service it offers to businesses who are themselves trying to use Facebook to make money. Mark Zuckerberg has to make a living too, doesn’t he? And he’s doing that off of selling ads to businesses on Facebook.
Zuckerberg’s ads can be good value compared to ads on Google, which are generally more expensive. And they can get quick traffic to your Facebook updates and even to a website, if you have one.
Facebook Not Enough for the Long Term
But Facebook alone is lousy for building a long-term audience for a business of any kind. And it’s especially lousy at creating a community of potential buyers for a residential solar installer.
Of course, plenty of homeowners who might want solar someday are on Facebook. And you might even be able to get a decent number of them to like your company’s page. But remember, even if you post updates, Facebook may decide to hide them from the fans of your page.
Facebook does that both to provide a better experience to its members and also to try to encourage companies to buy ads. Companies don’t like it. But that’s tough luck, because companies don’t make the rules for Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg does.
In fact, Facebook explains in their terms of use that you don’t own anything you put on Facebook – they do. And what that means is that they can do what they want with your content:
They can display it any way they want or they can decide not to display it at all.
If they think your content is in appropriate for their service, because someone has reported it or for some other reason, they can delete that content.
If they think you’re not playing by their rules, they can take your page down or even ban you from Facebook. And in the future, they can change their rules any way they choose.
They can even start to charge for companies to create pages on Facebook. Or they can start to charge for “premium” services like, say, posting a product update.
The Danger of Digital Sharecropping
Sharecropping is back — and today, it’s on the Internet. Too many solar companies are getting lured in. Photo: Boston Public Library/Flickr CC.
Lack of control is the problem with what writer Nicholas Carr has dubbed “digital sharecropping.”
The term sharecropping refers to the farming practices common after the U.S. Civil War, but it’s essentially the same thing as feudalism. A big landholder allows individual farmers to work their land and takes most of the profits generated from the crops.
The landlord has all the control. If he decides to get rid of you, you lose your livelihood. If he decides to raise his fees, you go a little hungrier. You do all the work and the landlord gets most of the profit, leaving you a pittance to eke out a living on.
When you build your business on somebody else’s service – whether Facebook or any social media site – then you’re on somebody else’s digital land. They own the territory, they make the rules, and they can change them anytime they want to. That means they can start charging you in the future for things that are free today, and they can evict you for whatever reason they like. They can even just shut down their whole service at some point if it’s not working out for them. And just that’s tough luck for you.
Even if social media sites keep their faith with you, those sites still get more out of the relationship than you do. You may think of Facebook as a free website. But Mark Zuckerberg thinks of pages like yours as free content that he can sell to advertisers.
You Can’t Build SEO on Facebook
If you want to grow your solar company as a tangible asset, you need your own SEO. Photo: Flickr user.
When you create something on the Web, if it’s done correctly, Google notices it. The owner of that content starts to build up credibility with search engines, which leads to more online visitors over time. That search engine mojo is valuable enough that a whole field of experts who do search engine optimization or SEO has arisen, to help Web marketers score well in Google for certain words that are popular with Web searchers.
Facebook does a good job optimizing its site for search engines. And millions of Facebook members do a good job of adding new content every day to give Google something to index. That means Google is giving Facebook more and more credibility over time.
And who do you think benefits from that search engine mojo – a) a business that puts up a Facebook page? Or b) Facebook itself?
If you answered b) you are correct.
When everything goes well, social media sites continually build more SEO for themselves. That in turn attracts more members, which helps the site build even more SEO. It becomes a virtuous cycle that seems unstoppable. And if social media sites have good SEO, then that can bring more traffic to their members, including your solar business.
Until that cycle goes into reverse, of course.
And that’s the other problem with entrusting your web presence 100% to a social media site. Just think of all the businesses that invested time into sites like Digg or MySpace. As far as I know, the services are still online. Somebody must still use them. But these social media sites have declined so much that marketers no longer take them seriously. In a world where things change so quickly online, these dusty old social media sites have become so passé that they have very little business value.
[Download our free e-book on how to build a great solar website]
It’s Time to Get Your Own Solar Website
Sonia Simone of Copyblogger says that social media services aren’t bad for business, if you use them the right way. Don’t make them your online headquarters. Instead, use social media to attract attention for marketing assets that you control.
Simone suggests three assets – only two of them specifically in online marketing – that “you should be building today and should continue to focus on for the lifetime of your digital business”:
1. A well-designed website with your own hosting
2. An opt-in email list, ideally with a high-quality autoresponder
3. A reputation for providing impeccable value
“Developing these assets are the equivalent of buying your building instead of renting it,” Simone says.
So, I hope by now you understand the dangers of digital sharecropping.
If your solar company is interested in doing business for years to come, then you can’t get away with just a Facebook page but no website – if for no other reason than credibility.
Solar is such a big commitment for a buyer that she’ll only buy from a company she can trust. Lack of a website makes a company look untrustworthy – poorly funded, unprofessional and certainly not built to last.
— Erik Curren, Curren Media Group
The post The #1 Risk for Solar Companies Using Facebook appeared first on Curren Media Group.