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Jex Energy

Jex Energy

Jex Energy

JEX Energy is a solar power company based in South Africa.
They specialise in B2C and B2B solar power solutions from solar panels to batteries and inverters.

Digital Marketing Case Study - Solar Energy Company Doubles Appointments in 30 Days

50%

Cost Savings on Ads

300%

Increase in Appointments

90+

Leads Per Month

Solar power generation is one of the most rapidly growing sectors in the renewable energy industry.

Solar power generation has several advantages over other forms of electricity generation; mainly that it doesn’t require the burning of hazardous fossil fuels.

There is some variation in the amount and timing of sunlight over the day, season or year, but a properly sized and configured system can be a highly reliable source of long-term, fixed-price electricity.

However, we know that the Solar Energy market is somewhat saturated, and making your brand stand out can be incredibly daunting.

JEX Solar came to us for help with making their business stand out.

They are a solar and sustainable energy solution provider operating throughout Johannesburg and Pretoria. Their services encompass all things solar including:

  • Solar Panel Installations
  • PV Grid-Tie Systems
  • Total Off-Grid Solutions
  • Solar Geysers
  • General Hybrid Options

JEX Energy was getting approximately 2 leads per day – primarily through Google AdWords.

60 Leads per month can be very lucrative in a high ticket item industry but the problem was that they were closing only about 1 in 20 leads – equating to roughly only 3 customers per month.

This is obviously not the ROI that any business wants to see.

We were particularly excited to get involved in the solar industry as we saw the opportunity to try a hybrid strategy between inbound and outbound marketing.

Solar is what we consider a non-time dependent industry.

What is a time-dependent industry?

It’s one where prospects will only consider a certain service or product at a very specific time or based on a key event occurring. Needing a new website design or requiring a plumber are two good examples of time-dependent services.

A non-time dependent industry is one where prospects are always open to a service or product if the value proposition is right. Buying a coffee machine or installing an energy-saving meter are items which interested prospects will consider regardless of a certain event taking place.

Most solar products fit into the non-time dependent industry category as pretty much everyone consumes electricity daily and solar offers a sustainable and economical alternative to this.

One of the most common mistakes we see companies make in inbound marketing (through AdWords or some other paid search) is to only measure which keywords are converting into leads.

This is a misleading optimization approach because the only metric that really matters is sales. We always suggest clients look at which keywords produce sales rather than which keywords produce leads. This mistake is seen in almost every industry we work in.

In every industry, the generic keywords (in this case “solar”, “solar geyser”,” solar power”, “green energy” and “off-grid energy”) have the most search traffic and therefore produce the most leads.

However because these are top of funnel searches (the search is not very educated at this point), very few of these search types result in sales.

A far better approach is to bid on cheaper, longer-tail keywords (“200-litre solar geyser price”) as the searcher is likely much closer to buying when they make these types of queries.

Although the search traffic is much lower for long-tail searches, the conversion rates are much better!

Some smart ideas on words to bid for could include “how to’s”, “cost”, “cheap” and “local” – all followed by the short-tail keywords.

This coupling allows for some searchers with no buying intent, but the main focus is on those who already know what they want and are simply trying to find the best company to source it from.

B2B cold calling can be incredibly effective but we decided to rather use a Facebook push campaign to gather leads quickly for JEX to call. We knew green energy was a hot topic and therefore we expected a promising result.

We used a variety of Ads to generate top of funnel leads. Below were two of the best-performing ones we used.

Facebook leads need to be dealt with quite differently to Google leads as Facebook employs demand generation rather than demand fulfilment (as with Adwords) so the actual closing technique was key here to convert these weaker leads into hot appointments:

By focusing on the whole lead journey we managed to optimize the inbound campaign by eliminating non-sale producing keywords, that originally looked to be effective (as they were resulting in a lot of leads but were producing no end results, or sales). This resulted in the same number of sales at an immediate cost saving of approximately 50%.

We then used the leftover budget and pumped that into our Facebook outbound approach which resulted in 90 leads per month with a net average of 15 appointments per month all at the same original cost of marketing. That is literally almost a 300% increase in appointments because of research, and a shift in keyword focus.

Through our time working with a number of customers in varying industries, we have noticed that these problems are evident in almost all of the cases we work with. What we have found is small tweaks like this are possible in almost every industry and one of the best parts is that these tweaks are fairly quick to implement so results should happen almost immediately.

Speak to us today if you are interested in data-driven marketing for your company.

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