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Educating & Marketing to Customers:Best Practices Outside Solar Industry

Presented at Solar Power International

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INTERNAL & EXTERNALRESEARCH

INTERNAL & EXTERNALRESEARCH

MARKET SIZING &

SEGMENTATION

MARKET SIZING &

SEGMENTATION

COMPETITIVERESEARCH

COMPETITIVERESEARCH

BRANDING & POSITIONINGBRANDING & POSITIONING

SWOT ANALYSIS

SWOT ANALYSIS

CREATIVE DEV’T

CREATIVE DEV’T

SEOSEO

PPCPPCSOCIALMEDIA

SOCIALMEDIAINT’L

MKTG.INT’L

MKTG.

GO-TO-MARKET

STRATEGY

GO-TO-MARKET

STRATEGY

MARKETING ANALYTICS

MARKETING ANALYTICS

ONLINE ADVERTISING

ONLINE ADVERTISING

OFFLINE MARKETING

OFFLINE MARKETING

E-Storm’s Focus – Holistic Marketing

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Clients: 10 Years – 100 Organizations Worldwide

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Educating Customers

• Top level educating/marketing ideas effective in other industries:

Marketing channel Stage of Customer Consideration

Search engines• Search engine optimization

(SEO)• Paid search (Pay-per-click)

First and last stage

Display advertising Usually first stage

Social media All stages

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Companies should invest in:

– Search engine optimization – SEO – still low competition

– Paid search - PPC

– Geo-targeted

– Related search – competitors, advocacy

– Contextual – Governator announces….

solar power

 solar power  

80% of consumers find product information through search

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Search – Leveling the playing field for you

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Search – Leveling the playing field

SEO

PPC

+29% Higher Return

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Display Advertising – You can afford it now

• You will hear “Banners don’t work”• Not true!

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Display Advertising – You can afford it now

• What you need:– Measure true ROI:

• Clicks • “Viewthrough”

–Customer exposed to ad, doesn’t click but comes to you later

• Tips:– AdBrite – geotarget, keyword & leads-based– Yahoo Apt– Google Site Targeting– Budget? $5-10K per placement

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What is Social Media?

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Why should you care about Social Media

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Are consumers really using social media?

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Are consumers really using social media?

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Are our customers really using social media…

• ..to discuss solar power online?– You bet

• EcoGeek

• NewEnergyNews

• The Oil Drum….

• How can start on social media?– Use technorati, trackur, google alerts, blog search to understand:

• Who is talking about:– Your brand– Your competitors– The industry– Customers’ needs

– Listen, then engage– Measure against benchmarks

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Educating Customers

• Social media is a perfect way for many companies to:– Learn from customers first hand what they want

& expect from you– Before launching any campaign – check with

your end customers– Make “consumable” content available– Develop relationship with consumers, instill trust

– sales will follow

– Lower cost per acquisition – increase conversion

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Social Media Case Study• Since mid 2007, e-Storm and Crimson Consulting helping UGOBE

with:– Community planning/development– Strategic and tactical social media marketing – Implementation of buzz metric tool; buzzlogic– Identifying new audiences, new promotions with social media– Identifying negative and positive WOM – Training staff on WOM/Social Media

• Results to date:– More than 4,000 sites have covered Pleo– More than 1M views of Pleo Videos on YouTube (650 videos)– Videos at Pleoworld.com – 6th most consumed content– Internal forums – 7th largest referrer to Pleoworld.com– 400 sites about Pleo bookmarked on De.li.cio.us– StumbleUpon – Top 20 referee– Sold out within weeks

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Case Study: Travelpod, a TripAdvisor Co.

Goals:

– Increase awareness, and qualified visits

to their website

– Increase advertising revenues

– Improve conversion from visits to transactions

Results: – Increased unique visitors by x7

– Increased the number of bloggers actively writing by x4

– Increased the number of pageviews by x2.5

– Achieved a loyalty percentage between 30 - 38% loyalty month to month

– Increased the number of pages that bloggers printed in books from 300K to 1M

– Achieved 100 – 5,000 referrals per month from community activities on and off site

– Company sold to TripAdvisor – thanks in part by e-Storm’s help

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Thank You!

William Gaultier

Tel.: +1-415-352-1200

william@e-storm.com

www.e-storm.com

twitter.com/wgaultier

linkedin.com/in/williamgaultier