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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
www.e-storm.com
twitter.com/wgaultier
linkedin.com/in/williamgaultier
