How to Turn a Great Customer Experience into Powerful Solar Content Marketing

In solar, when a commercial customer has a positive experience with your company or service, it can sometimes be tricky to turn that experience into effective inbound marketing. But if you nurture that relationship, even a large commercial or industrial customer can become a powerful influencer and advocate. Here’s how to turn those experiences into compelling and evergreen solar content marketing. 

• Create a success story section on your web site. Many solar companies post “projects” but only include a photo and a few key stats. If you create a Success Stories or Case Studies section with a story on each project you will increase your SEO and give your content marketing a boost. Writing an effective customer story means including context on the customer’s situation, industry challenges and how solar helps. Always include the financial and environmental benefits the customer is experiencing with solar.
• Turn them into press releases. Every solar project you build is not necessarily press-worthy, but if they are notably sizable, represent an industry trend (in solar or another industry) or a unique installation or financing challenge, they very well could be. Solar pubs in particular are always looking for original content – nurture your media relationships and understand what each reporter’s interests are.
• Combine success stories into a trend piece for your company blog. If you’re getting multiple customers in a certain industry, this is not an accident. It’s a trend! Identify why this industry is going solar and write a blog post about it. Then send it to the vertical trades as a backgrounder FYI and you might get additional pickup.
• Share your success stories with your Sales team so they’ll share them with prospects. Give your case studies sunlight by letting your internal team know they exist. In addition to sharing in your marketing newsletter and on social media, your sales team can attach appropriate stories to sales emails and print them on-demand for sales calls. Include links to popular case studies in your company’s email signature.
• Use case studies as part of a direct marketing campaign. In the digital age, anything that arrives First-Class mail in a large-format envelope breaks through the clutter. Design your case studies and success stories into a nice format and send them via email or US mail with a personal note from your CEO.
• Turn your best testimonials into social media posts and ads.
  Sprinkle your social media with quotes and post with photos or video whenever possible. If you’re running digital ads on multiple platforms, a good monitoring tool like Agorapulse can evaluate Facebook, Linked In and Instagram against each other and see which platform pulls best for your target audience.
• Pitch INTERESTING case studies to trade publications in the customer’s industry. For example, if you have a great story on how you installed solar for a dairy farm, pitch it to the agriculture pubs, dairy pubs as well as to solar trades. This helps establish you as a solar expert in that industry.
• Turn your customer successes into share-worthy videos. Every picture tells a story, and video is even better. You don’t have to sell the farm to produce a quality video these days. With drone photography, you can do a flyover video that pops on social media — and customers will love it. More in-depth videos with customer interviews and B-roll are appropriate if you’re launching into a new industry or have a bigger story to tell.

What’s Next?

Check out our Case Studies page for a fast, easy way to create customer success stories and case studies. CPMG helps companies across the U.S. incorporate satisfied customers into their B2B marketing efforts to engage more prospects and win more business.

We can help!