Solar Sorcery
Solar Sorcery is Austin’s new source for all things solar. Designed to provide resources, recommendations, watchdog updates, and sustainability stats to eco-minded Austinites. A trusted resource in Solar!
The Outcome
The Challenge
Solar companies in Austin are hungry for leads. Unfortunately, most lead sourcing companies are predatory and farm personal information out to multiple companies, resulting in the denigration of each company’s reputation.
Worse yet, there are a handful of predatory Solar Companies in Austin, many of them with pending lawsuits.
Austinites needed a trusted source for solar wisdom, a proverbial, whistle-blower for the local “bad guys”, and a recommendation for a Solar company that would not let them down. Founder, Daniel Brigham, commissioned me to develop a platform that would do just that.
The Role:
When Mr. Brigham approached me with the idea to serve this gap in Austin’s Solar industry, I obliged him with the challenge. I headed up the branding, design, and marketing strategy for SolarSorcery.com, starting with logos and brand architecture, then moving into blog strategy and copy tone. Later, I developed an branded, interactive lead-magnet that integrates with a visual project management system for his sales team. I designed a series of animated videos for the facebook ads and linked them to the lead-magnet and a custom designed CRM that integrated with an email marketing sequence.
Finally, I developed a sponsorship deck and 3 year marketing strategy for local Solar partnerships.
Solar Sorcery is now primed for partnership opportunities. A powerful sponsorship deck is ready for presentation and Mr. Brigham is sourcing a powerful team of copywriters and educators.
I’m very excited about the opportunities inherent in this platform! I’ll be updating this article as Solar Sorcery invests in social marketing and expands the blog.
The Process
industry gaps:
As a high-margin, in-home sales entrepreneur, Daniel Brigham, was quick to identify the gaps in Austin’s Solar industry. He noticed that most local solar providers relied on either door-to-door solicitation or indiscriminate digital marketing agencies for leads.
There was not a trustworthy information source where Austinites could review Solar Company’s reputation, other than Yelp. Daniel came to me with the business concept of using the information source as the lead generation platform.
I partnered with Mr. Brigham to further identify the psychographics of local consumers. With this information, we could build a turn-key campaign that was strategically targeted to each key psychographic.
Sales calls would be designed like educational workshops to build trust and give customers the greatest sense of confidence in their sizable investment.
The branding:
With our key psychographics defined, we set out to establish the brand architecture based on the brand’s essence, “become a trusted source of wisdom for Austin’s solar users.”
We capitalized on Austin’s “Weird” culture by playing with the whimsy of magic and sorcery, as the sun is quite literally a source of energy.
I developed key branding elements that exemplified trust-worthy education with a super-engaging twist that would disrupt the social terrain.
Wizard Brigham takes on apprentices!
Key Functionality:
The next phase in development was the Solar Sorcery lead-magnet page. A simple, clearly branded lead-magnet that filtered out non-qualifying solar candidates. The main messaging, “Because you are SMART & MAGICAL” is affirming to consumers which builds trust. Messaging that appealed to the top 3 psychographics touch-points was positioned front and center.
The key functionality resided in the qualifying survey and prepping consumers to take the survey as a branded, gamified process. “Choose your best solar source in less than a minute.” The questionnaire was simple and fun, with multiple choice questions like, “Do you live in a shaded Enchanted Forest, a Sunny Magical Meadow, or a Mystical Cave in the oceanic abyss?”
Qualifying customers were automatically sent an email alerting them that they have been selected for a Sorcerer’s Apprentice Program. The sales team was then sent an alert via the custom, Solar Sorcery, lead management platform.
A series of emails were composed for each state of the sales process which were automatically triggered by the sales-team as they managed their clients.
I designed the system using Trello project marketing, ConvertKit email marketing, Zapier automations, and Typeform surveys.
Digital Marketing:
With the back-end lead-management system in place, we set out to build the templates for targeting email marketing. This video was quickly designed by an intern under a tight budget. I created specific audiences based on the key psychographics and Daniel Brighams industry research.
The facebook ads link to the landing pages and leads are automatically vetted and served directly to the single Solar company, rather than 9 different solar companies. This strengthens the integrity of Solar Sorcery as consumers are not inundated by sales calls. Furthermore, customers are retargeted using educational emails based on blog content.
Solar Sorcery will eventually integrate a Chat Bot and a series of custom branded videos.