Marketing for ev charger installers

The economics that should drive the budget

A straightforward seven kilowatt home charge point on a short cable run comes in around £800 to £1,400 all in. Push the run to twenty metres, add a consumer unit change or a supply upgrade, and it climbs to £1,400 to £2,200. Flats and rented properties fall under a grant route worth a few hundred pounds per socket to the customer, which changes the conversation rather than the price. Workplace clusters of four to eight sockets with load management run £6,000 to £25,000. Depot and fleet AC arrays sit between £15,000 and £80,000, and a single DC rapid unit with its civils and grid connection can pass £45,000 before anyone has poured concrete.

Margins on domestic work are thinner than installers admit because the hardware is a large fixed share of the price. Thirty to forty per cent on the total is normal, which is roughly £300 to £450 a job. What rescues it is the close rate. A buyer with a build slot and a car on order converts at one in two, sometimes better, because they need someone competent more than they need the cheapest quote. Commercial and fleet work behaves nothing like this: months of procurement, site surveys, DNO correspondence, and one in four at best.

Run the domestic figures and the strategy follows. At a £1,100 average and thirty-five per cent margin you have £385 of gross profit, halved by the close rate to roughly £190 of value per enquiry. Twenty to forty-five pounds a lead is comfortable, sixty is defensible if the reply time is good, and anything above that only makes sense when the same install generates the household’s solar or battery conversation two years on. Commercial enquiries live in a different account with different tolerances entirely.

Seasonality

Forget weather. This calendar is set by number plates and tax years. New registration months in March and September produce two hard peaks as deliveries land, and the fortnight either side of each is when domestic enquiries are both plentiful and impatient. A second, quieter rhythm comes from salary sacrifice and company car schemes, which cluster decisions around the April tax year, and from businesses spending remaining capital budget before their own year end.

Winter adds a behavioural spike that has nothing to do with new cars. Cold weather cuts real-world range, public charging queues get miserable, and drivers who have spent a year without home charging finally decide to sort it. Any announcement about grant scheme changes moves the entire market within days, in both directions, which is a good argument for keeping scheme details on one page you can edit rather than scattered through the site.

What the buyer is actually checking

This customer has done more homework on the hardware than on you. They know which unit they want, usually because of an owners group or a tariff that only integrates with certain chargers, and their first question is whether you fit it. Their second is when. Their third, if it comes at all, is price. That order is the opposite of most trades and it means a page naming the units you install, with your approval status for each, converts far better than any amount of persuasive copy about quality workmanship.

Underneath the hardware question sits a quieter competence check. Reasonably informed buyers now ask how the earthing will be handled, whether the property supply can take seven kilowatts alongside an electric shower, whether load curtailment is included, and whether the distribution network operator will be notified. Landlords and managing agents care about none of that and care enormously about who claims the grant, what evidence they must provide, and whether one visit can cover several units in the same block. Answer both audiences separately or you will bore one and lose the other.

Which channel wins here

Paid search takes the domestic work almost by default, and the brand terms are where it is won. Bidding on the manufacturer name plus a town is cheap relative to generic charger searches, the intent is unambiguous, and the click arrives already halfway through the decision. Generic terms are worth having but need tight negatives, since the phrase ev charging belongs far more to public charging than to installation.

SEO is unusually kind to this sector because the market is young and the content is thin. A page per brand, a plain guide to the grant routes, and an honest piece on what actually makes an install expensive will rank in months rather than years and keep producing enquiries every plate change. Meta earns a narrow place: targeting postcodes with high new-car density, and reaching landlords and block managers who are not searching for anything because they do not yet know the grant exists. That second use is genuinely the best paid social case in this trade, and it needs a landing page rather than an instant form, because a two-tap lead from a scroll is almost never a property owner.