Marketing for solar & renewable energy

The economics that should drive the budget

Solar prices as an investment and the buyer treats it as one. A straightforward four kilowatt domestic system is roughly £5,000 to £8,000. Add a battery and six to eight kilowatts of panels and it is £10,000 to £16,000. A battery retrofit on its own is £4,000 to £9,000, and it is the fastest-growing enquiry type because flexible tariffs made it pay. An air source heat pump is £8,000 to £14,000 before the Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant comes off. An EV charger at £800 to £1,500 is a small job that frequently turns into a battery quote two years later. Commercial rooftop arrays run from £40,000 to well past £200,000.

Close rates are low and slow. One in five to one in four is a realistic domestic figure, across a cycle of one to six months, because the customer is gathering three quotes and modelling all of them. That combination — long cycle, low close rate, large ticket — means a single enquiry still carries perhaps £1,500 to £2,500 of expected value, so solar comfortably supports a cost per lead that would bankrupt a plumbing account. It also means judging the account at thirty days tells you almost nothing.

Seasonality

Solar has a clear spring peak. Enquiries climb from late February, run hard through to June, then fade over the summer as install diaries fill and scaffolding becomes the bottleneck. The trigger is simple: sunshine reminds people that their roof does nothing. Two other things move the curve and neither is weather. Energy price cap announcements produce a measurable jump in enquiries within days, and any Budget or scheme announcement moves the whole market at once, in either direction. Heat pumps run almost exactly opposite, rising through autumn and winter as boilers fail and heating bills land, which is why a firm doing both has a far smoother year than one doing solar alone. Battery storage has become the least seasonal of the three, driven by tariff switching rather than by the sun. December is dead for panels and perfectly good for heating.

What the buyer is actually checking

The solar buyer is the most analytical customer on this site and the most suspicious, for reasons the sector earned. Doorstep selling, telephone rooms, free-panel schemes and finance deals with the interest buried have all left a mark, and a large share of enquiries begin from a position of mild hostility. Anything in your marketing that resembles a lead funnel — qualify in sixty seconds, limited funding available, a countdown timer — produces cheap leads and repels the buyers worth having.

What they check is unusually specific. Your MCS number, against the MCS database. Your Companies House record and how long you have traded, because a twenty-five year warranty is only as good as the company behind it. Which inverter and which panels, by brand, because they have read a forum thread about both. The generation estimate, the self-consumption assumption and the export rate underneath your payback figure, which they will rebuild in a spreadsheet. Three quotes is the norm and one to six months is the cycle. What wins is showing your working: a real estimate for their roof and orientation, an honest payback somewhere around eight to twelve years rather than four, and a plain statement of what you have assumed. Overstating payback is the most damaging thing an installer can do.

Which channel wins here

Google search takes the ready buyers and content takes the rest. Solar is one of the few trades where genuine SEO effort repays quickly, because this buyer researches for weeks before contacting anybody. Pages on payback, battery sizing, what the export tariff actually pays and whether a heat pump suits a particular house type get read, saved and quoted back at you during the survey. An MCS number, real generation figures and a named engineer do more than any headline.

Meta works better here than in most trades, because solar demand can genuinely be created by an energy bill and a good before-and-after. There is a hard caveat though: Meta lead forms are the worst lead source in the sector. Two taps produces a name and a number from somebody who does not own the roof, cannot pass a credit check, or was hunting a grant, and chasing those is how installers burn a year. Use Meta for content and retargeting, put qualifying questions in front of any form, and route to a call. Buying leads from solar aggregators is worse again — sold three times over, price-shopped before you ring, and often the same enquiry you already paid Google for.