By Daniela McVicker

The energy sector has undergone thoughtful structural changes in recent years, getting towards a more competitive environment. 

Do you want to beat the competition and lead your energy company to success? Write an effective marketing strategy. Create guidelines that will allow you to coordinate your marketing efforts and achieve the desired results.

Here are six tips that will help you to craft a remarkable energy marketing strategy. 

Define your goals

Marketing strategy is an instrument for achieving business goals. If you want to use this instrument the right way, you should define your goals first.

Make a list of your short-term and long-term business goals. Write down what you want to accomplish in one month, three months, one year, and five years.

Just keep in mind that vague goals like this one, “to become an industry leader”, will not work. All your goals must be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, rational, and time-bounded. Here are a few examples of SMART goal for an energy company:

• To become a leader in the renewable energy industry in Oregon by increasing market share by up to 60% by the end of 2025.
• To increase sales of cleaner-burning fuel in Asia by 40% by the end of 2021.

Once you define your goals, you will be able to design a detailed plan on how to achieve them.

Learn more about your target audience

Whether you work in B2B or B2C sector, you should always put your customers in the first place. You should be aware of their wants and needs to design appealing marketing campaigns.

What concerns regarding energy consumption do your customers have? What attracts them the most: the lowest energy tariffs, reliability of supply, or innovative eco-friendly solutions?

Also, you should analyze your customer behavior. When do they need your services the most? What factors do drive the increase in energy consumption? 

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes, and you will understand what marketing tactics and methods you should use to maximize your efforts. 

Choose suitable marketing tactics

Finally, let’s talk about marketing methods that work well for energy companies. Your task is to decide how you will use each of these methods for achieving your goals and specify that to your strategic plan.

Content marketing

Do you want to increase your energy brand visibility? Invest money in content marketing. Create content for your website and your blog, and you will get your brand noticed. 

High-quality content will help you to attract new customers, gain loyalty, and build thought leadership.

How to create relevant content?

• Focus on adding value to your customers. Provide in-depth answers to their most frequently asked questions.
• Hire a professional content creator or use custom academic writing services.
• Cover trending topics. Inform your target audience about the events and issues that take place in the energy sector right now.
• Be open and honest with your target audience. Don’t make any false statements.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

If you want your website and blog to get to the top of the search engine results page, you should create content with SEO in mind. In other words, you should write copies in a way they will meet Google’ requirements:

• Research keywords. Find low competition high volume keywords to drive more traffic to your website.
• Improve text readability. Eliminate wordiness and avoid passive voice.
• Keep your sentences and paragraphs short.
• Use headings, subheadings, and bulleted lists.
• Add meta descriptions and tag titles to each web page.
• Add relevant internal and external links.

Social media marketing

Modern people are addicted to social media. They spend, on average, one hour 24 minutes on social media daily. So if you want to reach out to modern customers, you should do it via Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Do you doubt whether an energy company should grow its social media presence? Here is an example that will dispel your doubts. Shell has 292K+ followers on Instagram and 552K followers on Twitter. This world-famous energy company leverages social media to strengthen its market position, and you can do the same to boost your marketing efforts.

  https://twitter.com/Shell

What type of content should you publish on social media?

• Posts about industry events
• Company’s news
• Stories of your customers 
• Information about the volunteering and charity projects you participate in
• Posts about your key employees
• Behind-the-scenes photos and videos

Paid advertising 

Content marketing and social media marketing will not help you to get immediate results. So if you want to achieve specific results within the next few weeks, you should leverage paid advertising.

The best and the easiest way to bring your website in front of customers is to launch a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign.  Your website will appear at the top of the search results page, and you will attract visitors to your site.

What should you do to launch a successful PPC campaign?

• Craft a catchy ad copy. Write an engaging meta description and tag title.
• Set your target audience wisely. Make sure that your ad copy will be shown to the right people at the right time.
• Test different ad copies and target audience settings to optimize your PPC campaign and decrease spending.

Wrapping it up 

If you want your energy company to thrive in the long run, you should write an effective marketing strategy. You should define your goals, analyze your target audience’s preferences and behaviors, and then decide what marketing tactics you should use and how.

Never forget that your energy company is a unique one. You can’t just copy the marketing strategy created by another brand. You should write your own marketing strategy from scratch and follow it diligently.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Daniela McVicker is a passionate digital marketer, and she helps marketers make their names in the online world.